From Pragmatic Witness:
Truth about the Civil War still guarded by modern gate-keepers – most recently VETERANS TODAY
Last week I commented on a post which appeared on Veterans Today entitled, Lies About the U.S. Civil War 150 years later, by David Swanson.
As of the next day my comment was not there, obviously, due to the content it contained and the embarrassment it would most likely cause the author since he’s only writing part of the truth.
Below is Mr . Swanson’s article in full for my readers, then following is my comment – areas marked in RED I disagree with Mr. Swanson
Lies About the U.S. Civil War 150 Years Later
April 12, 2011 posted by David Swanson · 7 Comments
By David Swanson
Tuesday marks 150 years since the start of the U.S. Civil War. Newspapers everywhere are proclaiming it the deadliest war in U.S. history, the costliest U.S. war in terms of the loss of human life. That claim, like most things we say about the Civil War, is false.
Most humans, it will surprise our newspapers to learn, are not U.S. citizens. World War II killed 100 times as many people as the U.S. Civil War, with World War I not far behind. U.S. wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq are among those that have killed far more human beings than the Civil War killed.
The South, we’re told, merely wanted independence; slavery had nothing to do with it. Of course, this is nonsense. The South wanted independence to support slavery.
The North, we’re told, merely wanted to free the slaves; power, empire, profit, and politics had nothing to do with it. Of course, this too is nonsense. The war was well underway before Lincoln “freed the slaves.” Actually he did not free those slaves whom he actually could free in the border states, but only those he could not free unless the North won the war.
Grand Army of the Republic
Freeing the slaves, like bringing democracy to Iraq or saving the Jews from Hitler, was a belated justification for a war that had other motivations. Adding that moral mission to the war helped keep European nations from backing the South and helped keep Northerners killing and dying in sufficient numbers.
Regardless of who said what when, the war did end slavery and was therefore justifiable. Or so we’re told. Yet, every other nation that ended slavery did so without a civil war. Similarly, we justify the American war for independence because it brought independence, even though Canada and countless other countries achieved independence without war. If we had used a war to create public schools, we would denounce critics of that war as opponents of education.
To seriously justify a war, however, would need showing that anything it accomplished could not be accomplished without all the killing, wounding, traumatization, and destruction. What if the North had allowed the South to secede and repealed the fugitive slave law? What if an independent North had used trade, diplomacy, and morality to pressure the South to end slavery? Would slavery have lasted longer than the Civil War raged? If so, we are still talking, at best, about a war to hasten the end of slavery.
Even if the war was really launched for national power, to keep states together in a nation for the nation’s sake, we are all better off as a result. Or so we’re taught. But is it true? Most Americans believe that our system of representative government is badly broken, as of course it is. Our politicians, bought and sold, are directed by corporate media outlets, and controlled by two political parties than the citizenry.
One reason it’s difficult to bring public pressure to bear on elected officials is that our nation is too darn big. Most U.S. citizens can’t join a protest in their nation’s capital if they want to. A resistance movement in Wisconsin can’t very well spread to other key cities; they’re all hundreds or thousands of miles away.
In the years that followed the “preservation of the union,” the United States completed its conquest of the continent and began building an overseas empire, driven in large part by pressure from the same interests that had profited from the Civil War.
Secession has as bad a name as socialism, but Wisconsin could secede, ban foreign (U.S.) money from its elections and create government of, by, and for the people by next year. A seceded California could be one of the most pleasant nations to live in on earth. Vermont would have a civilized healthcare system already if not for Washington, D.C. Yes, the North helped end Jim Crow in the South, but the South did most of that on its own, and we all helped end Apartheid in South Africa without being South Africa.
In the absence of practical representative government, we won’t do much else on a national scale that we are proud of. We now, in the United States, imprison more people of African descent than enslaved here at the time of the Civil War, and it is national policies, completely out of the control of the American people, that produce that mass incarceration.
Those who fought in the Civil War, regardless of the politics or results, were heroes. Or so we hear. But most of the men who killed and died were not the generals whose names we know. They were soldiers, lined up like cogs in a machine, killing and dying on command.
