Bill Maher interviews presidential candidate Ron Paul

Run time: 03:56 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo6KIusCBoU   Posted on YouTube: April 17, 2015 By YouTube Member: YouTube Help Views on YouTube: 11861795   Posted on DU: April 02, 2007 By DU Member: CGowen Views on DU: 961

 

Was Bill Maher just pretending to be stupid by not understanding Paul's explanation of why and how the US could have avoided the American Civil War?
I learned in college American History that slavery was not the driving factor behind the Civil War.

What an embarrassing fact: We are the only nation that ended slavery thru a war.

and we also got the whole picture. We were taught about the North wanted to monopolize the indus ties in the South. And of course the main one, cotton, had to have the slaves to do most of the work. That is one of the reason the south resisted releasing the slaves they needed the labor. But it was wrong to have people as slaves.

My relatives were from Virginia. They did not have slaves, but yet they fought on the side of the South. They did not want the industrialized North telling them what to do. The men would fight til it was time to harvest the crops then they would leave. Harvest the crops and return to the fight.

Because slavery was so oppressive and so wrong President Lincoln signed the proclamation to free them. This then involved into the reason for fighting the war.

the central reason for the war was to prevent a second country from forming, i.e., the "preservation of the union."

And as a black man I'm awfully sick of hearing people say otherwise. Slavery was a driving force behind the civil war. However it wasn't the moral outrage about it that put slavery at the forefront, but the same thing that drives the war we're fighting in Iraq... Money.

Bottom line is this. The south was an agrarian based economy with cash crops, the biggest of which was cotton. The rich, white aristocracy duped the vastly un/undereducated populous in the south that "them damn northerners wanna tell you what to do" and "they say these niggers are your equal".

What they really meant to say is "Hey, we're making boatloads of money off our crops and part of the way we're doing it is using the cheapest labor of all, slave labor. Not only that we think we can make even more money by expanding our businesses into the new territories, but those damn northerns are so high and mighty that they won't allow us to expand slavery into the new territories. You know what? We're so dedicated to making sure that we can continue to stuff our pockets that I'd rather split the country in half than give up our profit by having the give up the human beings we consider no more than live stock. That being said I think I'll just manipulate you morons into fighting for my right to stay rich. Sound good?"

While the morality of slavery didn't cause the war they economics of it did and frankly I find it incredibly disrespectful that this country still seeks to dismiss the worth of black men and women in this country by saying that our freedom had no worth, be that moral or economic, in the reasoning for fighting this war.

So refresh my memory... Why did the south seek to form it's own country again?

If you don't know the answer read my other reply.

making is that preservation of the union was the main motivator for the Union.

The motivation of the Union is only HALF the damn story. The North may not have fought the war to free us, but the South fought one to keep us so stop insulting/discounting African-Americans in this country by spouting that bullshit about our freedom having nothing to do with it.

Damn it.

First Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln

I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/presiden/inaug/lincoln1.htm

first it was airing at some fucked up time, so I missed it, and I wans't sure whether it was a repeat, but now I guess it wasn't and it isn't available from comcast.

Tonight at 11PM on HBO