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["Marie McHarry" <mmcharry AT gmail.com>]

 On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 8:43 PM,  <Clansgian AT wmconnect.com> wrote:
>
> > And there we go again. Because you do not understand it, and because we
> > disagree with the revisionist presentation of the story, we Southerners 
> > are
> > carrying negative baggage.

One of the reasons that the War Between the States still leads to
exchanges like this thread is that it was fought on Southern soil.
Hundreds of thousands of Northerners died but their farmsteads weren't
burned out, their women and children killed or left to die without
food or shelter, and their cities burned to the ground. People now
living in the South still have living family memories of that horror.

People in the North may know -- but probably have no clue -- that an
ancestor fought in the war. If he died, he's even more likely to be
forgotten. For them, the war is a long time ago and they wonder why
anyone would still care.

That's one of the lessons of war -- and a good reason that the
ancients often razed the cities of their enemies, killed all the men,
and either killed the women and children or sold them into slavery in
distant foreign lands (no place close where they could get together
and live to fight another day). And another thing, industrial powers
fight wars of attrition (kill everyone and destroy everything until
the other side totally gives up); the only effective defense from the
less industrial country that's being invaded is, ta da,
counterinsurgency. We should probably bear this in mind when we start
wars that will inevitably have a lot of pulverized real estate and
hundreds of thousands of what is now called collateral damage.

Marie

PS: Even here in Illinois, only a few miles from where Lincoln spent
most of his adult life, I learned in school that the War Between the
States (that's what we called it in school) was an economic war, not
one that was fought to end slavery. Amazing the things one can learn
in school.