FILM REVIEW: C.S.A. The Confederate States of America

[whiskeytown]

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as an aside, anybody else think our country would be better off in some respects today if we had sent all of the slaves back to africa when the war ended?

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I think they left enough of their blood in the soil where it's just as much their America as it is ours.

RB

[kipin]

Pryor,

I heard about this film about a month ago, looked it up and was surprised to see it was actually shot sometime in like 2002 and was first debuted in 2004 at Sundance. It is amazing to me that a movie like this is getting pushed through, even if it is kind of late from its initial release.

Nice review, I'm definitely gonna check it out when it comes out on DVD.

[youtalkfunny]

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Lee didn't need the British and French...

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--I'm no war gamer, nor history buff.

But it's tough to agree that any army so out-manned and out-gunned didn't need any help.

Maybe if your cavalry is twice as big, you can send Jeb out for a night ride, AND have enough assets for reconn.

--Awesome reply ("blood in the soil").

--Back to the topic: I never heard of this film before opening this thread, but it sounds brilliant. I wonder if they'll show it down here in Mississippi?

[pryor15]

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so like, are all the slaves black? what about the nba, is it all white dudes? (don't tell me spike lee left out the nba!) are there like black professors and stuff or are they all slaves?

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well, Spike only presented the movie, and didn't have a big hand in it's development. the NBA is absent, but the NFL (or at least the equivalent) is there. Canada becomes a major force in the Olympics, since America only sends white athletes and a lot of blacks initially escape to Canada.

on the west coast, many of the slaves are Asian and a form of segregation exists in latin america when America takes that over

as for actual history, i will defer to whiskeytown.

[MrMon]

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Canada becomes a major force in the Olympics, since America only sends white athletes and a lot of blacks initially escape to Canada.


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Wow. Sounds kinda, I dunno, racist.

[Borodog]

Sounds interesting, but based on a tarrible example of logical counterfactual extrapolation. Slavery was dying because of economic reasons (capital intensive agricultural techniques that necessitated a literate workforce were making labor intensive agriculture, including slavery, uncompetitive; this happened decades earlier in the more industrialized north). Institutionalized labor slavery ended in every other nation on Earth in the 19th century peacefully. Only Lincoln required a war, which wasn't fought over slavery at all, but rather his installation of the heavilly mercantilist "American System", consisting of high protectionist tariffs and corporate welfare to protect and reward Republican Party political cronies, and a centrallized inflationary banking system to pay help pay for it all (in addition to the plundering of the South by the ruinous tariff rates). The only reason that slavery could still exist in the South at all was that the actual cost of owning slaves was externalized by laws like the Fugitive Slave Act (which shifted the cost of returning runaway slaves from their owners to taxpayers), which Lincoln supported.

Lincoln advocated deporting every single black man, woman, and child "back to Africa" or Haiti on numerous occasions, was outspokenly what would today be called a "white supremacist", and did not invoke slavery and the "Emancipation Proclamation" (which, humorously enough, did not free a single slave, as it only applied to territory not under Union control; slaves in Union territory remained in bondage) until 18 months into the war, when he was desparate and the North was losing, as a political ploy to incite slave revolts as well as to keep Britain from intervening on behalf of the South.

A much more reasonable counterfactual extrapolation of what might have happened had Lincoln not invaded the CSA can be found in Thomas DiLorenzo's The Real Lincoln:

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WHAT IF THE SOUTH HAD BEEN ALLOWED TO LEAVE IN PEACE?
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LINCOLN'S ADMONITION that secession would lead to "anarchy" and "destroy" democratic government was pure sophistry. Had the South been permitted to go in peace, as was the wish of the majority of Northern opinion makers before Fort Sumter according to historian Joseph Perkins, democracy would have continued to thrive in the two nations. Moreover, the act of secession would have had exactly the effect the founding fathers expected it to have; it would have tempered the imperialistic proclivities of the central state. The federal government would have been forced to moderate its high-tariff policies and to slow down or abandon its quest for empire. Commercial relationships with the South would have been continued and expanded. Afer a number of years, the same reasons that led the colonists to form a Union in the first place would likely have become more appealing to bothe sections, and the Union would probably have been reunited.
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After that, knowing that secession was a real threat, the federal government would have stuck closer to its constitutional bearings. The mere threat of peaceful secession would have had that effect on it. Its imperialistic tendencies, and the large tax increases necessary to finance such adventures, would have been checked. We may never have had a Spanish-American War. We may also have never had a president like Woodrow Wilson, who was so eager to involve Americans in a foreign war. Economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe argues in a recent book that if AMerica had not intervened in World War I, the European monarchies would have eventually worked out a peace agreement that was not so punishing on Germany, and that may have even precluded the rise of the Nazi Party, which itself was partly a reaction to the Versailles treaty of World War I.

