[quote=@darkwolf687]
"It involved secession, but that's not really what people are interested in here. I mean, it's interesting that they are flying a flag of treason, but most people are more worried about the racial connotation, and the war provides at the very least the seeds of that connotation. You can't really divorce the secession of the south from the reason they seceded. The American reason for secession wasn't inherently fucked up at its core"

In my opinion, the reason for American succession was that the colonials wanted to have their cake and eat it to; They were a protectorate that dragged their protector into a war after said protector specifically said "No" and then rebelled when their protector handed them the bill in the form of taxes.
[/quote]

That's... not quite how that went. Colonial friction created the incident, but European diplomacy started the war. After living through an incident in which they could not handle their own affairs despite being the frontier of the conflict at hand, they dealt with economic mismanagement in the form of taxation. It was mismanagement in the sense that the growing cities in the north were starting to suffer from the population problems that major cities at that time tended to suffer, where there was a growing number of poor people with no place to go, and the taxations that Britain induced caused damage to the delicate economic situation in these places. The Stamp act was particularly bad because it caused the local currency to collapse, whereas the imposition of a tea monopoly became more a symbolic cause than an important one. This played a part in why "Taxation without representation" became the battle-cry - It was not only for the principle of the thing, but because British officials living in Britain didn't understand what the effects of their moves were. Rather, like a debt-collector making demands over the phone, they were completely oblivious of what effect their decisions had and only saw the other side as a generic entity that owed them. 

Even if we are to ignore all of this and pretend all was equal except for the oversimplified popular-history causes, it wouldn't be a proper comparison. It's callous to pretend that retaining slavery is an equal crime to not paying your taxes.