When the war with Iran began, the University of Western California voting faculty failed to gain a quorum to vote on a resolution opposing war. Only a quarter of the two thousand eligible voters showed up for the assembly. Thousands of others teach at UWC, but they can’t vote, which is another issue. Our concern here is helping the progressive universities like the University of Western California develop new strategies for getting faculty (those allowed to vote) to pass resolutions in favor of avoiding conflict at any price. They’ve got to come up with stronger arguments than one offered by a UWC faculty person who wrote in a campus newspaper op-ed piece that there are worse theocracies in the world (Alabama) than Iran.

We need only look to the past, which means going beyond the Vietnam War. Following the attack on Fort Sumter, Lincoln was ready to rush into war against the Confederate States of America, but Lincoln hesitated after massive anti-war demonstrations were held in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere in the world. The Republican president instead went to the United Nations and asked for a resolution from the Security Council that demanded the Confederacy disarm.

France, once the ally of the United States, threatened to veto, arguing that slavery still existed in many places in the world, and just because the South had slaves was no excuse to go to war. France also asserted that the Confederacy had a sovereign right, as an independent nation, to arm itself and do as it pleased with its own population, free and otherwise. At the same time, rumors surfaced in the press that the North cared only for preserving the Union to assure a steady supply of cheap cotton.

Representing the Union at the Security Council meeting, Frederick Douglass presented evidence that the South was forming an army with plans to invade the North and occupy Washington, D.C. He added that the Union had compromised for decades with the South in an attempt to avoid conflict, but that the South had continued to ask for more and more concessions that guaranteed the continued violation of human rights to millions of African Americans.

The Confederacy, not having been officially admitted to the UN, sent an envoy, who was invited to speak before the Security Council by France. The envoy accused the United States of provoking war with the Confederacy to impose its imperialist will on the South, to usurp states’ rights, and to deny the right of the Confederacy to exist as a free (for some) and independent nation. The envoy sharply rebuked the United States for using slavery as an excuse to steal Southern cotton and sell it in Europe to enrich Wall Street speculators.

The war between the states never occurred, of course, as all children learn from middle school history books. The Confederate States of America remains a sovereign nation to this day, albeit with one of the world’s most heavily armed borders because, according to the South, the United States remains perpetually poised for invasion. The South also accuses the United States of continually sending special forces across the border to free slaves, who, if they wanted, would certainly have opted for democracy by the 21rst Century.

The university progressives can learn from that lesson in the past. They need to call for the recognition of the right of any sovereign nation to enslave its population, they need to call on free nations to stay out of the internal affairs of slave states, and they need to learn that the Vietnam War is not the only historical analogy available for political argument.

–the editors