Uncivil War, I
No international security, no call of the righteous man
Needs a reason to kill man, history teaches us so
Reason he must attain, must be approved by his God
His child, partisan brother of war
--War?, S.O.A.D.
And I don't need your civil war
It feeds the rich, while it buries the poor
You're power hungry, sellin' soldiers
In a human grocery store, ain't that fresh?
I don't need your civil war
Needs a reason to kill man, history teaches us so
Reason he must attain, must be approved by his God
His child, partisan brother of war
--War?, S.O.A.D.
And I don't need your civil war
It feeds the rich, while it buries the poor
You're power hungry, sellin' soldiers
In a human grocery store, ain't that fresh?
I don't need your civil war
--Civil War, Guns n Roses
Mr. Lincon,
I beg to present you, as a Christmas gift,
the city of Savannah
--General Sherman
___________________
Mr. Lincon,
I beg to present you, as a Christmas gift,
the city of Savannah
--General Sherman
___________________
Some reflections 150 years after Gettysburg.
Our Civil War was bloody and vicious, but it was certainly ours alone. It is the historian's party line that we could not have cohered as a nation had we not fought it (though its wounds, deprivations and divisiveness persist.) One thing we have not learned as a result of our exhaustive self-study is that Civil Wars are internal affairs.
We persist in our folly by intervening in the inevitable Civil Wars of Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. Adding ignorance to our folly, we consider it a good thing to do. As with "The Trauma of the Gifted Child", we actually think we can fix their problems or stymy the inevitable. Maybe we think being a tourniquet is good enough, and fancy that we can stanch the bleeding.
If our justification for entering these conflicts is that the behavior of the combatants is heinous, we should consider how our Civil War was fought. Both sides perpetrated inhumane conditions upon their prisoners of war and suffered them among the troops. Grant, Sherman and Sheridan brought the carnage to the citizens of the South, Sherman cutting a swath of destruction to the Sea as a gift to President Lincoln. Sheridan destroyed the Shenandoah Valley so thoroughly that "a crow flying across the valley needed to bring his own provisions."
It was a total war of unflinching destruction, with such animus that the scars are still felt, and yet we now wish to involve ourselves in the Civil Wars of other nations, peopled by citizens who follow practices and beliefs much more foreign to us than that which divided the North and the South. Why? Are we suffering a collective wish for atonement -- to get it right somewhere else? Is it our Christian sympathy with the perceived meek, whomever he is conceived of being and wherever he may be? Throwing ourselves into the lion's den certainly seems to be the action of the martyr, yetwe haven't the wisdom of Solomon to determine who actually is the meek (if anyone out-qualifies another.)
RangerAgainstWar's position is that there is misery and deprivation aplenty in the United States without needed to go foraging about for it in other lands. It might not make for a exotic photo op, but if cross you Divide Street in most towns you would find need without bottom. However, Americans like flash and gash. It is as though at 237 years young, we are already an enervated ideology.
If Syria were not enough to interest us, we still have Iran on the back burner, and as a recent article teased with full seriousness, "Is Africa the Next Afghanistan?"
Our nation transfixed with one single death in the Zimmerman trial, yet we as a nation are willing to become the "neighborhood watch vigilantes" for the world, not too much troubled by death orders of magnitude higher.
Do we see the hypocrisy?
--by jim
posted by Lisa at 8:43 AM
28 Comments:
"Why?"
It's the same mentality in your dollar store post writ large.
"The road to hell is paved with....."
Incidentally, we have at least moved two infantry brigades to Turkey near the Syrian border. This from a friend of someone I know who is in one of the brigades. I haven't seen that in the news, of course.
My family's plantation was in the Tide Water region of Virginia. There was minimal fighting in that area as it had been occupied early on by Union troops. My ancestor, one Aaron Ball, ran off to join General Lee's army as a cavalry officer (though some records have him as an artillery officer - a discrepancy possibly explained by the possible existence of a cousin with the same name). Any how, to this day the Union "carpet baggers" are still discussed with much disdain. In fact, anyone from the North - tourists, recent relocated retirees, etc - were still referred to as carpet baggers behind their backs when I was a child.
