What about the horrendous conduct of the Union during the War? The South fought like gentlemen following the Laws of War, while the Union—especially that monster Sherman—routinely committed war atrocities with the full approval of Lincoln.
I confess that I’m not a real expert on this. I’m not as well-versed on the ins-and-outs of the battles of the War and the relative conduct of the Union and Confederate forces. Apparently Sherman committed what we’d call war crimes in his “March to the Sea.” I don’t know enough about it in its context to determine justifiability. But let’s assume for a moment that the Union did some horrible and completely unjustifiable things to innocent Southerners during the War. I do have a couple of things to say in response:
1) I can’t address the credibility of the (frequent) claim that the Union soldiers committed acts of brutality completely unmatched by the CSA army. Maybe there was a huge disparity between the two. But are you claiming that Confederate forces never ever committed wartime atrocities with the official sanction of the government? Really?
If so, then let me bring something to your attention. Are you familiar with President Davis’s “Infamous Proclamation” regarding the treatment of black Union soldiers who were captured? Are you familiar with the absolute massacre of surrendered black soldiers at Fort Pillow? If not, maybe you’ve been only told one side of the story. Does it sound reasonable to you that one side in a war like this was completely 100% “playing by the rules,” while the other side was the Devil Incarnate? Does that pass your “smell test”?
2) You’ll find no bigger fan of the Rule of Law than this guy (points both thumbs at myself). It’s conservatives who believe in working within the rules in order to accomplish our objectives. One of our favorite slogans is Lex Rex. And to the degree that actions like Sherman’s March to the Sea were unjustifiable under norms of combat during his day, then this needs to be condemned. As we say in the South, I have no “dog in this hunt.” I have no desire and feel no obligation to defend the wartime conduct of Sherman or any other officer during the War.
Why not? Because this is completely irrelevant to the argument I’m making and we’re discussing. To be brutally honest, it has about as much to do with my arguments as the personal beliefs of the individual soldier on the battlefield. The vast majority of Union soldiers were not fighting to end slavery, at least at first. And I’ll readily concede that a good number of Confederate soldiers weren’t fighting to perpetuate slavery, or maybe even hated the Institution with a passion. I think those numbers are exaggerated somewhat by NC’s and relatives of Confederate soldiers, but I’ll grant that at least there were some of them. But once again, the personal beliefs of this or that soldier nor the relative wartime conduct of either side has anything to do with whether the South had the right to secede and set up its own government.
Again, not saying that the Confederates were the moral equivalent of Nazis. But both WW2 and the Civil War had at least one thing in common: the existential stakes of both conflicts. When Lincoln raised the possibility that if we lost that there was a possibility that “government of the people, by the people, for the people” might “perish from the earth,” he was deadly serious, and I agree with him. The worldwide cause of liberty for humanity actually was at stake here, just as much as in World War 2. If you doubt this, listen to him again:
Our popular government has often been called an experiment. Two points in it, our people have already settled--the successful establishing and the successful administering of it. One still remains--its successful maintenance against a formidable internal attempt to overthrow it. It is now for them to demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly carry an election can also suppress a rebellion; that ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets; and that when ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets; that there can be no successful appeal, except to ballots themselves, at succeeding elections. Such will be a great lesson of peace; teaching men that what they cannot take by an election, neither can they take it by a war; teaching all the folly of being the beginners of a war.
Please keep in mind that ours was the greatest experiment of democracy (in the best sense of the term) that the world had seen yet. Great Britain, France and others had some sort of representative government, but they also had kings who ruled by hereditary right. They watched us waiting for us to fail, because they believed that representative democracy like we had could not be sustained. To them, humanity had a choice of either monarchy (possibly with some elected representatives) or bloodthirsty anarchy (e.g. the French Revolution). Once we fell apart, then any worldwide movement towards representative democracy could've (and most probably would've) been strangled in its cradle.
In the end, the legal right of unilateral secession and the rule of law are incompatible. Let secession become the precedent, especially with base motives such as these, and liberty’s “experiment” would be declared a complete failure by a watching world.
Why am I making a big deal over this parallel? Because in World War 2, supposedly our most “just” war, we committed some horrible and completely unjustifiable actions. We bombed Dresden, which to my knowledge doesn’t have many modern defenders. We interred American citizens of Japanese descent solely because of their ethnic background. During the War, black soldiers were mistreated horribly by our own government via racial discrimination. And of course, that doesn't even touch upon the ubiquitous Apartheid occurring right that moment in the American South. Those are just off the top of my head, but I’m sure there are plenty of other examples we could find if we looked hard enough. The bottom line is that while American soldiers were fighting Nazis in Europe, black Americans were routinely treated as second-class citizens (or worse) back home.
But we were fighting an existential conflict in WW2, in which everything was at stake. This wasn’t like the European wars we'd seen for centuries, in which one absolute monarch went to war to steal land from some other absolute monarch, so no matter the outcome, the winner was going to be...an absolute monarch. This was a war in which a (mostly) good side sometimes did some horrible and unjustifiable things in a struggle for existence against a thoroughly evil side. If the (mostly) good side did some really bad things, then that’s not in line with our ideals. We need to deal with it and admit it. But that in no way calls into question which side deserved to win. Nothing in the previous paragraph should cause you to think, "Well, then it really didn't make any difference if the Nazis won. There was bad on both sides."
It’s the same thing with the Cold War, although the goodness of that war is a little more “iffy” in the minds of Liberals/Leftists. I for one don’t share their moral ambiguity at all: Communism was the most blood-soaked system of this or any century, responsible for the murders of about 100 million citizens (not in war, just cold-blooded murder). But during that War—probably even more so than in WW2—our side, the (mostly) good side did some things which aren’t justifiable in hindsight. But that in no way changes the fact that one side was for universal liberty (although we frequently didn’t live up to that ideal), while the other threatened the world with genocide and universal slavery. With all the problems, back then and now, there are countless millions of people who lived in slavery who now have freedom because the (mostly) good side won. Any person who's kinda "iffy" on which side was the more moral really has declared that their moral compass has broken.
Same principle with our current War on Terror (or whatever we’re calling it nowadays).
*There was a great story that summed up the situation nicely. Joe Louis--a (black) boxer--was asked during World War 2 as to why he'd fight for a country that treated blacks so badly: "There ain't nothing wrong with this country that Hitler can fix."
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