Totally fair, I didn't notice, my bad.
And back to yelling at you.
Paul's ideas on how to end slavery and avoid the civil war sound awfully good when it's just short one minute long snippets. 'Let's pay off all the slave owners and buy their slaves! That way we'll be able to avoid a costly civil war" sounds kind of like the hippie-dippy solutions to our problems we should practice a lot more instead of killing people.
Problem is, Ron Paul neglects to mention HOW important slavery was to the South. Namely that economic powers in the southern United States were not interested in ending the institution of industrialized slavery. Their entire economy, culture and lifestyle was based on slavery. Many may have sold their slaves, but many more would not, or would simply relocate and purchase more of them.
Shit, at the time the south were seeking to expand the number of slave holding states entering the union. Territory taken after the Mexican-American war was targeted by them for this very reason. The main reason the northern dominated Congress refused to expropriate more than the 55% of Mexico than The United States did, was simply to prevent the south from expanding slavery into the deeper reaches of Mexico past Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.
But you see, Ron Paul ignores most of that or tries to shift things around a bit. Each interview has him mention how the war "must have been faught for other reasons" which is practically a codified dog-whistle for neo-confederate "lost cause" historical revisionists. Groups of people who for years have been trying* to change the way we look at history and show the South as a group of states with a proud aristocratic tradition, and a willingness to defend their "rights" and homeland with a heroic yet doomed attempt at war. And a good part of that history is attempting to downplay slavery's importance, ignore or distort black voices from that time, and create a narrative of the Southerners themselves as those oppressed.
But like I said, I put up with this historical revisionism constantly, and have spent enough time listening to that bullshit that I know Ron Paul is talking shifty when he opens his mouth.
*One could argue that they have changed it.