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The Hoppe book he mentions is Democracy: The God That Failed, in which Hoppe explains:

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What would have happened, it is being asked again, if in accordance with his reelection promise, Woodrow Wilson had kept the U.S. out of World War I? By virtue of its counterfactual nature, the answer to a question such as this can never be empirically confirmed or falsified. However, this does not make the question meaningless or the answer arbitrary. To the contrary, based on an understanding of the actual historical events and personalities involved, the question concerning the most likely alternative course of history can be answered in detail and with considerable confidence.[7]
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If the United States had followed a strict non-interventionist foreign policy, it is likely that the intra-European conflict would have ended in late 1916 or early 1917 as the result of several peace initiatives, most notably by the Austrian Emperor Charles I. Moreover, the war would have been concluded with a mutually acceptable and face-saving compromise peace rather than the actual dictate. Consequently, Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia would have remained traditional monarchies instead of being turned into short-lived democratic republics. With a Russian Czar and a German and Austrian Kaiser in place, it would have been almost impossible for the Bolsheviks to seize power in Russia, and in reaction to a growing communist threat in Western Europe, for the Fascists and National Socialists to do the same in Italy and Germany.[8] Millions of victims of communism, national socialism, and World War II would have been saved. The extent of government interference with and control of the private economy in the United States and in Western Europe would never have reached the heights seen today. And rather than Central and Eastern Europe (and consequently half of the globe) falling into communist hands and for more than forty years being plundered, devastated, and forcibly insulated from Western markets, all of Europe (and the entire globe) would have remained integrated economically (as in the nineteenth century) in a world-wide system of division of labor and cooperation. World living standards would have grown immensely higher than they actually have.

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Also, claiming that a secessionst, decentralized CSA based upon the principle of state sovereignty would ally itself with a centralized statist like Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany seems a stretch. As a matter of fact, Adolf Hitler was an admirer of Abraham Lincoln's bloody centralization of power. He repeats Lincoln's handwaving justification for destroying state sovereignty in Mein Kampf:

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[T]he individual states of the American Union . . . could not have possessed any state sovereignty of their own. For it was not these states that formed the Union, on the contrary it was the Union which formed a great part of the so-called states.--Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

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As DiLorenzo notes, this is "Hitler expressing in his own words the theory of the Union that Lincoln invented in his First Inaugural Address . . .":

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The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured . . . by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And, finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was, "to form a more perfect Union."

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As DiLorenzo notes, "Hitler clearly understood that state sovereignty was a powerful bulwark against the potential tyranny of the central government. That's why the Jeffersonians so cherished states' rights and why Hitler--and all of the worst tyrants of the twentieth century, for that matter--so abhorred them. Hitler mocked 'so-called sovereign states' in Germany precisely because they stood in the way of a centralized Reich. He condemned their 'impotence' and 'fragmentation.'"

[youtalkfunny]

Awesome, awesome post. Very thought provoking.

[Grisgra]

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Canada becomes a major force in the Olympics, since America only sends white athletes and a lot of blacks initially escape to Canada.


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Wow. Sounds kinda, I dunno, racist.

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that aint racist dude, thats the truth...do some searches for genetics and race...black people just have bodies that are more genetically/physically whatever, adept at sports/hard labor/physical activities...thats why they made great slaves-thats why the NBA is 95% black now that they're allowed to compete

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People who channel Jimmy the Greek amuse me. Go on, please! Something about the slaves' thick thighs would be nice.