Very few people understand the utter (criminal?) destruction that the North rained down on the South. The South was blighted for years after the war; a proud culture destroyed along with the economy. Land owned by families for generations was ruined.
I am glad Ranger recognizes what actually happened as opposed to the revisionist history story taught in schools where the whole story is simply evil southerners wouldn't free slaves, started a war, north beat them on the field of battle, slaves freed. Justice done and union preserved. Happy ending for all.
The ancestors of slaves that the do gooders are so happy were freed are, to this day, living in squalor and crime ridden pockets, on government support, in the very cities that are the center pieces of the land from which the do gooders blue coat heros came from.
Yes, hypocrisy.
no one,
Yes, IMHO it was utterly criminal destruction, and the scars are felt to this day. The South was brutalized, and it amazes me that the Total War wrought by Grant et. al. is admired as a template, and Lincoln as some sort of minor Messiah. Not.
(Ranger may have his own views on the topic.)
I wonder if our nation will ever recover from this bloodletting, actually.
no one,
Oh, and yes -- the do-gooders. Ms. Stowe's "book that started this great war" ... I doubt she and her ilk would actually want to dirty their hands.
Nice post Lisa. I agree with the sentiment. But our civil war was certainly not ours alone. Without British and French support the south would have folded much earlier. Maybe without all that devastation. And maybe without Emancipation.
Many in the south, including the Vice President of the Confederacy, never wanted the war and were against secession. He (Stephens) and others had good reasons to believe slavery as an institution would survive Lincoln's election since Democrats still controlled Congress. Unfortunately some hotheads from South Carolina trumped his words of wisdom. BTW - many plantations in tidewater SC were owned by Brits who had fled from the west indies after slavery there was outlawed. Hmmm?
Sherman can be held guilty for the devastation in Georgia and Tennessee. My father, from Norfolk, always thought Lee's genius for war was the reason that Virginia got torn up so bad.
@ no one - Slavery is evil. You imply it should have continued, am I wrong?
Any war is from the stupidity of men and women.
Grow Up or Die Human Race!
"Why? Are we suffering a collective wish for atonement -- to get it right somewhere else?"
Close to the mark. I think it has to do more today with parties in power seeking validation for their "behaviorist modification" polices of bribes and bombs to shape the world into their vision of utopia.
Just like Nazi Germany used Spain's Civil war as a test bed for its military weapons and tactics, so do progressives employ weak nations with internal strife as guinea pigs to experiment with their pet theories.
By the by, here's your man Stephens on the "peculiar institution":
"The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away... Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it—when the "storm came and the wind blew, it fell."
Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition."
I agree that the man didn't want what the South got. But "words of wisdom"? That owning a man like a box of Cap'n Crunch is "his natural and moral condition"?
Mmmmm. Probably not.
working stiff,
I like simple Ranger thoughts.
I just read a mystery by Michael Dibdin and in it he described the idea of power as seen by a North and South American.
To the north we see power as the ability to stop you from doing an act, any act.
To the south power is being able to do what i want.Whatever that is.
When i think of it this is 2 sides of the same coin EXCEPT you can't have both sides up when u flip the coin.
That's exactly what our policies propose. We now tell other nations what we want them to do and not do.
Maybe we need to be Ranger simple like we once were.
Thanks for writing.
jim
Eric, I am not arguing that slavery should have continued indefinitely. I agree that it is evil.
I am arguing that the situation was - and is - far more complicated given slavery having been already established for at least a couple hundred years. Certainly the South was utterly destroyed by moralizing Yankees; Yankees who, based on sweat shops, subsistence wages, child factory laborers and other conditions in their industrial sector really weren't standing on the moral high ground. Who do you think had it worse - a plantation slave or a child with rickets and two missing fingers due to a machinery accident working 15 hour days, six days a week, in a northern factory?
