Плави,сиви, Џони Реб и остали...

[porucnik vasic]

Ово што ми знамо као заставу Конфедерације је војна а не државна застава. Не постоји никаква паралела са заставом ЈАР.Индијанци робовласници су наравно имали црнце за робове. Експеримент са Индијанцима као робовима пробали су Шпанци па се показао ппотпуно неуспешан те је тако и кренупо увоз робова из Африке.Са друге стране има племена у Каролини, која нису нимало налик на представе из филмова, била су ( и даље су) део западног културног круга, примивши веру, обичаје досељеника.Што се тиче разлога за борбу у рату можда је најбоља илустрација анегдота коју је у својој књизи описао Шелби Фути. Заробили плави неког мученика у Вирџинији. Он гологуз, неписменшивео у планинама, не да није био робовласник него ни црнца у животу није видео у својим гудурама док рат није почео. Питају они њега због чега се бори, а он им рече зато што сте ви дошли овамо. Мислим да је то био случај код гомиле на Југу.

[porucnik vasic]

Интетесантан је однос између генерала са обе стране, а нарочито је занимљив однос Шерман , Џонстон, који су постали пријатељи после завршетка рата.Џонстон је умро пошто је навукао запаљење плућа док је носио ковчег на Шермановој сахрани.

[kim_philby]

1861-1865:Gardner’s Civil War Sketch Book, an iPad App

[Prospero]

1 udžbenička aferica the american way, tematski on topic:

Virginia 4th-grade textbook criticized over claims on black Confederate soldiersBy Kevin SieffWashington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, October 20, 2010; 12:53 AMA textbook distributed to Virginia fourth-graders says that thousands of African Americans fought for the South during the Civil War -- a claim rejected by most historians but often made by groups seeking to play down slavery's role as a cause of the conflict.The passage appears in "Our Virginia: Past and Present," which was distributed in the state's public elementary schools for the first time last month. The author, Joy Masoff, who is not a trained historian but has written several books, said she found the information about black Confederate soldiers primarily through Internet research, which turned up work by members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.Scholars are nearly unanimous in calling these accounts of black Confederate soldiers a misrepresentation of history. Virginia education officials, after being told by The Washington Post of the issues related to the textbook, said that the vetting of the book was flawed and that they will contact school districts across the state to caution them against teaching the passage."Just because a book is approved doesn't mean the Department of Education endorses every sentence," said spokesman Charles Pyle. He also called the book's assertion about black Confederate soldiers "outside mainstream Civil War scholarship."Masoff defended her work. "As controversial as it is, I stand by what I write," she said. "I am a fairly respected writer."The issues first came to light after College of William & Mary historian Carol Sheriff opened her daughter's copy of "Our Virginia" and saw the reference to black Confederate soldiers."It's disconcerting that the next generation is being taught history based on an unfounded claim instead of accepted scholarship," Sheriff said. "It concerns me not just as a professional historian but as a parent."Virginia, which is preparing to mark the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War, has long struggled to appropriately commemorate its Confederate past. The debate was reinvigorated this spring, when Gov. Robert F. Mc­Don­nell ® introduced "Confederate History Month" in Virginia without mentioning slavery's role in the Civil War. He later apologized.The Sons of Confederate Veterans, a group of male descendants of Confederate soldiers based in Columbia, Tenn., has long maintained that substantial numbers of black soldiers fought for the South The group's historian-in-chief, Charles Kelly Barrow, has written the book "Black Confederates."The Sons of Confederate Veterans also disputes the widely accepted conclusion that the struggle over slavery was the main cause of the Civil War. Instead, the group says, the war was fought "to preserve their homes and livelihood," according to John Sawyer, chief of staff of the Sons of Confederate Veterans' Army of Northern Virginia. He said the group was pleased that a state textbook accepted some of its views.The state's curriculum requires textbook publishers and educators to explore the role African Americans played in the Confederacy, including their work on plantations and on the sidelines of battle. Those standards have evolved in recent years to make lessons on the Civil War more inclusive in a state that is growing increasingly diverse.When Masoff began work on the textbook, she said she consulted a variety of sources -- history books, experts and the Internet. But when it came to one of the Civil War's most controversial themes -- the role of African Americans in the Confederacy -- she relied primarily on an Internet search.The book's publisher, Five Ponds Press, based in Weston, Conn., sent a Post reporter three of the links Masoff found on the Internet. Each referred to work by Sons of the Confederate Veterans or others who contend that the fight over slavery was not the main cause of the Civil War.In its short lesson on the roles that whites, African Americans and Indians played in the Civil War, "Our Virginia" says, "Thousands of Southern blacks fought in the Confederate ranks, including two black battalions under the command of Stonewall Jackson."Masoff said of the assertion: "It's just one sentence. I don't want to ruffle any feathers. If the historians had contacted me and asked me to take it out, I would have."She added that the book was reviewed by a publisher's advisory council of educators and that none of the advisers objected to the textbook's assertion.Historians from across the country, however, said the sentence about Confederate soldiers was wrong or, at the least, overdrawn. They expressed concerns not only over its accuracy but over the implications of publishing an assertion so closely linked to revisionist Confederate history."It's more than just an arcane, off-the-wall problem," said David Blight, a professor at Yale University. "This isn't just about the legitimacy of the Confederacy, it's about the legitimacy of the emancipation itself."Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James McPherson of Princeton University said, "These Confederate heritage groups have been making this claim for years as a way of purging their cause of its association with slavery."Masoff said one of her sources was Ervin Jordan, a University of Virginia historian who said he has documented evidence -- in the form of 19th-century newspapers and personal letters -- of some African Americans fighting for the Confederacy. But in an interview, Jordan said the account in the fourth-grade textbook went far beyond what his research can support."There's no way of knowing that there were thousands," Jordan said. "And the claim about Jackson is totally false. I don't know where that came from."The book also survived the Education Department's vetting and was ruled "accurate and unbiased" by a committee of content specialists and teachers. Five Ponds Press has published 14 books that are used in the Virginia public school system, all of them written by Masoff.

