Rynar wrote:
Diamondeye wrote:
Rynar wrote:
The only absurdity here is your conflating moral correctness with winning wars.
I'm not.
Where I'm getting hazy is here, where you said this:
Quote:
My perspective is, if what he did was so bad, the south should have done a better job of not getting its *** kicked.
And as to the rest of it, what my morality is, asstastic or otherwise, has nothing to do with your above statement.
Let me make this perfectly clear:
If the South, in deciding to make itself an independant nation, believed that there would be a war with the North (which it reasonably should have) then it had precisely one moral obligation: win the war. The only moral imperative a government has is to protect the interests of its citizens, which necessarily and before all other means of doing so, includes defending against outside attack and maintaining territorial integrity. That's the reason governments exist.
By failing to do so, the Confederacy failed in its moral imperative. The North, from its perspective that the South was an area in rebellion, succeeded in its moral imperative of defending its interests by maintaining its territorial integrity.
That's the way it works with all international conflicts. The rightness or wrongness of a nation's actions are determiend by whether they are in the interests of its citizens. This is why most conquests fail the test; once you destroy another nation and make it yours, the people there are now
your citizens; you have to have a method for making them coequal with the ones you already had or you're not representing the interest of your citizens, only some of them.
The reason for what I said is simple: Since the South lost, it doesn't matter what it
thought was moral or not. It's not running anything now. I don't have any problem with anything the North did. They won, and now Southern citizens (and even more importantly the descendants of slaves) are coequal citizens. From my personal perspective everything's fine, and while some of you may disagree I don't see anyone pressing the 'reset history' button any time soon.