The vast majority as with soldiers on both sides of all wars prior to late-20th century conditioning, avoided killing if possible. Many simply reloaded their guns over and over, fetched supplies for others, or lay in the dirt.
Killing human beings does not come easily to most human beings, and many will avoid it — unless properly conditioned to brainless killing — even at risk to their own lives. To be sure, many killed and many who did not kill died or lost their limbs. There was much bravery and sacrifice and even noble intention. But it was all for a tragically pointless exercise in collective stupidity, lunacy, and horror. Reassuring as it is to put a pretty gloss on a tragedy like this, we would be better served by facing the facts and avoiding the next one.
A century and a half after this madness burst forth, the United States has established a permanent military and permanent war-time, with military bases in over 100 other countries, multiple major wars, and numerous small-scale secretive wars underway. Our weapons industry, born out of the Civil War, is our biggest industry, the world’s biggest arms supplier, and the source for the armaments used by many of the nations we fight our modern wars against.
The civil liberties, the right to habeas corpus, everything that Lincoln temporarily stripped away for the War Between the States, also known — quite accurately — as the War of Northern Aggression, has now been stripped away for good-by Justice Department lawyers and prostituted pundits pointing to Lincoln’s example.
The legacy of the Civil War has been death, destruction, erosion of democracy, and the propaganda that produces more of the same. Enough is enough. Let’s get our history right. Let’s glorify those years in our past during which we did not all try to kill each other.
About the writer: David Swanson is the author of “War Is A Lie”
Source
My comment to Veterans Today:
The south had every right to secede according to the Constitution when their very way of life was threatened as does any state today . At this time the south was extremely rich with boundless resources of cotton and immense fields of agricultural profit and the north coveted that wealth and sought control of those resources through any means possible. The only solution was to raise a war and use slavery as the excuse.
Below is an article written by the Webmaster at American Civil War. I’ve read dozens of articles about these very topics then there is a modicum of truth on the nature of the War of Northern Aggression against the South. The deceitful disclosure about the south are untruths to obfuscate the fact that it was Jewish involvement that brought the slaves to America, not to mention, that the North had as many slaves if not more at one time than did the south.
This is not to say that slavery was a good idea or that the institution should have continued, this is a blame game and the south has always been the down trodden. Slavery is a human stain on America that will never be forgotten, however, lets all remember who the cause of this horrible calamity was thereby shifting the blame to those directly responsible.
WW~
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Was the War Fought Over Slavery
North and South
The war was fought over Southern independence, not over slavery. Lincoln said repeatedly the war was not being fought over slavery. In August 1862, over a year after the war started, Lincoln wrote an open letter to a prominent Republican abolitionist, Horace Greeley, where, he said he did not agree with those who would only “save” the Union if they could destroy slavery at the same time. Lincoln added that if he could “save” the Union without freeing a single slave, he would do so (Letter to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862, published in the New York Tribune).
In July 1861, after the First Battle of Manassas (Bull Run) had been fought, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution, by an overwhelming majority, that declared the war was not being fought to disturb slavery, nor to subjugate the South, but only to “maintain the Union” (i.e., to force the Southern states back into the Union). A few months later, in September, a group of Radicals visited Lincoln to urge him to make compulsory emancipation a war goal. Lincoln declined, telling the Radicals, “We didn’t go into the war to put down slavery, but to put the flag back” (Brodie, Thaddeus Stevens, p. 155; Klingaman, Abraham Lincoln and the Road to Emancipation, pp. 75-76). Later on, about halfway through the war, the Radicals and other Republicans succeeded in making the uncompensated abolition of Southern slavery a secondary goal of the war. However, the primary purpose of the federal invasion was always to destroy Southern independence.
The war itself really had nothing directly to do with slavery. It’s true that issues involving slavery were the most important factors behind the first wave of secession, but secession and the war were two separate events, and four of the Southern states did not secede over slavery. As noted earlier, secession was a peaceful, democratic process. The seceded states posed no threat to the federal government, and they had no intention of trying to overthrow the government. The Confederate states wanted to live in peace with the North and offered to pay their share of the national debt and to pay compensation for all federal forts in the South.