školama su podeljene nalepnice da bi se pokrio sporan deo texta, pa je dorađena, ali problemi ostaju:

Posted at 04:00 AM ET, 01/19/2012 New problems found in 4th-grade Virginia history textbookBy Valerie StraussThis was written by Brendan Wolfe, associate editor of Encyclopedia Virginia, a project of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities that is the first online reference work about the Commonwealth that aggregates in a single resource information on Virginia history, business, politics, geography, arts, religion, culture, and folklife.Wolfe writes about an episode in Virginia when state officials approved a fourth-grade textbook that, as it turned out, was riddled with historical errors, a story told by my colleague Kevin Sieff. The textbook was redone to remove the obvious errors, but Wolfe still has problems with it. Here’s a critique he wrote and published on the Encylopedia Virginia’sblog, though he notes that his opinions are his own and not those of the foundation.By Brendan WolfeLast year, upon the release of Five Ponds Press’s fourth-grade textbook, “Our Virginia ,” and its unfavorable write-up in TheWashington Post , the history nerds of Virginia — which is to say, pretty much everybody — mobilized into a mass orgy of righteous fact-checking. I was right there with them, of course, shocked to learn thatSir Walter Raleigh had traveled to North Carolina or that Stonewall Jackson had mobilized two battalions of black Confederates.I was also appalled at how The Post gleefully seized on author Joy Masoff‘s use of the Internet as a research tool, as if that were a bad thing. (Hint, hint.) How does the old saying go? The Internet doesn’t create two battalions of black Confederates. Only textbook authors create two battalions of black Confederates … or something like that.But now that a new edition of Our Virginia has been approved, with its most egregious factual errors corrected, it’s worth giving Five Ponds some credit. Sir Walter is safely back in London and those thousands of black Confederates have — poof! —magically transformed into “body servants.” The press opened the process up to historians and the result, as one might expect, is a much better book.But is it good enough? I’m not yet convinced.I’ve written history and social studies textbooks for third-, fifth-, seventh-, and eighth-graders. I’m familiar with the challenges of communicating with kids who don’t always have the same interest level, let alone the same literacy level. And I know something about the frustrations that come with trying to shape a compelling narrative out of what often are stiff, unforgiving, fact-based state standards. My dad taught middle-school American history for more than thirty years, and he just e-mailed to say that “it’s an enormously difficult subject to teach, perhaps the hardest.”If he doesn’t have all the answers, then neither do I. But because history is a critical part of our civic discourse — see here and here and hereand heck, even here — it’s worth thinking hard about how it’s taught. If, as adults, we can’t speak intelligently about history, then we will have more and more trouble speaking intelligently, period.So, back to Our Virginia …One has to start somewhere, so why not with pages 54 and 55: “WHEN WORLDS MET.”Here the author contrasts the Englishmen who founded <a data-xslt="_http" href="http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Jamestown_Settlement_Early" style="color: rgb(12, 71, 144);" target="_blank">Jamestown, represented by John Smith, with the Virginia Indians who already lived there, represented by their paramount chief, Powhatan. The facts are more or less in order, but what about the bigger picture? This is from the text:

