Two Anniversaries

Anniversaries of two major historical events took place during the past week. The first of these was the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War. This anniversary is naturally of greatest significance to Americans, but considering the influence the United States has had on world events for the past century, there is no question that the Civil War ultimately had an effect that reached far beyond American borders. If the Confederacy had managed to win independence, the world would certainly be a very different place.

When the causes of the war are discussed, many southerners assert that the Confederacy was mainly fighting for states' rights and against tyranny by the federal government, and to preserve the Southern way of life. They also focus on the major disadvantages the South had in manpower and industrial development and the devastation caused in the South by invading Union armies. In other words, in their view, the South was fighting in a just cause against great odds.

Unfortunately, while it is true that the South faced great odds and, after holding out much longer than might have been expected, suffered great hardships in the last years of the war, the argument that the cause was just doesn't hold water. I say this in spite of the fact that a large number of my ancestors were Southerners (certainly more than were Northerners) and several fought for the Confederacy, and in spite of my support for the principle of self-determination. The truth is, the South was fighting to maintain the institution of slavery. All this talk about states' rights and the Southern way of life is just another way of saying the Confederates were fighting to ensure that slavery could continue in their territories. This is obvious if one looks at the history of the years before the war. All of the major political disputes that divided the North and South in the decades before the war had to do with slavery, including the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision and more. The Southern states seceded because they saw that the balance of power in the US was shifting to pro-abolition forces, and the election of Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of the abolitionist Republican party, was the final straw.

As I said, I do in principle support the right of self-determination, including the right of regions to secede from larger nations for reasons such as having a distinct language or culture that is in danger of being swamped by the majority. But if their reason for secession is because they want to maintain or put in place a system that oppresses minority groups, then I cannot support them. If a part of some nation wanted to secede in order to institute or maintain capital punishment for homosexuals, genital mutilation of girls, repression of religious minorities or laws that forbid women from working or going to school, then I would certainly be against it. Suppose, for example, a part of South Africa had attempted to secede in order to maintain apartheid in its territory; that would have been completely different from the much more reasonable aspirations of the Tibetans, the Kurds, the Quebecois, the Chechens, the Acehnese, or the Puerto Ricans. As a look at the history shows that the main issue for the South was maintaining slavery, it is impossible to view their cause as just.

This is not to say that the North was necessarily much better. Many Northerners, including Lincoln himself, held arguably racist views, and the Lincoln administration virtually suspended the Bill of Rights during the war. The destruction caused by the Northern armies as they invaded the South was in many cases completely unjustifiable, and there is no doubt that many Union soldiers were guilty of cruel and brutal behavior, as were some Confederate soldiers, though at the same time there was also chivalrous behavior displayed by people on both sides. But none of that changes the basic point that the South was fighting to maintain a oppressive system, and so it is hard to feel much regret over its defeat.

Last week was also the 50th anniversary of the first human spaceflight, by Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Since then, hundreds of people have flown in space, and a dozen have even walked on the Moon. There has been a continual human presence in space for more than 10 years on the International Space Station. However, while much more has been accomplished in terms of human spaceflight than could have been imagined before Gagarin's flight, expectations raised by the rapid progress in the 1960s have not been met. While humans landed on the Moon less than 10 years after Gagarin orbited the Earth, it has been almost 40 years since the last lunar landing, and Mars remains a distant goal. The development in the past few years of numerous promising private spaceflight programs is encouraging, but I also hope in the next 50 years humans will travel much further than they have done yet, going to Mars and back to the Moon and taking steps to establish a permanent human presence in both of those places. I hope we will also see landings on near-Earth asteroids, for research and possible resource extraction (though some regulations should also be put in place, to prevent the sort of unrestrained exploitation that has caused so many problems on Earth). As I have argued before, spending what amounts to a small fraction of our resources on space exploration will be, in the long term, of great value to humanity as a species. Human spaceflight has been worth every penny that has been spent on it, and I only hope that there are enough far-sighted people to ensure that it continues to achieve new things in the decades to come.