I am also saying that the Gettysburg Address was Lincoln's "mission accomplished" moment. Great, the slaves are free. Now what? I am further saying that the descendants of slaves are now living in squalor in the center piece cities of the righteous North in ghettos. They still can't speak English. They have a culture of crime and broken homes. They aren't integrated and largely do not want to be and this is 150 years later and in the North! Failure to integrate has kept them down at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder.
So did the North really help these people or not when it freed them? Were the abolitionists really morally superior?
But basically it's not a simple problem to solve and it will not be solved by moral sloganeering, which, as far as I can see, is what American ideological crusaders do best. Pronounce a few strong glorious phrases, lock and load and/or throw some money around, declare victory and move onto the next noble cause.
Americans love charged words like "freedom" and "democracy", but they seem totally unequipped to deal with the ramifications.
I should note, in fairness to Lincoln, that his plan was to have freed slaves leave the country. They would have the choice of either going to Africa (e.g. Liberia) or migrating as colonists to South America. It was his belief that blacks would not thrive in white society.
The abolitionists and some black leaders would have nothing of this plan.
"We now tell other nations what we want them to do and not do."
NOW?
I'll bet you could dig up some some Mexicans who'd argue that we were doing that in 1845, some Filipinos who would make that argument for 1903, some Hondurans and Guatemalans for the Thirties...and some Cherokee and Cheyenne and Delawares the same since about July 5, 1776...
I don't think there's any way to support the notion that this is something new and dangerous to the U.S. national character.
I'll agree that it's usually a BAD part of our character.
But it's not like we've suddenly developed a bad case of interventionitis. It's a feature, not a bug.
mike,
Thanks for the compliment, but jim wanted me to point out that these were largely his ideas. I forgot to change identifiers when I posted; I did add the paragraph on atonement, however.
Much of what we write is a team effort, with the strongly military analyses being Jim's alone. Those that are solely mine I enter under my name, and those posts that we feel are truly 50/50 we use both names @ the end.
FDChief quotes Stephens in saying, "the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature", that the races are not equal, and that Jefferson saw slavery as the great misery that his nation would have to face. Really, all are correct, with some explanation.
As I say, our nation has not recovered from our CW, and may never. I do not know if slavery is a violation against the laws of nature as I'm not sure what those laws are, and also the fact that slavery is such an obdurate institution (in both Africa and elsewhere.)
Not so much are the "races" unequal, but humans are; to say otherwise is a toxic platitude, IMHO.
FDChief -
Stephens may have been an a$$ on the question of slavery. But he was right about secession being the wrong path for the south. He had pointed out correctly that the south and their northern democratic allies still had a lock on the US Supreme Court and Congress even when Lincoln was elected. They could have blocked any Lincoln moves against slavery for decades.
Stephens was also right about Jefferson Davis. As President of the Confederacy Davis's strategy, militarily, politically, and diplomatically was a complete failure.
Chief,
I'm not saying anything EXCEPT THIS IS AN INTERESTING view of power that my dumb Ranger ass never considered before.
jim
jim: The reason I got out of the RA is because Grenada and Lebanon woke my dumb ass up back in 1983. Regardless of what we SAID we were we were imperial grunts, going all over the globe telling other people that it was our way or the highway.
It took me about another 10 or 15 years of studying history to "get" that this was something that my country has been doing since the days of Jefferson and Adams.
We just hate to admit it; that's why we are so shocked when some angry Arab gets up on his hind legs and bitchslaps the piss out of us for fucking around with his people.
Ignorance may be bliss but is sure makes for some fucked up policies.
"....we were imperial grunts, going all over the globe telling other people that it was our way or the highway."
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well I remember a bunch of California air head faggots protesting the Gulf War. It was amazing how many "no war for oil" bumper stickers were flashing around attached to expensive imported cars. Their sandals cost more than a third worlder makes a year, as did their hair cuts. Where did those morons imagine that the oil for their cars came from? Where did they imagine their wealth came from?