Smith described himself as brave and fearless.

Many others thought he was obnoxious.

Let’s be fair: he probably was obnoxious. Smith was like that other John, John Adams, in the classic musical 1776: “I’m obnoxious and disliked; you know that, sir!” But little if anything is offered to suggest how he was obnoxious or, more importantly, what the consequences of his personality were. Instead, we are left only with this representative Englishman who’s a boastful and obnoxious soldier of fortune.So how’s the representative Indian?

Powhatan knew the English settlers were a terrible threat, but

he was

a ruler of great spiritual, mental, and physical strength

.

Hey, wait a minute! Is it fair that the typical Englishman is obnoxious and disliked while the typical Indian resembles nothing if not Mr. Miyagi inKarate Kid :

Please understand that I am not making a complaint here about political correctness. Instead, I am highlighting one clue to the ways in which this text sometimes fails.One of the early settlers at Jamestown was a fellow called William Strachey. His “Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia” serves as one of the most important sources we have on that moment “When Worlds Met,” and he paints a more complicated picture of Powhatan. For instance, Strachey tells the story of how the English visited Powhatan at his capital, Werowocomoco, and there noticed an awkward and gruesome sight: a number of human scalps hanging on a line between two trees. By way of explanation, Powhatan apparently told his visitors that he had recently ordered an ambush of the Piankatank people, killing twenty-four of their men, and now he displayed his trophies for all to see. The English never heard why Powhatan had done this — why he had had these men killed — but perhaps that was the point. The paramount chief aimed to instill fear among his English rivals just as he had done with his Indian rivals.Strachey bravely dismisses the idea — “But, God be praysed, yt wrought not feare but courage in our people” (yeah, right)—but the point seems to be clear: Powhatan did not command tribute from twenty-eight to thirty-two Indians tribes and chiefdoms simply because of his “great spiritual, mental, and physical strength.” He was a man who understood power. And violence.I imagine him thinking: This is what I did to people who look like me. Imagine what I could do to you!And no, I don’t think that the author of Our Virginia should have included Strachey’s graphic description of Piankatank warriors being scalped. I do, however, think that an understanding of Powhatan’s relationship to violence is not simply desirable but necessary. Why? Consider the last sentence in this two-page section:

Without the help of Powhatan, his daughter Pocahontas, and the Powhatan Indians, Jamestown might have ended up as another “Lost Colony.”

The astute student is bound to ask: How might they have ended up as another “Lost Colony”? And why? Would they have disappeared without a trace? Would they have disappeared for a lack of help?Our Virginia doesn’t offer any clues, and as a result these entire two pages, devoted to making sense of how these two alien peoples interacted, end in incoherence.To help make sense of it, I flip back to page 51 and a two-paragraph section titled “The Lost Colony.” Here, the author mentions the Roanoke colonies — er, I mean colony . In Our Virginia there is no mention of the failed first colony of 1585–1586, the one that ended with Englishmen ambushing and beheading a local weroance , or chief. Why does that particular omission matter? Because when it mentions the so-called Lost Colony, the book finds itself helpless to explain what happened.

When a supply ship returned in 1590, every single settler had vanished. A tree trunk with the word

“

Cro

”

and a gatepost with

“

Croatoan

”

scratched in it were the only clues to their fate.

