the civil war on tv

You are always saying that when you hear a story there is probably some truth in it, and I want to say not necessarily.  Some stories have no truth at all in them.  I think that the story about the commies and the Jews being responsible for Germany losing WW 1 is one of them.  People who lose wars are always looking around to blame somebody for it.  I believe my ilk was blamed for losing the war in Vietnam, even though your ilk was ill at ease defining what victory would have been.  I believe anything less than killing the last commie would not have been a victory for the Birchers.

Anyway Germany was fighting England, France, and then we came marching over there, and who were Germany's allies, Turkey, and Italy, for part of the war.  Of course they lost.  And the reason Adolf blamed the Jews and the commies is because he didn't like them anyway.  You always blame people you don't like for anything bad that happens to you.

In all the troubles in Iraq there has been a lot of self segregating, Sunnis being driven out of
Shite areas and vice versa and similarly with the Kurds.  The big problem is who gets this oil, and right now the Kurds in the north have it and so do the Shites in the south, but those poor damned Sunnis don't have any.  You would have to make some deal where they would all split the oil revenue, and that would not be easy. 

I just saw something on tv about the civil war last night.  It wasn't the history channel, they have these two other channels, History 2, and American Heroes, all owned by the same people and when they aren't doing aliens or ice road truckers they sometimes show some actual history.  It's generally quite dumbed down and pretty jingoist.  They had something else on last night about Texas and I was interested in that, but I knew it would all be about those noble Texans defeating their enemies.  The civil war I knew they couldn't choose sides because some of their viewers lived in the south. 

The interesting thing was they took a tech slant on it, railroads, telegraphs, ironclads, cannons, and guns.  Of course the north had the edge on all that because we had the manufacturing.  Well we had the edge period, we had more people and more treasure.  Those southerners were all romantic like teenagers, and the north was pragmatic like adults and we mowed them down, though it took us awhile.  I have always thought I should be a civil war buff, read about all those battles, visit those battlefields, sounds like fun.  Well it is also fun to drink beer and watch it on tv, and a whole lot easier.

They brought up the same thing you said about rifles and muskets,  and about how they taught them at West Point, the Napoleonic theory where you mass your forces for attack to increase your fire power, but that didn't work with the newer faster loading rifles, kind of like the machine gun did in WW 1.  They had some kind of repeating rifle where the bullets were lined up in the stock, and I don't remember that they mentioned the gattling gun which I thought was invented during the civil war.  I had always thought (mistakenly) that the difference between the musket and the rifle was in the way they were loaded.  When did they start doing that breech, is that what it's called, loading?  You know in the movies they never show guys loading their guns by dropping the bullet down the barrel, it kind of takes away from the drama.

The show treaded lightly on slavery, not wanting to offend southern viewers I am sure.  But aside from slavery those rebs were also inspired by love of their country, though in their minds their country was their state, and probably most of them were fighting for love of country.  And on the north those guys were fighting for love of country too.  It all seems like such a waste, they both believe in the same thing and there they are killing each other.  Shouldn't they be submitting the question of whether or not to go to war before they picked up that gun?  Is their a morality in war?  If we examined every war, and weighed all the facts, could we always decide which side was more just than the other?