Civil War

I don’t know if I’ve discussed this before or not … If I have, well figure out which one’s written better and ignore the other one, if I haven’t then we’re good.

As some of you know I’ve recently been playing EVE Online, a sci-fi MMO in which the human race, after being cut off from earth and one another by a dark age, have re-developed space flight and made contact with one another. I mention this, not because I plan on writing a full long piece about EVE and the depth of the game, size of the universe, or differences or similarities of the various ‘races’ in the game to modern earth philosophies or governments, but rather because it got me thinking about the American Civil War.

No … I haven’t gone off the deep-end, and in all honesty it was a conversation in the game that got me started thinking, but elements of the backstory of two of the ‘races’ in the game that kept me going. People often look for those ‘turning points’ in history … those points where the directions of things change. And it is by studying those points that we can get an understanding of where we are and where we’re potentially headed.

So … what does this have to do with the civil war … or a sci-fi computer game for that matter?

In short, nothing and everything.

The civil war (yes, I know it’s incorrectly titled, but I’m going to be typing it a lot and ‘civil war’ is shorter and easier than ‘the war between the states’ … and at this point I think that certain battles are already lost and the term civil war is one of them ….) was one such turning point for the United States. So the question is, was it a turn for the better or for the worse?

Before I answer I want you to read the WHOLE answer before flipping your lid and calling me a bunch of nasty names.

As you can probably guess by the preceding sentence, my answer is that, in many ways, it was a turn for the worse in this country. Those of you yelling and screaming and calling me names can now leave the page and I’ll ask you not to return until you can learn to follow directions.

Why the worse? Well to understand that we need to examine a few things … the first of which is why the civil war was fought. No, it wasn’t slavery, it really wasn’t even about ‘preserving a way of life’ which you’ll also hear (since this usually refers to slavery) … that was an issue focused on and used to vilify the south, not the reason for the war.

The civil war was fought over the issue of State Rights …. That is the right of the state to govern itself and its citizens as opposed to being governed by the federal government. The original concept of this country was government on a local level where the further removed from the people the government was, the less power it held directly over those people. Cities towns and villages governed themselves; if a dispute came up between people from different cities then it went to the county or state level, if an issue came up between states then it went to a federal level.

The federal government, however, was starting to encroach on that system on several issues, of which slavery was one, seeking to pass laws that had a greater effect on individuals within the States than was technically within the granted powers of the federal government; with the northern states, which held a population majority, having the balance of power and, thus, effecting the rights of the southern states who didn’t have the political power to oppose them.

So a contingent of southern states withdrew from the union, at first it was a couple of states, and then as the debate increased more withdrew as the federal government said ‘you don’t have the RIGHT to leave, you must abide by our rules.’

Our forefathers must have spun in their graves … had people already forgotten? Did they no longer remember that the war for independence had been fought for the very right for people to govern themselves?

The war itself was, realistically, inevitable … The US Federal government was not going to remove it’s troops from the Confederate States, the Confederate States weren’t going to just roll back over and return to a government that was essentially telling them ‘you’ll do it our way and like it’. In that powder keg of a situation it was only a matter of time before someone blew the top off ….

States rights, however, died before the first shot was ever fired … sure they’ve sputtered up here and there, but ultimately it had already been decided … the states have no rights and, in turn, neither do the citizens of those states. Because, you see, the federal government has set the precedent … you don’t have the right to leave the union unless they let you.

Would things have been different had the war ended differently? Certainly different … better or worse no one can really say. So why did I say better earlier? Look again … I said that the war was a turning point for the worse, not that we would be better off had the outcome been different. The turning point was not the war, but rather the decision to place the power of the federal government above the rights of the States, and to enforce that power through force against an unwilling citizenry.

Since then the federal government has grown ever more powerful taking on more and more of the duties of the state and local governments … directly affecting the lives and liberties of people of whom they have no knowledge nor direct answerability. [Yes, your Senators and Representative are marginally answerable to you, but that’s 2 (of 100) Senators and 1 Representative (of about 430) …. Heck even the voting power of a single State realistically holds minimal pull within the view of the Federal machine.]

This has become considerably longer than I had intended, so I will tie this back into EVE in order to complete the train of thought and bring the discussion full circle. We had been discussing the civil war in Corporate chat one day when it struck me how similar the beginning of the civil war was to the break away of the Caldari State from the Gallante Federation … The Caldari, unhappy with the Federation rule sought the right to govern themselves and when confronted by the Federation declared their independence. A long and bloody war followed with the Federation only withdrawing because of an encounter with another race that threatened to divide their forces. Now the Caldari live, ruled by their mega-corporations with each of the controlling corporations (states) independent of the others but with an equal say in the governing of the whole.

Could it be that the programmers of CCP in Iceland have a better understanding of the American War Between the States than most Americans?