That is America's life style and it needs to be maintained. It ain't the government making the decision to go imperial - it's you and me and our neighbors and their neighbors.
Fuck the camel jockies and their hero Mohammed along with them. Their culture sucks in just about every way. Our culture is, objectively, superior. In this modern world societies and countries are mutually interdependent; have to be. Why shouldn't we dictate the terms and conditions of being a member of the global community? You want to live by their ideals? You want the primitive wipe-their-ass-with their-hands-stone-women-to-death assholes calling the shots? Hell no.
So they either cooperate and establish mutually beneficial relationships or we take what we need and, if we were wise, destroy them in the process so they can't make trouble over it.
Just to clarify re imperialism, I do think we should focus on developing our own country, the infrastructure, natural energy sources like solar, wind, hydro and geothermal. Set tariff's and taxes such that business is heavily incentivized to produce in America using American labor and resources. Establish many trade schools that partner with businesses for young people that would prefer to learn a useful and employable skill as opposed to sitting through four or five years of theory in college.
This would allow us to stay out of foreign entanglements to a great extent.
I also think that there should be a military draft with 0 deferments (excepting 4F, section 8 and such). College bound? Fine. You will participate in a ROTC program while you attend college. Increase the reserve forces and reduce active duty to the bare minimum. This way everyone is vested in the decision to go to war and the decision will not be made lightly or without public input.
If you're on welfare and have a child, then you are sterilized. Better yet, women applying for welfare would have to have an IUD implanted before the first check can be received. Removal of the IUD while receiving welfare is a felony offense.
War would only be fought in matters of true, extremely serious and obviously imminent national threats - or to capture resources that are necessary to our society, when all other means, like business negotiations with the foreigners or internal development of same or substitute materials have failed.
When the decision is made to go to war we would wage that war ruthlessly and totally without any respect whatsoever for the culture or beliefs of the enemy. We would never attempt to nation build, to implement COIN or to train indigenous troops. To the contrary, we would kill them all and reduce any assets that might support an opposing/avenging force to ashes and rubble, take what we want (if that is our purpose) and then go home. That is what we should have done in Afghanistan.
no 1,
You did not put hydro or ocean current power on your list.
Why would you implant a ied in a welfare recipients vagina? Don't the males have sumpin' to do with the problem also? The men shoot and scoot and the hens are caught holding the bag?
This doesn't seem fair to my enlightened view of sexual equality.
Let's agree that we have a problem , but addressing that problem is the task of leadership. The leadership is elected by the people.
I find it interesting that you never seem to advocate sexual awareness training and birth control for the kiddies BEFORE they squirt out their little bundles of joy.
I'm firmly on board with isolationism.
jim
JIm, Hydro is on the list.
IED.....I like it. Puts a new spin on concepts like "banging" and "explosive sex". Agreed, it takes two to tango, but policy has to be based on what's feasible.
I think the kiddies are more than sufficiently sexually educated. The problem isn't information volume. It's the quality and direction of the information. When the breakdown of the two parent stable home is ubiquitous, producing babies out of wedlock and with no sense of responsibility is the norm.
Responsibility is what is lacking. This is a culture wide problem. It expresses in different communities in different ways - blacks can't accept that Trayvon caused his own death, father children out of wedlock like rabbits where whites feel entitled to self gratifying careers over family obligations, consumerism over deeper core values - but it's the same root problem. The culture of self indulgence and instant gratification.
I know you know what I'm talking about. Nobody elects to be a Ranger and then makes it through the process to receive the tab without having the ability to defer gratification, endure hardship, etc. for achieving a meaningful goal.
The country needs more Rangers and Marines - not literally, but the mindset; which could be applied to anything, even peaceful endeavors. This is what needs to be developed in schools and homes; not more sex-ed.
