Posted on 09/27/2010 1:27:31 PM PDT by RandysRight
This article gives another perspective on liberals, libertarians and conservatives. The history both Lincoln and Sherman has been written by the victors and beyond reproach. Do we want to restore honor in this country? Can we restore honor by bringing up subjects over 100 years old? Comments are encouraged.
Randy's Right aka Randy Dye NC Freedom
The American Lenin by L. Neil Smith lneil@lneilsmith.org
It’s harder and harder these days to tell a liberal from a conservative — given the former category’s increasingly blatant hostility toward the First Amendment, and the latter’s prissy new disdain for the Second Amendment — but it’s still easy to tell a liberal from a libertarian.
Just ask about either Amendment.
If what you get back is a spirited defense of the ideas of this country’s Founding Fathers, what you’ve got is a libertarian. By shameful default, libertarians have become America’s last and only reliable stewards of the Bill of Rights.
But if — and this usually seems a bit more difficult to most people — you’d like to know whether an individual is a libertarian or a conservative, ask about Abraham Lincoln.
Suppose a woman — with plenty of personal faults herself, let that be stipulated — desired to leave her husband: partly because he made a regular practice, in order to go out and get drunk, of stealing money she had earned herself by raising chickens or taking in laundry; and partly because he’d already demonstrated a proclivity for domestic violence the first time she’d complained about his stealing.
Now, when he stood in the doorway and beat her to a bloody pulp to keep her home, would we memorialize him as a hero? Or would we treat him like a dangerous lunatic who should be locked up, if for no other reason, then for trying to maintain the appearance of a relationship where there wasn’t a relationship any more? What value, we would ask, does he find in continuing to possess her in an involuntary association, when her heart and mind had left him long ago?
History tells us that Lincoln was a politically ambitious lawyer who eagerly prostituted himself to northern industrialists who were unwilling to pay world prices for their raw materials and who, rather than practice real capitalism, enlisted brute government force — “sell to us at our price or pay a fine that’ll put you out of business” — for dealing with uncooperative southern suppliers. That’s what a tariff’s all about. In support of this “noble principle”, when southerners demonstrated what amounted to no more than token resistance, Lincoln permitted an internal war to begin that butchered more Americans than all of this country’s foreign wars — before or afterward — rolled into one.
Lincoln saw the introduction of total war on the American continent — indiscriminate mass slaughter and destruction without regard to age, gender, or combat status of the victims — and oversaw the systematic shelling and burning of entire cities for strategic and tactical purposes. For the same purposes, Lincoln declared, rather late in the war, that black slaves were now free in the south — where he had no effective jurisdiction — while declaring at the same time, somewhat more quietly but for the record nonetheless, that if maintaining slavery could have won his war for him, he’d have done that, instead.
The fact is, Lincoln didn’t abolish slavery at all, he nationalized it, imposing income taxation and military conscription upon what had been a free country before he took over — income taxation and military conscription to which newly “freed” blacks soon found themselves subjected right alongside newly-enslaved whites. If the civil war was truly fought against slavery — a dubious, “politically correct” assertion with no historical evidence to back it up — then clearly, slavery won.
Lincoln brought secret police to America, along with the traditional midnight “knock on the door”, illegally suspending the Bill of Rights and, like the Latin America dictators he anticipated, “disappearing” thousands in the north whose only crime was that they disagreed with him. To finance his crimes against humanity, Lincoln allowed the printing of worthless paper money in unprecedented volumes, ultimately plunging America into a long, grim depression — in the south, it lasted half a century — he didn’t have to live through, himself.
In the end, Lincoln didn’t unite this country — that can’t be done by force — he divided it along lines of an unspeakably ugly hatred and resentment that continue to exist almost a century and a half after they were drawn. If Lincoln could have been put on trial in Nuremburg for war crimes, he’d have received the same sentence as the highest-ranking Nazis.
