and it failed, the Union was preserved and slavery was abolished. We are still fighting the racist mindset of white superiority, but that is also dying out.

I did not call slavery a “movement”. I was referring to the secessionist movement which existed for years before the Civil War.Your reading comprehension skills are exceedingly poor.

Slavery was the South’s economic system. Secessionism was the movement. People who can read understand that.

“Leaving aside slavery”? The fact that you can even say that makes you unworthy to be taken seriously. Slavery wasn’t a “movement” it was an evil institution which the majority of the country practiced.

Leaving aside the issue slavery for argument’s sake the notion that a section of a nation has the legal or natural right to secede is a serious point worth discussion. The US Constitution did not strictly forbid secession. One can maker the argument that the South had every right to secede. The modern concept(purposed by the southerner Woodrow Wilson) of self-determination that is enshrined in the UN’s charter is a solid basis for this.

No other dissenting movement did as much to fight for the success of it’s movement as the Confederacy. No other movement suffered as much either. 330,000 dead and tens of thousands of men terribly wound and their culture thoroughly destroyed.

As moral beings we say this is a good thing because it ended slavery. But we learned folks know that the war was not fought to end slavery. It was fought to preserve the union. At least that is what Northerners were told.

Dissent comes in many forms.George Wallace was every bit the dissenter that Angela Davis was, except his goal was very different.Just because a cause is not perceived as being moral or just that does not mean it isn’t dissent. It’s still dissent regardless of the ideas that drive it.Hitler, Lenin, Mao, Castro…all of these men were once dissenters in their own(or adopted in Hitler’s case) country.

As these examples show dissent is not necessarily a good thing. I believe that most dissenters do not fully comprehend the consequences of their actions .For example, the efforts of anti-Vietnam War protestors in opposing an immoral war resulted in the victory of a totalitarian and brutal regime. The Vietnamese people still lost even in victory. Whatever “victory” dissenters earned was a hollow one for human rights and social justice were still erased in Vietnam. Did the anti-war protestors intend this? Of course not. But that was the result of the end of the war.

I think we need to change how we view dissent from the positive outlook that this list implies to a much more critical approach based on actual history and not the rose-tinted reminiscences of participants and Fellow Travelers.

America has a long history of dissent and for a vastly different reasons. Any serious study of dissent has to include the Confederacy/pro-slavery movement because it is by far the largest and most historically important movement in American history.