There are not very many photographic images of slaves before the American Civil War. Slave owners were not all that interested in spending money to photograph their slaves. The first large number of slave images comes with the Civil War. This Matthew Brady photograph was od laves on the Aiken s plantation, probably about 1862. Aiken s Landings was on the James River. The Penknsular Campaign was fought here (1862). This woukd have been before the Emacipation Proclamation (1863). We are not sure what the building in the background was. The Aiken s plantation mansion was alarge brick building.
If the Southern states had not seceded, there would have been no war and slavery would have continued. If the Southern states had surrendered when Lincoln issued his call-up for an invasion force, there would have been no war and slavery would have continued. If Jefferson Davis’s first announcement as Confederate president had been that the Confederacy was going to abolish slavery, Lincoln and the Radicals still would have invaded the South. If the Confederacy had informed Lincoln at any point during the war that it was going to start an emancipation program, Lincoln would not have suddenly called off the federal invasion. The issue was Southern independence, not slavery.
The reaction of the Northern abolitionists to the proposal of fellow abolitionist Moncure Conway is further proof the war was not fought over slavery. At least a few of the abolitionists were Republicans, and nearly all of them strongly supported the Radicals. Conway, however, was a pacifist. Yet, at first Conway reluctantly supported the invasion of the South. “But,” notes Jeffrey Hummel, “the increasing bloodshed sickened him.” So, when Conway was in England in 1863, he proposed to a Confederate envoy that if the South freed the slaves the abolitionists would oppose the war. Conway also said he would support continuation of the Confederacy as long as the Confederacy abolished slavery. Strangely enough, leading abolitionists had selected Conway to go to England to convince the British that the war was being fought to free the slaves. However, when Conway’s proposal for Southern independence coupled with abolition became public knowledge, most abolitionists reacted with outrage and withdrew their support from him (Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men, p. 206).
To most Southerners, independence was more important than the continuation of slavery. This is not surprising, since less than 10 percent of Southern citizens actually held title to slaves, and since 69-75 percent of Southern families did not own slaves (John Niven, The Coming of the Civil War: 1837-1861, Arlington Heights, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1990, p. 34; Divine et al, editors, America Past and Present, p. 389; see also the 1860 Census). Early in the war, James Alcorn, a powerful planter-politician from Mississippi, began to talk openly about emancipation. Duncan Kenner, one of the most powerful slaveholders in the South and a chairman in the Confederate Congress, urged that slavery be abolished. Robert E. Lee, the Confederacy’s most famous general, believed slavery was evil and favored gradual emancipation. The Confederate secretary of state, Judah Benjamin, and Governor William Smith of Virginia, also supported ending slavery.
By late 1864, Jefferson Davis himself prepared to abolish slavery to gain European diplomatic recognition and thus save the Confederacy, which shows that independence was more important to him than preserving slavery.
A Confederate soldier captured early in the war expressed the South’s reason for fighting in simple yet eloquent terms. He wore a ragged homemade uniform, and like most other Southerners he didn’t own any slaves. When his Union captors asked him why he was fighting for the Confederacy, he replied, “I’m fighting because you’re down here” (McPherson, The Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 311, emphasis added).
Source
WW~Notes: We have since learned that a vast majority of southerners did not own slaves. It was the wealthy Jewish plantation owners who had cargos of slaves shipped over on Jewish Dutch owned vessels of filth, over crowding, sickness and depravity.
Yet, lest we NOT forget that it was the African tribal leaders at war with other tribes that sold their own African brothers and sisters into slavery in the first place. Secondly, Jewish slave traders made certain to warn the few goyim white owners that Africans were below even human beings they were animals and treated as such. This is where the stigma began about blacks being inferior to whites on many levels caused by who – THE JEWS!
An excellent film I would recommend everyone to watch is BAND OF ANGELS with Clark Gable, Yvonne DeCarlo and Sidney Poitier. You will not find more truth about what happened in the south after the Civil War than in this film. There was never another one like it made by Hollywood.
Whitewraithe~
Postscript: We all might remember that even today we are still slaves yet it is much more appealing considering the ammenities. Slavery of the human race never ended it just changed position and focus over the last century.
