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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30108 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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I'm a patriotic American, but I think the Revolutionary War was a mistake and history would have been a lot better if the US had stayed British

Why? Without the American Revolution, we'd not have gotten first amendment speech protections (even if Mills had still existed on this timeline), and without those, it would have taken a lot longer to dispel the popular falsehoods of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The UK and Canada actually do have freedom of speech. It's just not interpreted as liberally as it has been by American judges in the latter half of the 20th century.

"Freedom of speech, unless your ideas suck" allows totalitarianism as long as the totalitarians get to draw up the list of which ideas suck. Remember that censorship only of ideas you don't like feels a lot like freedom of speech.

You're missing the point. The difference in freedom of speech between the US and Canada and the UK is not because of the first amendment. Canada and the UK also have laws protecting freedom of speech in basically the same language, but they've been interpreted differently. The first amendment also used to be interpreted very loosely, resulting in the US having many laws restricting speech in the past that would not be allowed today.

  1. The UK doesn't have constitutional freedom of speech; it has no constitution. Yes, there are laws saying free speech is a right, but those laws are automatically overridden by any subsequent laws that breach freedom of speech under the doctrine that Parliament can't bind itself. In this case (though not the Canadian or EU case), it's not a matter of interpretation.

  2. Yes, there has been a miscommunication here. You said "the UK and Canada actually do have freedom of speech", which I interpreted as meaning "the state of speech in the UK and Canada is what I, Glassnoser, would describe as 'free'". Lots of people, including the governments of Canada/the EU/the UK, agree with that latter sentence, because they are naïve and/or in denial regarding the result of "freedom of speech, unless your ideas suck". Hence, I assumed you were one of these people and attempted to correct your understanding. It would now appear that what you meant was "the UK and Canada actually do have a constitution requiring them to respect free speech, but they flagrantly ignore it, pretending that free speech is some pitiful, mutilated version of itself that doesn't accomplish its purpose". This is still untrue with regard to the UK (see #1), but I agree with it in regard to Canada. I apologise for misunderstanding your sentence, but I hope you'll agree that your actual meaning was not exactly clear.

The UK has an unwritten constitution. But that's irrelevant. I didn't say it had a constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech. It has freedom of speech. They could repeal that law, but they haven't. They've simply interpreted it to not be as restrictive as the first amendment. The US Supreme Court has done the same in the past.

The British abolished slavery without a Civil War! If the US had been militarily part of the UK you don't get WW I and II (probably) and as a bonus no communism.

I don't see how you figure this? The Kaiser was convinced Britain would stay neutral in WW1. What does it change if he expects Britain + America to stay neutral?

I'm actually listening to a WW I podcast and Germany was worried about Britain entering WW I. If it had been Britain + America, Britain would have been able to dictate terms. The German military was not stupid.

There was uncertainty (both in Germany and in Britain) over what Britain would do - the Kaiser famously said "I have the word of a king, and that is good enough for me", while others were less optimistic.

Britain could not dictate terms because Britain itself was not clear on what its terms were. Ultimately pro-war voices were able to use the invasion of Belgium, an entirely uninvolved party that just happened to be in the way, to galvanise Britain into declaring against Germany. But it was far from clear before the fact that this was how things would play out.

I also am sceptical that Britain could have deterred Germany anyway - I think the Germans considered themselves to be in a "fight or die" situation, and they would have fought regardless of the odds against them. The party that I think was the critical decision maker is Russia, in the sense that they chose to fight and could realistically have chosen otherwise, and that would have prevented the war from becoming a much bigger deal than Austria v Serbia. But a stronger Britain doesn't prevent Russia from getting involved.

There was a miscommunication that for a short time caused the Kaiser to think that England would not fight against Germany and might even stop France from fighting, but this was quickly cleared up, and was cleared up before the start of war. If Britain was a lot stronger, the British foreign minister would have had a lot more influence and could have either told Austria-H don't invade Serbia, or Russia to stay out of it. Germany would have figured that with a strong Britain against them, they would be unlikely to get Turkey or Bulgaria to join them and they probably get Romania and Italy to side against them.

Of course WW1 and 2 would start with the same arrangement of players if Britain was more powerful, but that doesn't there wouldn't be massive wars. Maybe the war would have been British vs the whole Europe.