Even innocent little fourth-graders deserve something here — some kind of stab at an explanation. To explain, for instance, that fightingmay have contributed to the deaths of the English colonists in 1587 may help prepare students for understanding that fighting was also part of the equation in 1607 and later.How so? I move to pages 56 and 57, devoted to “THE STARVING TIME.” As we all know, the Starving Time occurred during the winter of 1609–1610, when about 240 settlers hunkered down inside James Fort and slowly starved to death. Our friend William Strachey arrived in May 1610—having been cast away on Bermuda for the winter; lucky him!—and what he found was horrifying: only sixty or so skeleton-like figures remained of the original 240, prompting the colony’s new minister to cast up “a zealous and sorrowfull Prayer.” Strachey himself, though, was less interested in grieving than in figuring out what had gone so terribly wrong.But first, here’s how Our Virginia explains it:

But in their excitement to do well, they [the English colonists] failed to stow away enough food for their own needs. When a shipload of new settlers arrived just before winter, things took a deadly turn. That bitter winter came to be known as the

Starving Time

.

Students — or at least the ones half paying attention — would at this point wonder what in the world happened to “the help of Powhatan, his daughter Pocahontas, and the Powhatan Indians.” Why hadn’tPocahontas shown up and, in the book’s words, “bridged the Indian and English worlds, serving as a contact when the Indians brought food to the starving settlers”? I mean, this is the Starving Time , for crying out loud! Our Virginia doesn’t say, which means that, again, these entire two pages, devoted to making sense of an important moment in Virginia history, end in incoherence.What’s missing, of course, is also what was missing at Roanoke:fighting . Flip a little farther back in the book now, to pages 36 and 37. In this section, called “THE FIRST NATIONS,” the author describes Virginia Indian life prior to 1607:

Many towns dotted the landscape. Most people were well fed and lived in vibrant communities. But all that was about to change when the first ships from Europe began to explore the waters of Chesapeake Bay and cross paths with the Powhatan

(POW-uh-tan)

Indians.

If the Indians were well fed and vibrant before the Europeans showed up, then presumably what changed is that they soon went hungry. Except how does that square with Pocahontas bringing the starving colonists food? Unless everybody was short of food — with the Indians simply being less short — which was, in fact, the case. Actually, what are the odds that when the English show up in 1607, Virginia would be suffering through its driest spell in 770 years? For that matter, what are the odds that when they showed up at Roanoke a few decades earlier, that area would be suffering through its driest spell in even longer?All of which is to say that Powhatan’s people weren’t all that well fed, at least not in 1607, and when they helped the English, they didn’t helpthat much, and when the colonists didn’t get what they needed, they just went ahead and took it anyway. Which, of course, left the Indians evenmore hungry, which helped lead to … fighting. The First Anglo-Powhatan War to be specific.It is this context — that they were fighting and what they were fighting over — that is crucial to making sense of the Starving Time and so much else in these sections of Our Virginia . Look at what William Strachey says about what happened during that deadly winter:

… and it is true, the Indian killed as fast without, if our men stirred but beyond the bounds of their Block-house, as Famine and Pestilence did within …