P.S. On leadership I am ambivalent. I do not want to be a drone zombie following dear leaders dictums even if the leader is basically good. Nor I do not want a corrupt self serving crook that maintains power by pandering to the lowest instincts of his/her constituents and closed door donors.
Develop citizens as outlined in my previous and the right leader and the right balance will emerge, but it must start within the individual character of each citizen. It will not be imposed from without.
no one says,
Develop citizens as outlined in my previous and the right leader and the right balance will emerge, but it must start within the individual character of each citizen. It will not be imposed from without.
This view is pregnant with implication. I agree, character is lacking. As an example only today, I was searching online for the lyrics to an 80's or 90's tune, "Nasty Boy" -- innocent enough. Sadly, I pulled up Notorious B.I.G.'s song (can it be called that?) of the same title, and was repulsed. Do those sentiments represent a "culture"?
Yes, character must start from "within", but per, the "will not be imposed from without" ... then, from whence? Do we just need to get out of own way? Surely you would not suggest children begin as tabula rasa?
Lisa, IMO (I have had "experiences" and I've researched the topic rather thoroughly), we are not born tabula rasa. I believe we bring much into this life from past ones and/or some kind of spiritual connection. I also believe we have an animal biology that influences our personality. We all come here with unique latent abilities. Everyone has something to offer.
A tree not tended with will wither and die. Though it could have produced delicious fruit - the potential was there - it will not if planted in poor soil.
Like the proverbial horse and its water, a person will not consume education and opportunity if it doesn't want to because it doesn't see the need or hasn't been taught to value these things.
Like most things in life, I suspect there is a feedback loop in effect; meaning I take your point. People of good character will act accordingly and produce new people of good character, but, if good character is in deficit, where do we find it to reintroduce into the system? Our feedback loop needs resetting at this point. I don't know how to do that.
Governments can attempt to impose the reset from without. However, they will usually do so in ways that crush out human potential. Governments tend to oppress and control for their own sordid reasons - the reasons of a priviledged few - as opposed to the good of the many. Communism has always promised to create a new man and a glorious society, yet has always failed totally in the opposite direction.
In a free land, character development must begin to happen at the level of the family. Parents must lead by example. Hard work, respect, doing it right and consequences imposed for doing it wrong. High personal standards that, once achieved, are set even higher.
Advocate for a society based on the stable two parent family these days and you are labeled a "conservative" and shouted off the soap box - because the government has already promised some other easy options; options that appeals to the lazy animal instincts that we all have and that sounds a lot like communism-communism lite at least.
I truly believe that the '60s cultural revolution began the ruin of the country. Too bad. I love the music that came out of it. I even basically am down with hippie ideals (peace, love, happiness). For that matter, I occasionally enjoy cannabis use and am grateful that it was able to become fairly mainstream.
It's all good to go freaking out in the purple haze, until you go so far and so long that you've lost all sense of tradition and end up living in a permanent fantasy land where you're so fried you can't tell the difference between a man and a woman and then you demand that others accept that you are right about there being no difference.
Such silliness could only spread like cancer in an overprotected overfed environment with the government enabling; not helping.
Lisa, actually I am genuinely interested if you have an idea of how character could be imposed by society lacking the gentle, but constant, tending of that garden at home.
Opportunities (other than jobs in this economy for those that want to work) are certainly available for everyone in this country. Definitely more than 60 years ago. Perfectly available? No. But still, more widely so than ever.
Every school teaches/preaches equality, acceptance and niceness to the point of utter saturation.
Even the gangsta youfs who shout about bein' desciminated on have the latest smart phones/ap.s.
Where ever I go in corporate America I see women in high positions.
The government has had a hand in enabling all of this.
Yet the people are popping anti-depressants at increasing rates.
It's not enough. The culture declines more.
What more would you do if, say, you were made Queen of America for life?
no one,
You've pricked the metaphysical Lisa.
