Fighting for the Cause...

In June of 1863 the battle of Gettysburg was to decide the fate of the US Civil War. Michael Shaara's book "The Killer Angels" is perhaps the best ever written about this historic battle. An excerpt with Colonel Chamberlain of the Union Army is bound to be copied here:

He had grown up believing in America and the individual and it was a stronger faith than his faith in God. This was the land where no man had to bow. In this place at last a man could stand up free of the past, free of tradition and blood ties and the curse of royalty and become what he wished to become. This was the first place on earth where the man mattered more than the state. True freedom had begun here and it would spread eventually all over the earth... The fact of slavery upon this incredibly beautiful new clean earth was appalling, but more even than that was the horror of old Europe, the curse of nobility, which the South was transplanting to new soil. They were forming a new aristocracy, a new breed of glittering men, and Chamberlain had come to crush it. But he was fighting for the dignity of man and in that way he was fighting for himslf. If men were equal in America, all these former Poles and English and Czechs and blacks, then they were equal everywhere, and there was really no such thing as foreigner... the American fights for mankind, for freedom; for the people, not the land.
Yet the words had been used too often and the fragments that came to Chamberlain now were weak. A man who has been shot at is a new realist, and what do you say to a realist when the war is a war of ideals?

War is a war, because whether it is for a good cause or not, men are murdered in it. War is a mass murder which culminates in the humanity soaked in the bloodbath of its own creation... War can only be justified when it is for critical self-defense, when one's country is in grave and immediate danger... Even then self-defense must be proportionate to the attack...

The US Civil War, an extraordinary war, was fought for a good cause, a noble cause... But still it was a war between brothers and sisters, many of whom did not want to fight or die... It is hard to say that it was fought in vain, because when people die on the battlefield believing in the ideals of that war, they must be honored by recognition that they did not die in vain... We are indebted to them for their sacrifice, their courage and their faith in the cause...

But war is a war... Slavery in the US could have its natural demise without bloodshed. A free society could not endure bondage and servitude for long. Many in the South realized that even then and many generals fighting in the Confederacy did not own slaves, including Robert E. Lee.

Moreover, the slaves were freed only nominally, because servitude was replaced with complete poverty and discrimination... Even the black soldiers fighting on the side of the Union were being discriminated and were sent to accomplish impossible missions (see the movie Glory). So, discimination and segregation culminating in the shameful doctrine enunciated in Plessy v. Ferguson-- 'separate but equal'-- was to replace the slavery.

With or without the US Civil War, it took a hundred years to really end the 'slavery' of the African-Americans... It was not until the Civil Rights Movement and the Warren Court that freedom became real...

Revolutions and wars fought for sacred ideals demean those ideals once blood of a human being is shed... These are conflagrations that destroy societies, homes and whole civilizations... Their powerful wind disperses seeds of destruction-- falling on earth and burning without giving fruits, and take a long time to calm down and settle... People, gone with the wind-- they are...