The Indians, in other words, had laid siege to James Fort. (I should say that not all historians subscribe to this terminology, but what does seem clear is that the Indians made it extremely difficult for the English men and women to do anything that winter but starve.) Does this completely explain the Starving Time? No, of course not. But it does help to make comprehensible what is otherwise incomprehensible in Our Virginia .Remember that Powhatan was a man who understood power. And violence. To make this point early on is to be able to make it again now, when it truly bears on students’ understanding of the material. One gets the sense that the author is almost preoccupied with underscoring the positive in Virginia’s Indians while acknowledging the unwelcome intrusion represented by the English settlement. This is as it should be. But to really give Virginia Indians their due, you have to allow them to beactors in this drama.Did you notice that at this crucial moment in the history of Jamestown — when the colony had nearly starved to death en masse, then packed up and headed for home, only to be saved by the miracle arrival of English resupply ships — that the Indians have, for all intents and purposes, disappeared? Consider that this is also a crucial moment in theirhistory . The Powhatans had used power and violence in an attempt to expel the foreigners, and it had almost worked! But of course it didn’t work, and they would never again come so close. That is part of the story, too. How could Our Virginia miss it?Last year’s textbook controversy focused on fuzzy facts and, to a lesser extent, whether you could find quality information online. (You can!) But now that many of those facts have been corrected, we are still left with … just facts. What do they mean? Why do they matter? And how can we put them together so that they begin to make sense? Our Virginia is still not up to that task.Am I asking too much of a fourth-grade textbook? My dad e-mails: “One thing you know intellectually but can’t possibly understand very well without having experienced it as much as I is that so very many students have only the vaguest notion of what is happening in their subjects. Sometimes I couldn’t assume most of my eighth-graders had any previous knowledge on the subject. I seemed to be starting from an empty slate.”True enough. But we all know about fighting , and if we don’t all know what it means to be really hungry , then most of us can at least imagine it. These can be starting points for fourth-graders, concepts to build on — from Roanoke to Smith & Powhatan to the Starving Time.There are other ways to organize this information, of course, and other pedagogical choices that could be made. The point, though, is that a textbook has to make some choice. It’s not enough for it merely to be fact checked. And while we should applaud Five Ponds for making an extra effort to get these facts right, we also should demand even more.PS: Lest you think that I am merely picking on these few pages, I’ll give you one more, head-scratching example. On pages 68 and 69 you’ll find a paragraph on Bacon’s Rebellion, which, I will be the first to acknowledge, would be awfully difficult to teach to fourth-graders. On the other hand, guess what? It’s not in the state standards!Anyway, here’s Our Virginia :

In 1676 an angry group of poor, former servants, both black and white, joined a planter named Nathaniel Bacon and set fire to Jamestown. Why? They wanted to expand westward by taking Indian lands, but the governor would not let them.

Bacon’s Rebellion

soon faded, but the uprising alarmed Virginia’s ruling class. This growing fear helped lead to an end to short-term servitude and to the growth of permanent slavery as an economic choice.

So you’ve got white servants and black. You’ve got Indians. You’ve gota governor who is being contrary but you don’t know why. And now, out of all this, you have the end of indentured servitude and the rise of slavery “as an economic choice.” Even if you were going to read between the lines here—and I don’t imagine that most fourth-graders are going to be able to do this—you’re led to believe that the “growing fear” of the ruling class came from free blacks and whites causing trouble and burning stuff. The elites respond to this social problem by making sure that such hooligans don’t ever again become free. So how is this an “economic choice”?As you might imagine, Our Virginia does not say.

[bigvlada]

Džoj Mesof(Slobodan Samardžić), bilo je i crnaca (jevreja/muslimana) među konfederalnom vojskom (četnicima). Mesta i iimena su različita ali suština je ista, opravdati ultradesničarske pretke.

[porucnik vasic]

Džoj Mesof(Slobodan Samardžić), bilo je i crnaca (jevreja/muslimana) među konfederalnom vojskom (četnicima). Mesta i iimena su različita ali suština je ista, opravdati ultradesničarske pretke.

Какве ултрадесничарске претке?

[Прслин]

Džoj Mesof(Slobodan Samardžić), bilo je i crnaca (jevreja/muslimana) među konfederalnom vojskom (četnicima). Mesta i iimena su različita ali suština je ista, opravdati ultradesničarske pretke.

[kim_philby]

bilo ih je ali ne puno. kongres nikada nije prihvatio dejvisov i lijev predlog da se ponudi oslobodjenje robovima koji se ukljuce u odbranu juga. neki slave owneri su dizali svoja domacinstva.

[Blueberry]

"Sličnost je gotovo frapantna."Džon Ford, 1956, tokom snimanja 'The Searchers'

[Prospero]

gettysburg 150th anniversary - reenactment live stream

[Prospero]

ŠBB KBB:
 

If the Civil War Had a Different Ending



Residents of the Confederate States might still be celebrating their Independence Day over one hundred and fifty years later...