Like the opening of the Coen Bros. film "Oh, Brother", I have seen amazing things; we all have. I have seen the lowest and most despised rise to elegant behavior, and seen those with pedigrees fail abysmally at the art of humanity, and I have seen the ebb and flow within a discrete conflicted individual (organism).
Yes, IMHO we are born with an innate proclivity; the good can be extinguished will vile use, but the "evil" impulse never can be, and not all drop in here possessing souls ISTM (def. as "conscience", or ability to see rightly.) I think most are bound by selfishness, greed and alternately, sloth, hence why Communism will always fail. How to re-engineer the human?
If the society lacks for gentility and character, then it cannot be the structure to impose values which it lacks. People eventually see through the hypocrisy.
You mention the attainment of objects and some petty status by some in the American economic caste system, yet you observe that we are a pill-poppin' nation, too.
"Queen of America for Life"? Oh, my, well -- I'd secure a nice little lodging in Bar Harbor, and then ... what was the question?
Oh, yes, I would not rip values clarification from the classrooms for fear of trodding upon someone's values or lack thereof, but there is a problem with my fine idea: We would have to create educators capable of allowing that discovery.
And in advance of that, we'd have to create responsible, thoughtful parents who could be accessible and provide a comfortable home climate. But then you get back to selfishness and greed and all of the petty human failings which are hard-wiring in, for some reason.
Like the poet Philip Larkin wrote in "This Be The Verse",
They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you.
That fuck-uppedness + societal expectations tend not to leave much time for attainment of excellence in the human character. I think one solution would be a time-out, an adult gap year, intermittently throughout one's life. But that would screw up one's career track, y'see?
Lisa, apparently we very much see eye to eye on all of this. Yes. It seems that for most the good can be stripped away or beaten out or tempted into oblivion, but the evil always remains. We have seen the least beomce the most and the reverse. Though, mostly these are rare individuals.
An occasional adult sabbatical is an idea I have been thinking about for some time now. I had mentioned the peace corps at one point in the not too distant past. Unfortunately family responsibilities (of which you are aware) will keep me engaged in status quo for a while longer.
When i was in my early twenties I just wanted to fight. I had a sense of needing to fight for right, but, honestly I was mostly intersted in fighting. Then some interesting experiences caused me to switch focus to spiritual matters, all the while family matters/paying the bills took an increasing amount of time and energy. My friends were not main stream being Native Americans, military or artists types. At some point along the way, in the depths of career pursuits and fatherhood/husbandhood I became a machine and lost touch with my soul; mostly. Not good. Then I began reawaking a few years ago. I really ignored politics and societal issues until recently; maybe the past couple of years. Looking around I see that while I was asleep or otherwise distracted the world really changed. I can't say I like how it changed. Or, maybe it is as it always was I and I am looking at it with less naive/idealistc eyes. Maybe I isolated myself from its reality for so long for a good reason.
Thank for putting up with my frustration and questioning.
Hope that wrist is coming along!!!
no one/A
No 1,
I will agree that a form of gov't service is a good thing, but it doesn't have to be military.
jim
Right. I get carried away sometimes. There could be a draft into all sorts of useful areas of service - from building bridges to caring for the elderly.
no one/A,
It is a great pleasure to ply such ground, and important, ISTM, if we are to avoid the status of automaton. I admire your path out of darkness; it seems a necessary part of waking up.
Thank you for asking about my wrist :) Had my 1st PT today, and the analogy is perfect: We must break up the gluey and stuck parts, the adhesions, much like those that confine our minds.
I feel like the watcher in the woods, and the direction our society has taken is disappointing in so many ways. As per the downturn you note beginning in the '60's, I take a long historical view: Some people worked so hard to create the structure of monotheism, and the phenomenon of Christianity in particular, 2,000 or so years ago, only to have humans earnestly work to chip away at the finer dictates which basically come down to loving your brother. What a degraded nation we are becoming.
Live and let live. Live -- robustly, which means canning all the garbage which mires us. We can't seem to do it, eh?
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