[A-List] Why the wars can't be won
Todd Boyle
toddfboyle at gmail.com
Fri Aug 27 13:43:08 MDT 2010
Thanks for your essay at
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=20707
Actually, your title could have been more specific. You didn't
establish why all wars cannot be won. That would be a larger project.
But this essay is absolutely golden. The Civil War as
failure. Getting people to think about that, especially in the South!
You missed an opportunity to point out the collapse of reconstruction
under a hail of bullets, lynchings and near-revolutionary war in the
1880s, as even large garrisons of federal troops failed to protect
blacks' civil rights against the white populations. Quote Ulysses
Grant or speeches in congress where politicians warned against a 2nd
civil war, and gave up on the black voting rights. Hundreds killed
by KKK in genocidal campaigns --this is terrorism. Terrorism is what
you get. And terrorism won.
There's another weakness -- you've built your argument on the
studies that correlate states' social indicators with whatever
Duopoly party won the last election. We need to correlate those
indicators with only the confederate states, in order to begin the
case about the Civil War. And then we *still* need to establish
that these crappy statistics were the result of the civil war, rather
than the reverse, or something else.
There have been some other studies correlating Red/Blue states'
divorce rates, alcoholism, traffic fatalities, gambling, and other
"moral indicators" besides crime rates. I'd recommend those indicators.
And drop the statistic about mobile homes. Mobile homes are
fine--what's that got to with your case? Since I'm 58 and have no
pension or savings, I'll probably spend my retirement years in one,
if I'm lucky.
Todd Boyle public intellectual, town drunk, and misanthrope (425) 827-3107
9745 128th Avenue NE, Kirkland WA 98033-5286
antiwar http://rosehill.net videographer http://vimeo.com/user1891999/videos
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