Paul J. Saunders
July 3, 2014


Some American conservatives appear to revel in discussing what the world might be like if the United States didn’t exist—a sentiment today indulged byDinesh D’Souza’s new film “America.”  Nevertheless, while Americans are justifiably proud of their past, and of their contributions to the world, independence for England’s North American colonies was bound to happen sooner or later.  And the nation that emerged was likely to draw heavily upon its colonial master’s classically liberal political and legal traditions, though possibly expressed differently if the country emerged later with other leaders.  Still, this world-without-America speculation can be both thought-provoking and entertaining.  In that spirit, as Americans celebrate July 4, they might also consider an independence day that didn’t happen and how different America and the world might be if it had.

If the American Civil War had ended other than it did—or if the federal government and the northern states decided to pursue a negotiated separation from the south—residents of the Confederate States of America (CSA) might still be celebrating their Independence Day over one hundred and fifty years later, perhaps on December 24 (the day in 1860 when South Carolina declared its independence) or on February 9 (when, in 1861, the thirteen southern states formed the CSA).  It is, of course, impossible to know what the USA, the CSA, and the world would look like after this alternate history—there are too many variables over too much time.  But it is an interesting thought experiment nonetheless.

For someone who lives in northern Virginia and works in Washington, DC, one of the first possible consequences that comes to mind is a local one.  Would Washington have remained the capital of the United States?  On one hand, the capital was already here, meaning that the federal government had invested significantly in infrastructure and buildings.  On the other hand, in an environment of enduring tension between the USA and the CSA, the city would have been exposed and hard to defend.  Many key national symbols did not exist yet; when the Civil War started, the Washington Monument had been sitting unfinished and essentially untouched for seven years. Moreover, Washington only became the capital because of a political compromise between northern and southern states that relocated the nascent government from Philadelphia.  Had things turned out differently, might modern-day U.S. politicians be denouncing “Philadelphia bureaucrats” and “Market Street lobbyists”?

While a relatively minor issue, the American capital’s location highlights how central the USA-CSA relationship would have been in any subsequent history.  A negotiated separation may well have preserved the deep economic interdependencies between north and south, avoided and contained the passions expressed during the Civil War, and allowed for a form of peaceful coexistence.  Even in this most favorable case, however, Richmond would likely have been fertile ground for European powers seeking to constrain the northern states.  At the same time, strong abolitionist sentiment in the north would have continued.  Enduring slavery in the south could well have provoked considerable political tension if not armed skirmishes along the border if committed northern activists attempted to maintain and expand the Underground Railroad for escaped slaves or even to foment rebellion inside the CSA.  This could well have led to war sooner or later.

Conversely, if the Civil War ground on indefinitely without a northern victory or if the south managed a decisive battlefield success, perhaps at Gettysburg, it could have broken the north’s will and won independence in an eventual political settlement.  Had this happened, the two new neighbors would have started with a much more tense and bitter relationship.  And while the north would have been militarily and economically dominant, the south would have had important leverage of its own—including, for example, control of the Mississippi River Delta and therefore of the river trade that proved so important in developing the American Midwest.  The CSA would also have been in a better geographical position to exercise influence in the Caribbean Sea, though it would have needed a major naval construction program to succeed at this.  Some leaders in Richmond might have seen this as strategically essential, however, to protect the southern states’ access to international markets and to block U.S. or European navies from the Gulf of Mexico.

The latter point raises an interesting question: if the CSA endured as an independent country, would the 1898 Spanish-American War have taken place in the same way?  The war resulted from America’s intervention in Cuba to support a rebellion against Spain.  But what if the CSA supported the Cuban rebels, rather than Washington, attempting to secure its southern coast with a friendly government in Cuba?  Would the United States have aligned with Spain, perhaps allowing Spain to keep its empire a bit longer?  Or what if the USA supported the rebels but the CSA sided with Spain, perhaps in exchange for territorial concessions in some of its other colonies?  Would the United States still have ended up controlling Spain’s imperial possessions, including the Philippines?  If not, would the USA been equally concerned about—and equally capable in resisting—Imperial Japan’s expansion in Southeast Asia?

Moving into the twentieth century, it is difficult to know how long the CSA could have sustained the abominable institution of slavery.  Would the south evolved into an apartheid-style society by doing away with legal slavery but maintaining second-class status for its former slaves?  Absent external pressure, a two-tiered discriminatory society could well have survived for some time, as others did elsewhere.  Would the north have attempted to apply pressure on the south to change its ways?

