Civil War 2
“I’m saying very plainly that the Yankees are better equipped than we. They’ve got factories, shipyards, coalmines . . . and a fleet to bottle up our harbors and starve us to death. All we’re got is cotton, and slaves, and—arrogance.”—Rhett Butler
All this talk of another Civil War. It seems like half the country—the half that doesn’t know very much about the first one—is all for it. The illusion of exceptionalism and privilege in this country has taken its toll. If we’re not feeling special we demand the right to pitch a tantrum.
How could so many people really not understand what another Civil War would mean?
This country is the best social compact the world has known. The price to enjoy it is to tolerate our neighbors, and we can’t even do that. We simply can’t stand for other people to be, act, think, smell different from us. It’s a very old story. Tribalism is in our DNA.
So are human sacrifice, burning people alive, and genocide.
Capitalism, for all the credit it deserves for creating modern society, has turned us into drudges: producer/consumers who can’t really see the value in anything else. The brainwashing of greed culture has worked spectacularly well.
Our handlers get rich telling us “They” are to blame.
We get poor believing it.
But it beats thinking.
* * *
In an age when we could use enlightened leaders, we have only intellectual simpletons. None seem to have any values, let alone vision, beyond personal grievance.
We are told that we are being poisoned by immigrants—we, America, created by immigrants, and whose economy depends on them now. Of course we can’t just swing open the gates and let in an endless stream of millions. I don’t know what the answer is, but I do know the problem is much bigger than blaming desperate people. Americans have a habit of refusing to hold themselves accountable for anything bad, always deflecting blame to some straw man.
One way of looking at the worldwide mass migration going on today is as an inevitable third world response to a history of first world exploitation. Oh dear, I’m going woke. Bear with me. The capitalistic first world has stolen labor and resources, manipulated third world politics in dirty and deadly ways, and helped create a demand for drugs to deaden the guilt and spiritual emptiness of a life based on production and consumption that drives the drug trade and narco wars. The people fleeing hopelessness have infiltrated the first world or are bunched up at the borders like water behind a dam. They’re not going anywhere because they have nowhere to go. And only fools could believe that electing different politicians could solve the problem. It’s way, way bigger than that.
Okay, speaking of wokeness. Another attempt to solve a deep problem by oversimplifying it, as though complex problems could be cured with cheap charms and trifles. The truth is that America is a multicultural society and it can’t be anything else. This is simply what the culture of democratic freedom has evolved into. Lose the multiculturalism, lose the freedom. If you don’t like someone’s ways, fine, but if they’re not harming you, keep it to yourself. The heterogeneity of America is, or should be, its strength—and the idea that America is only a European, straight, Christian country is a delusion. But at the same time, trying to address deep systemic realities of the American experience with scolding, “woke,” cosmetic codes is chicken shit.
Get over yourself. Laws were not meant to make people think like you.
As for another Civil War, it would not permanently solve any problem, only store fuel for future incarnations of it. Let’s hope all the talk of warmongering is exaggerated.
* * *
The widely vilified General William Tecumseh Sherman was born in Ohio, graduated from West Point in 1840, and had a checkered pre-war career. He spent time in the south, enjoying the upper class life, before the war, and in 1859 became superintendent of the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy, the precursor to LSU. He was what we would today call a racist and white supremacist who sympathized with the southern cause. His role in the war was motivated not by a hatred of slavery (he was no abolitionist), but of treason. His infamous march of destruction through Georgia in 1864 was his attempt to end a war that could only create more pointless suffering through continuing.
His “destruction,” real enough, lives on as much in fancy as in fact, and he was generous—many thought too generous—in his terms of surrender with the south.
Sherman is reported to have told his Louisiana Seminary colleague David Boyd, just after South Carolina’s secession in December 1860, the following (and if you ask how “reported to have told” became this seamless reproduction, I would say that’s a good question). These remarks have been widely published. I’m not trying to imply that our situation is a replica of the one he describes, only that his thoughts are worth listening to:
"You, you the people of the South, believe there can be such a thing as peaceable secession. You don't know what you are doing. I know there can be no such thing. ... If you will have it, the North must fight you for its own preservation. Yes, South Carolina has by this act precipitated war. ... This country will be drenched in blood. God only knows how it will end. Perhaps the liberties of the whole country, of every section and every man will be destroyed, and yet you know that within the Union no man's liberty or property in all the South is endangered. ... Oh, it is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization. ... You people speak so lightly of war. You don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing. I know you are a brave, fighting people, but for every day of actual fighting, there are months of marching, exposure and suffering. More men die in war from sickness than are killed in battle. At best war is a frightful loss of life and property, and worse still is the demoralization of the people. ...
"You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people, but an earnest people and will fight too, and they are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it.
"Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The Northern people not only greatly outnumber the whites of the South, but they are a mechanical people with manufactures of every kind, while you are only agriculturists--a sparse population covering a large extent of territory, and in all history no nation of mere agriculturists ever made successful war against a nation of mechanics. ...
"The North can make a steam-engine, locomotive or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth--right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with.
"At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, and shut out from the markets of Europe by blockade as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. ... if your people would but stop and think, they must see that in the end you will surely fail."
January 2, 2024