If libertarians ran things, they’d melt all the Lincoln pennies, shred all the Lincoln fives, take a wrecking ball to the Lincoln Memorial, and consider erecting monuments to John Wilkes Booth. Libertarians know Lincoln as the worst President America has ever had to suffer, with Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson running a distant second, third, and fourth.
Conservatives, on the other hand, adore Lincoln, publicly admire his methods, and revere him as the best President America ever had. One wonders: is this because they’d like to do, all over again, all of the things Lincoln did to the American people? Judging from their taste for executions as a substitute for individual self-defense, their penchant for putting people behind bars — more than any other country in the world, per capita, no matter how poorly it works to reduce crime — and the bitter distaste they display for Constitutional “technicalities” like the exclusionary rule, which are all that keep America from becoming the world’s largest banana republic, one is well-justified in wondering.
The troubling truth is that, more than anybody else’s, Abraham Lincoln’s career resembles and foreshadows that of V.I. Lenin, who, with somewhat better technology at his disposal, slaughtered millions of innocents — rather than mere hundreds of thousands — to enforce an impossibly stupid idea which, in the end, like forced association, was proven by history to be a resounding failure. Abraham Lincoln was America’s Lenin, and when America has finally absorbed that painful but illuminating truth, it will finally have begun to recover from the War between the States.
Source: John Ainsworth
http://www.americasremedy.com/
So who would you recommend as non-biased—and are they really “non-biased” or do they just agree with you?
I know it’s hard for you but try not to be a buffoon...
Brilliant!
There was a pretty good thread here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2036596/posts where people discussed their favorite Civil War reference books.
Especially Sherman. lol
I think the key phrase is right here:
"Citizens, by birth or choice, of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your affections. The name of American, which belongs to you in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discriminations."
Washington considered himself a citizen of the United States. His loyalty was to country over state. As it should be.
I would recommend reading both sides. Read David Herbert Donald as well as Tommy DiLorenzo, Doris Goodwin as well as the Kennedy Brothers. Read the writings of the Founders as well as those of the leaders of the rebellion. Go into it with open eyes, take nothing at face value, and come to your own conclusions. Not Tommy's.
My belief (worth exactly what you paid for it) is that the United States was “founded” as a treaty between equal and sovereign nation-states and the Constitution is that treaty. I believe (there goes that word again) that the states agreed to support that treaty (and NOT to be subject to a government greater than themselves—who would DO that?)...and I believe that the original intent was for the federal government to provide and maintain a unified armed forces and provide a uniform judicial system to arbitrate disputes between the states...I DO NOT believe that forcing one of those states to remain in the union if they chose to leave was their original intent, nor do I believe that many of Lincoln’s actions (i.e., suspension of habeas corpus, arresting the elected officials in Maryland, consolidation of federal power) was anything the founders had envisioned or would have approved.
You should read the Virginia Resolutions of 1798. Madison is the author.
ML/NJ
The Union army didn’t only make the Confederate Army pay, they took it out on the women and children, too. They stole their food and livestock, tore up their fields, and burned their homes and left them to starve. They did other things even worse. I don’t care what you say, the Confederates didn’t fight their women and children. Sherman was ruthless and cruel. Its been well documented. Slavery was wrong and maybe the war needed fighting but they could have extended the same courtesy to the southern women and children that the south did to their women and children. After all, enemy or not they were still fellow Americans.
This cartoon may be funny but it is to the point. If we were free to leave the individual states could leave one by one when the government stepped upon them too much. Political divide and conquer would no longer be as practicable by Federal politicians. If we were free to leave it is not unlikely that we would not peacefully reassemble in time, under a new Federation with stronger limitations.
Patrick Henry has entered the forum:
"Here is a resolution as radical as that which separated us from Great Britain. It is radical in this transition; our rights and privileges are endangered, and the sovereignty of the states will be relinquished: and cannot we plainly see that this is actually the case? The rights of conscience, trial by jury, liberty of the press, all your immunities and franchises, all pretensions to human rights and privileges, are rendered insecure, if not lost, by this change, so loudly talked of by some, and inconsiderately by others.