Meanwhile, how would the north have evolved?  If the strongest advocates for a weaker federal government had left the union rather than remaining within it, would the United States have tilted further in the direction of federal power and northeast/liberal political and social values, with the populous east more easily dominating independent-minded settlers in the American West?  If so, how would the US political system have reacted to the rise of the labor movement?  Might the USA today look more like European Union countries today?

World War I, World War II, and the Cold War could also have been quite different. Germany’s Zimmermann Telegram, an intercepted diplomatic message outlining a strategy to recruit Mexico to support Berlin in World War I with promises of reclaiming lost territory, shows clearly that the Central Powers were thinking about how to distract the United States and limit its involvement in the war.  A USA-CSA rivalry on the North American continent would have provided a much bigger opportunity for mischief.  

In the 1930s, would southern political leaders have sympathized with Adolf Hitler’s racist worldview?  By this time, the CSA would have been hard-pressed to call itself a democracy if a white minority enjoyed substantially greater political and economic rights than what could by then have become a black majority (the Confederate States were about 40% black at the time of the Civil War).  Could World War II have led to a replay of the Civil War with deadlier weapons and with bombers attacking USA and CSA cities?  Would the allies have been able to defeat Hitler if the United States couldn’t contribute as many troops, ships and planes to the invasion of Italy and to D-Day while fighting off a hostile neighbor or at least maintaining large garrisons?  Or, equally ominous, could Josef Stalin’s Red Army have ground its way across Europe to seize Berlin unaided, perhaps only by 1947, avoiding the division of Germany but producing a united communist German Democratic Republic?  Would France have then fallen to communism too?  The Cold War could have become a time of Soviet containment of the United States, rather than the reverse, with only America’s atomic bombs preventing an attempted invasion.

By the 1960s and 1970s, the CSA would probably have faced severe challenges as colonial systems collapsed globally under pressure from national liberation movements.  What we call the civil rights movement today could have been far bloodier, looking much more like a revolution.  The USA’s response could have been decisive.

In US politics, the country would have done without many if not most of its post-war presidents.  On the Democratic side, there would be no Lyndon Johnson (Texas), Jimmy Carter (Georgia) or Bill Clinton (Arkansas), though one can imagine Johnson in particular as an influential politician in the CSA.  On the Republican side, no “southern strategy”—something that could have significantly affected Richard Nixon and every subsequent Republican candidate (and, of course, who became the Republican candidates).

If the CSA still existed in 2014, it seems likely that U.S. foreign policy today would be profoundly different.  Likely without the clear military successes and the resulting strong sense of self-assurance that developed during the twentieth century, America would be a much smaller place in not only territory, but in aspirations.  Perhaps ironically, it might be even more moralistic in its foreign policy rhetoric if it lived next to an oppressive and discriminatory state for well more than a century—but much less able to impose its moral vision on others.

This provokes a final thought.  The American Civil War was a profoundly destructive experience for the United States, north and south.  In 2014, many Americans regret its excesses, such as General William Tecumseh Sherman’s brutal burning of Atlanta and his self-consciously terrifying March to the Sea.  More important, however, is that no small number of Americans would likely support U.S. military intervention in someone else’s civil war to stop similar conduct today while simultaneously believing that our own civil war, however bloody, was necessary and that the united country—north and south—is the better for it.  Indeed, while no one can know what could have happened instead, it is not difficult to envision admittedly speculative outcomes that could have been much worse.  Taking all of this into account, Americans would do well to remember their own experience with civil war  and to employ a degree of moral humility in forming judgments about today’s global conflicts—particularly if they think that General Sherman turned out to be “on the right side of history.”


Paul J. Saunders is executive director of  The Center for the National Interestand associate publisher of The National Interest. He served in the State Department from 2003 to 2005. Follow him on Twitter: @1796farewell.

Image: Wikicommons.

[Radoye]

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Ima sjajan mockumentary na tu temu:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJJtH_5vcmM

Edited July 4, 2014 by Radoye

[MancMellow]

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Do WW1 još i nekako, ovo posle je...maštarije :D