Doomed to Repeat?

According to "Black Lives Matter" protester and flag-burner Jesse Nevel, there is no difference between the American and Confederate flags:

To us the Confederate flag and the American flag, those represent the same thing which is that this country, this social system was built on slavery and genocide...

To anyone for whom lives matter enough to bother learning from history, Thomas Sowell reminds us that:

What was special about America was not that it had slavery, which existed all over the world, but that Americans were among the very few peoples who began to question the morality of holding human beings in bondage. That was not yet a majority view among Americans in the 18th century, but it was not even a serious minority view in non-Western societies at that time.

Then how did slavery end? We know how it ended in the United States -- at a cost of one life lost in the Civil War for every six slaves freed. But that is not how it ended elsewhere.

What happened in the rest of the world was that all of Western civilization eventually turned against slavery in the 19th century. This meant the end of slavery in European empires around the world, usually over the bitter opposition of non-Western peoples. But the West happened to be militarily dominant at the time.

Regarding the value of military superiority in at least buying time for better ideas to prevail, I can think of at least one prominent individual who seems to have missed the memo.

-- CAV