I liked PCR's new piece on American Civil War, despite the fact that I disagree that it was NOT a Civil War--it was by all measures of nationality defined primarily for centuries as ethnicity-culture. Yet, it still caught my attention in a sense that United States was a very different country then and people did view themselves differently governance-wise, with states being a much larger players then than they are today.
I know this feeling when "new" history is written by amateurs with ideological agenda, not desire to seek the truth. In this piece Paul Craig Roberts nails it and exposes utter lies by the author. It is about identity politics and about Orwellian reality and it has nothing to do with real history. United States is becoming more and more the nation with unpredictable past. Soviet Union and Russia paid dearly for allowing demagogues and pseudo-historians, many of them being direct operations of influence assets, to "write" Russia's history of the 20th century. Only now Russia finally begins to deal with this baggage of ideological anti-Russian BS perpetuated under the guise of the "fight against communism". The United States seems to be hell bent on repeating this story in regards to own Civil War history, which is a complex history with very many shades of grey in it.
As late Alexander Zinoviev pointed out, after seeing Russia's catastrophe in 1990s, "we aimed at communism but hit Russia." Same can be applied today to all those so called lefty "intellectuals"--they aim at, allegedly, racism, they will hit America. In fact, the destruction only accelerates--those people have no clue what they are in for. As per real history and what drives it--indeed, who needs facts when they contradict the narrative. It is important to address them since the United States, for all of her major faults and crimes in 20th and 21st centuries, is not the country which can be simply dissolved. Using false narratives to widen already huge split in the society is not the way to address injustices and grievances, many of them contrived, of the past. I will conclude with PCR's conclusion:
It would have been better for the South to say that secession was based on the North’s exploitation of the South. If Karl Marx had published Vol. 1 of Capital in 1857 instead of 1867, the South would have had a popular basis for its exploitation case. But the southern states could not see into the future. The southern politicians did not know that whites would become self-hating people who would empower black Americans and illegal immigrants as victims of white people and misuse southern secession arguments as proof of white racism. The British today have made the identical mistake as the South made by trying to buy their way out of the European Union instead of just leaving on the grounds that membership is a violation of British sovereignty and law accountable to British citizens. Government works to expand centralized control. Lincoln succeeded in shattering the 10th Amendment’s limit on central power. The real achievement of the War of Northern Aggression was to centralize power over the American people. All of them.
