What was I thinking?

Why would a voluntaryist write a blog post (https://steemit.com/history/@joybran/court-historians-fly-into-a-frenzy) that sounds like she is defending General John Kelly, General Robert E. Lee, and, of all things, the Confederacy? All nation states enslave their "citizens" with onerous taxes and debilitating regulations, but the Confederacy was even worse in writing the institution of chattel slavery into its foundational documents.

All military officers, including or especially generals, are people who have abandoned all of their principles and morality in their vow to follow orders without question. Generals, in particular, have dedicated their lives and careers to dealing death and destruction on "the enemy," whoever their civilians overlords have decided that might be. With the vast majority of Americans still worshiping the State and its military "heroes," how could I even risk the appearance of defending such people?

My first thought was that the truth is the truth, no matter who says it or why they say it. Even if Kelly is a mass murderer and an enabler of authoritarian government, and also if he was telling the truth just to argue for compromise on principles that shouldn't be compromised, he was still speaking the truth. There were people of good faith on both sides of the War Between the States, and the causes of the war were much more complicated than just slavery or just states' rights. It is equally foolish to say that the war was only about slavery as to say that slavery had nothing to do with the war.

It is also true that, in those days, people identified with their states rather than with their nation. That is why Robert E. Lee felt duty bound to kill his fellow Americans for Virginia, and why that was considered the "honorable" position by people on both sides of the war, both before and since. It would have been nice if he had realized that the honorable stand was refusing to fight, but it would be impossible to expect that from a man of his time and circumstances.

In all the talk about the political causes, it seems that the economic reasons have been largely ignored. In particular, recent historians ignore one of the fundamental problems of a large national government--passing edicts that impact the entire territory with all of its different local economies. When a Congress dominated by northerners passed laws favoring the North's industrial economy at the expense of the South's agricultural economy, secession seemed like an obvious solution to many southerners, whether they were slaveholders or not. To a voluntaryist like myself, decentralization is one of the most promising trends in current affairs. If the end goal is seven billion sovereign nations in the world, the secessionist movements in the US and around the world are encouraging.

I finally realized that I was thinking about something else when I wrote about Kelly and his critics. He, his critics, and many other people these days act as if history is good for nothing except finding anecdotes to bolster whatever argument they want to make, whether the stories are real or not. There seems to be little effort to understand the thinking of people in other times and relate that thought to what we see around us today. For example, it is fashionable to be outraged that Robert E. Lee justified his slave-owning by saying his slaves were better off than they would have been starving in their home country in Africa. It is more useful to ask how an educated man like him could be so self-deluded as to believe such a thing. Then look around and see how many people have deluded themselves into repeating ridiculous slogans like "we have to fight them over there, so we don't have to fight them over here."

The point is to always search for the truth, in history and the present. If we can understand why people believe obviously false assumptions, we can better communicate our vision of peace and prosperity.

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