[Peace-discuss] Presidents Day

[John W.]

It's an elegant thought experiment, Carl.

What gives you the slightest inkling of hope that there will ever, anywhere
in the world, be a "consistent anti-war movement" of any size whatsoever?



On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 10:50 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>wrote:



> In an article in the Atlantic four years ago, Christopher Hitchens tells
> the following story about the excellent historian Perry Anderson:
>
>     "A few years ago, when we jointly addressed a gathering in New York, he
> [Anderson] startled me by announcing that he thought the Confederacy should
> have been allowed to secede. His reasoning was elegant enough — slavery was
> historically doomed in any case; two semi-continental states would have been
> more natural; American expansionism would have been checked; Lincoln was a
> bloodthirsty Bismarckian étatiste and megalomaniac..."
>
> I haven't found a full discussion of the matter in Anderson's work, but
> what there is suggests that Hitchens' account is substantially correct.  And
> it seems to me that the view ascribed to Anderson is correct.
>
> As far as I can tell, one of the few recent discussions of the notion
> appears in a book by William Marvel, an academic Civil War historian, "Mr.
> Lincoln Goes to War" (2006). Marvel carefully sets out Lincoln's policies as
> "destructive and unimaginative."
>
> It looks to me as though a consistent anti-war movement 150 years ago would
> have opposed Lincoln - a point that may have some importance because of his
> mythic position in the American social imaginary. --CGE
>

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