[Peace-discuss] Civil War

[Bill Strutz]

----- Original Message ----
From: John W. <jbw292002 at gmail.com>
To: Bill Strutz <billstrutz at yahoo.com>; peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
Sent: Saturday, March 17, 2007 3:56:10 AM
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Civil War 

At 03:02 PM 3/15/2007, Bill Strutz wrote:

>         The two sides of a war may have quite different reasons for 
> having a war.  For instance, to the US, Iraq may have been about oil (and 
> probably was).  To the Iraqis, it wasn't about oil.  It wasn't, "Let's 
> defend our oil."  It was about the fact that they had been invaded.
>         Perhaps neither side would have fought the Civil War, except that 
> they all expected to win in six months or less.  To some extent, the war 
> was fought because they didn't think it was going to be that big a deal.
>
>         The Southern elite seceded because they thought that the 
> Abolitionists were eventually going to prevail in Congress.  The South 
> was either mistaken, or premature. It was not entirely a decision to 
> fight; some of them expected that they could secede without a war.
>        The North did not care enough about slavery to fight (at least, 
> not in 1861), but when confronted with the fact that states had seceded, 
> they were willing to call up some 90-day volunteers to bring those states 
> back in.  Then things got out of hand.
>
>         Wars don't always happen for dramatic, momentous, and meaningful 
> reasons.  Sometimes people just screw up.
>         Maybe we didn't have a reason to invade Iraq at all.  Maybe it 
> was expected to be so easy that the question wasn't "Why?" but "Why not?"
>
>         However, we are shooting ourselves in the foot if we argue about 
> stuff that happened seven score and six years ago.  Do we really care 
> what the Civil War was about?  Or is it that one person has to prove 
> himself right, and another person has to prove him wrong?  Let's stay in 
> the present.


"He who fails to learn from the past is condemned to repeat it."  You may 
quote me.  :-P
----------------------------

Since you address me by name --

Welcome to the listserv, Mr. Santayana, under whatever pseudonym you are traveling.

We've all read pretty much the same books.  As for me, I read a huge amount of history, parsing the footnotes, delving into the bibliography.  Only yesterday the new Gandhi biography hit my desk.  I care so much for that history that I bought copies to give to friends.

Of course we should study history, and discuss it.  To say that I said otherwise is to set up a straw man.  It is a cheap rhetorical device.

What I clearly said is that we should not ARGUE about stuff that happened so long ago.  There are issues in the here-and-now that we have been totally ignoring in here for several days because people in here fall into the old pattern of "...one person has to prove himself right, and another has to prove him wrong."  

It seems easier to re-fight the Civil War -- or each other! -- than to address peace in our own time.

         -- Bill










 
____________________________________________________________________________________
Food fight? Enjoy some healthy debate 
in the Yahoo! Answers Food & Drink Q&A.
http://answers.yahoo.com/dir/?link=list&sid=396545367
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.chambana.net/cgi-bin/private/peace-discuss/attachments/20070317/89444276/attachment.html