[lucozade]

I'm not sure I follow. It may well be that the north had ulterior motives beyond humanitarianism but that doesn't take away from the fact that the explicit reason that a number of states gave for seceding was to preserve slavery.

I'm not sure I get your point about the flag either. Of course, it's not racist per se, it's abstract. But it's almost exclusively flown as a symbol of pride in the confederate institutions that it represents. Those institutions were explicitly racist. As you say, it has direct parallels with the swastika.

> what was the last humanitarian war you witnessed?

And finally, this really doesn't take into account the period. It was not at all unusual, in the mid 19C, for countries to use military action for social aims. Now, I happen to think that an awful lot of it was on behalf of evangelism of "superior" values rather than humanitarianism. This was rife in British establishment thinking at the time and was prevalent in the northern states too.

In other words, I think it's justified to believe that these actions were driven by feelings of moral superiority rather than human equality. But to suggest that they can all be understood as power plays simply doesn't fit the facts.