If we admit this consolidate government, it will be because we like a great, splendid one. Some way or other we must be a great and mighty empire; we must have an army, and a navy, and a number of things. When the American spirit was in its youth, the language of America was different: liberty, sir, was then the primary object.
You don’t care what I say.
But non-seq..I don’t see it as a “sides’ issue. I see it as a “truth” issue. Lincoln was NOT the hero that history books make him out to be...he wasn’t Satan, either. He was a man, in an extremely untenable position. Add in the dynamics of the time, and it was a powder keg. He consolidated power in the federal government that has snowballed into the mess we have now...granted, if it hadn’t been him, it would have been someone else..but it WAS him, and he has been made out to be a hero...and the entire Civil War issue keeps folks off balance. How can anyone be against Lincoln?—He freed the slaves!! And as conservatives, espousing smaller government, that is anathema...if you sully the name of Lincoln, you’re a racist hate monger. It’s hard to reconcile love of Lincoln with conservatism.
The Battle Flag sure looks more like it means business ... and way more not guilty.
Well done. Both sides do definitely have their strong points ;-)
Well done—you have made excellent points!
Lincoln DID tread on constitutional and Founding principles. But I wouldn’t go so far as to call him a “terrorist” (boy, that word is slung around so much now since 9/11). Misguided, but basically a good man, and no terrorist. Closer to that would be some of the Repubs in Congress.
"I see, as you do, and with the deepest affliction, the rapid strides with which the Federal branch of the government is advancing towards the usurpation of all the rights reserved to the States, and the consolidation in itself of all powers, foreign and domestic; and that, too, by constructions which, if legitimate, leave no limits to their powers. Take together the decisions of the federal court, the doctrines of the President, and the misconstructions of the constitutional compact acted on by the legislature of the federal branch, and it is but too evident, that the three ruling branches of that department are in combination to strip their colleagues, the State authorities, of the powers reserved by them, and to exercise themselves all functions foreign and domestic. Under the power to regulate commerce, they assume indefinitely that also over agriculture and manufactures, and call it regulation to take the earnings of one of these branches of industry, and that too the most depressed, and put them into the pockets of the other, the most flourishing of all. Under the authority to establish post roads, they claim that of cutting down mountains for the construction of roads, of digging canals, and aided by a little sophistry on the words “general welfare,” a right to do, not only the acts to effect that, which are specifically enumerated and permitted, but whatsoever they shall think, or pretend will be for the general welfare. And what is our resource for the preservation of the constitution? Reason and argument? You might as well reason and argue with the marble columns encircling them. The representatives chosen by ourselves? They are joined in the combination, some from incorrect views of government, some from corrupt ones, sufficient voting together to out-number the sound parts; and with majorities only of one, two, or three, bold enough to go forward in defiance. Are we then to stand to our arms, with the hot-headed Georgian? No. That must be the last resource, not to be thought of until much longer and greater sufferings. If every infraction of a compact of so many parties is to be resisted at once, as a dissolution of it, none can ever be formed which would last one year. We must have patience and longer endurance then with our brethren while under delusion; give them time for reflection and experience of consequences; keep ourselves in a situation to profit by the chapter of accidents; and separate from our companions only when the sole alternatives left, are the dissolution of our Union with them, or submission to a government without limitation of powers. Between these two evils, when we must make a choice, there can be no hesitation. But in the meanwhile, the States should be watchful to note every material usurpation on their rights; to denounce them as they occur in the most peremptory terms; to protest against them as wrongs to which our present submission shall be considered, not as acknowledgments or precedents of right, but as a temporary yielding to the lesser evil, until their accumulation shall overweigh that of separation. I would go still further, and give to the federal member, by a regular amendment of the constitution, a right to make roads and canals of intercommunication between the States, providing sufficiently against corrupt practices in Congress, (log-rolling, &c.,) by declaring that the federal proportion of each State of the moneys so employed, shall be in works within the State, or elsewhere with its consent, and with a due salvo of jurisdiction. This is the course which I think safest and best as yet.”
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