Suresh Ramasubramanian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Perry E. Metzger [19/08/08 11:06 -0400]:
>>1) The South was wrong for contending it had the right to enslave
>> people.
>>2) The North was wrong for contending it had the right to impose
>> itself on the South.
>>
>>I believe the South did indeed have the right to leave -- I just don't
>>think it had the right to maintain the system of slavery.
>
> You cant have your cake and eat it too.
That depends on how large the cake supply is, I suppose. :)
> Sure the civil war was about secession rights far more than "free
> the slaves".
>
> Texas wasnt too much on slave owning, cattle rather than cotton so
> far fewer employees needed, unlike the deep south with labor
> intensive work like, say, picking cotton. They still joined the
> confederacy ..
>
> But .. something had to be done.
Perhaps, but the question is always "what".
The civil war itself killed something like 600,000 soldiers, and who
knows how many civilians. On the other hand, even the most
intransigent slave holding societies in the world like Brazil broke
down and eliminated slavery within decades of the end of the US civil
war, and it is far from clear that the US South could have sustained
slavery for very much longer, either.
Would an extra couple of decades of slavery, and the retention of the
principle of self determination, have been a good trade for something
close to a million deaths? It is hard to say. If I were a slave, I
would clearly have said no. If I were a conscript who died miserably
at Gettysburg, I would clearly have said yes.
The question is not a new one, and there are far more positions than
there are good answers. Lysander Spooner, who was a virulent
abolitionist, favored the use of violence to end slavery, but not to
prevent secession.
> There wasn't any UN around either to pass sanctions against the
> Confederate States of America.
Clearly, if the North had simply allowed the South to leave, things
like the Fugitive Slave Act would have ceased to be -- slaves escaping
from the South would no longer have had to fear being returned at
all. The North could have taken other moral stands against the South,
and quite clearly the South needed trade with the North more than vice
versa.
> I think it was churchill who said "you can either jaw-jaw or war-war"
More easily said for a political leader than for a conscript with a
gun in his hand and a mandate to die over a cause he cares little
about. :)
> Giving up Kashmir would be dumb.
Well, lets consider the positives:
1) Elimination of a major, perhaps the major, cause of conflict
between India and a neighboring state.
a) Lowered military spending.
b) (probably) lowered terrorism.
c) Lowered risk of conscripts and civilians dying.
d) Lowered risk of nuclear warfare.
e) The possibility of opening up valuable trade, and significant
resultant economic benefits.
2) Affirmation of the right to self determination (at least if a
plebiscite is held to determine the fate of the region), along with
the ability for India to push for that right in other places
without seeming hypocritical.
3) Less energy spent debating a question that has raged on for
decades. The benefits to the Silk list alone would be significant!
The major negative, as I see it, is reduced machismo. There would be a
perception that whomever negotiated the deal had "given in", was
"wimpy", "rewarded terrorism", etc. All these seem like fairly silly
reasons to be worried, so far as I can tell.
As for the Kashmiris themselves, I think they would be foolish to want
to go, but then again I'm the sort who amuses himself by imagining all
sorts of alternate universes. Consider, for example, an alternate
universe in which India integrated with Great Britain in 1950, 96% of
the members of parliament at Westminster were representatives of
districts in the former "colony" (considering relative populations of
60M vs the combined population of India and Pakistan), the PM at
Downing Street was not a native of those peculiar islands off the
European coast, and the Anglo-Saxon population of the "Empire" was
nearly completely disenfranchised. :)
Perry
--
Perry E. Metzger [EMAIL PROTECTED]