Manifest Destiny!

One of the factors leading to the American Revolution was that the British leadership wasn't really interested in Westward expansion: it kept causing troubles with the natives and their allies requiring expensive interventions (see the French and Indian War) and the American colonies were, economically, afterthoughts compared to the sugar trade in the Caribbean. Not to mention the entire Louisiana Purchase thing.

I'm not sure the modern borders could have happened at all, much less been a likely outcome under Crown leadership.

Maybe SoCal + a bunch of desert would belong to Spain -- maybe not though; the British Empire did after all span to the Pacific eventually, and I think the same forces that led the US to seek lebensraum would have driven the colonies inexorably South and West. The exact timing of things would be pretty important I guess, and the redcoats probably would have massacred fewer Indians.

It would have been the Louisiana conquest if the US had been part of the UK.

Slaveowners were a tiny portion of the British population. They were powerful disproportionately to their numbers, but they would never have been able to resist abolition by force like the American South could.

If the Revolution has failed/never happened, the British slave owning population would have been much larger and more widespread -- remember, most Northern states abolished in response to the ideology of the Revolution.

But the South's strategy for winning the Civil War relied on the UK Navy not allowing the South to be blockaded. The UK + North American North would have easily beaten the South and so could have forced the South to end slavery without a Civil War.

Or alternatively everyone in North America might have grown to see the "peculiar institution" as a defining trait that set them off from the Brits and when the British moved to crackdown on slavery in the 1800s the combined North American colonies might have steamrolled them with superior Yankee industry and Southern military leadership, resulting in a hundred more years of chattel slavery across the entire Anglosphere!

I find your hypothetical more reasonable than mine. But something one doesn't understand until one reads letters from the time period is how much Northern will to fight the South was motivated by (checks notes) antipathy towards Europe, not slavery per se. (On average I'd say Northerners didn't like slavery but they didn't like black people either.) The Northerners saw the Southerners as oligarchs after the European feudal model, and that was a large part of what they had a problem with. Splitting the Union was unacceptable to them because it meant that the grand Republican experiment had "failed" (read: made them look bad to the Europeans.) Or at least that's what I recall being struck by when I did some primary source readings. Perhaps my memory and/or coursework was selective.

That's not to say that there weren't a very vocal and dedicated group that saw slavery itself as unacceptable and campaigned specifically to get rid of it, even at the cost of war. But (and this is my point) culture works in funny ways and in an alternative history where the Revolution never happened over self-government+taxes it might have happened later over "self-government+slavery." Never underestimate how crotchety people will get over being told what to do.

Just as a technical note, the South wanted the UK to intervene badly, but I don't think that was their best or only chance of winning, and they actively pursued strategies to unilaterally break the blockade themselves. Ultimately I think they lost because they got bled white, not because they were blockaded. Southern casualties were extraordinarily high as a percentage of the population compared to any other American war, and although they had trouble with heavy industry (you know, cannons) they were able to produce basic necessities like gunpowder to the end. In fact, IIRC, their soldiers were better off for powder than they were for food.

You could be right about the South. My only somewhat informed view is that the Civil War was a war of choice for the South, and not going to war would not have caused them to have to give up slavery. Unless they were crazy (which they might have been) the war only made sense if they thought they could win easily and that needed the UK to not let the North blockade the South.

I agree that it was a war of choice, but I think they had ~somewhat deluded themselves into thinking that Lincoln's election sealed the deal against them. I think this was an exaggeration in the short term, but probably they were correct in the long term: the hostility to slavery was real, even if many people were apathetic about it, and the power of slaveholding states was being curtailed, and geopolitical factors were tilting against the South electorally. Basically, they were inching closer to being permanently locked out of political power as a region, I think.

The South thought they would win because they thought they had superior martial prowess, and because they were fighting a defensive war and believed their situation was analogous to that of the colonies during the American Revolution. They were at least partially correct (they were better at fighting) but the North had more manpower and was able to import vast amounts of additional manpower over the course of the war as well. But they also had convinced themselves, I think, that the struggle was existential. They were willing to fight to preserve their way of life, which I suppose in some ways was easier than changing their way of life, even if the latter was more moral and would have been more beneficial in the long run than losing a war.

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