Other Wars

Reader comment on item: War as Social Work?

Submitted by Jeff Foster (United States), May 6, 2003 at 12:06

You only mentioned two wars in which the winning US liberated the citizens of the losing side. There was also the US Civil War, which freed poor white farmers from the unfair competition of the plantation system, killed off a great deal of the aristocratic class, and brought blacks out of bondage and into government. The US remained in the area for only a few years, though, and didn't complete the job of de-Dixification, so much of the good was undone by the 1880s. There's a lesson there.

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