From: Mike Linksvayer (ml@gondwanaland.com)
Date: Wed Apr 18 2001 - 12:18:12 MDT
On Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 10:21:48AM -0400, Michael Lorrey wrote:
> The North waged war on the South primarily to provide cheap labor for
> northern factories in the form of 'freed' slaves.
That's one I haven't heard. I suspect you would've been hard
pressed to find a white northerner of any stripe who wanted to see
a migration of blacks into the north. Most had no intention of
ending slavery anything but very gradually, as it had ended over
the previous half-century or so in northern states.
The north's reasons for waging war to prevent secession include
mostly bad ones (as "paloeolibertarians" love to point out, though
I'd be hard pressed to name a war not fought mostly for bad reasons),
though the south's primary reason for firing the first shots was
simple: preserve slavery. Read the letters and oratory of
pro-secession southern politicians as the campaign for secession
was under way: the arguments are all about protecting huge investments
in slaves, protecting women and children from supposedly barbaric
Africans, and protecting the southern economy and way of life,
which they believed, or argued anyway, could not exist without
slavery.
And the reason the south seceded in 1861? They lost control of
the federal government, which they had a lock on for nearly all
of the nation's short history up to that point. VERY quickly
pro-slavery southerners switched from using arguments for federal
power to enforce slavery to using state's rights arguments to
maintain slavery. Most unfortunate, as mostly-meritorious arguments
for devolution of power are now tarred with racism in the US.
See http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?20010412028R
for a review of some recent books on these topics.
> > * Affirmative action and "multiculturalism" are undermining western
> > civilization
>
> Which I agree with entirely.
I'm no fan of AA and perhaps not of multicultralism depending upon
how it's defined, though I'd say western civilization is much more
resilient than to be threatened by giving special privileges to
small minorities. After all it survived for almost its entire
history giving special privileges to roughly half the population
(men) and expositing racial theories at least as bogus and destructive
as today's most virulent "multiculturalist", so defined as to
include such people.
> > For reasons I do not understand paleos fawn over wholly inconsistent
> > cultural conservatives, curmudgeonly kooks, and Pat Buchanan while
> > castigating mere economic conservatives and culturally liberal
> > libertarians as handmaidens of the fall, more or less.
>
> Well, I don't fawn over any cultural conservative, or kooks, and I
> despise Pat Buchanan. So you need to come up with another theory...
I can't find any record of you calling yourself a paleolibertarian
either.
ml
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