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/
Which life would you prefer? Oppression? Or independence?
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Independence, but not dependent on the government.
You know nothing about the South, NOTHING. You call every black that worked for a white family a slave. Many were paid. Many lived in the house and were considered members of the family. Often kids were as close to some of the blacks than they were their own parents. I never rarely see racism down here but I sure as hell saw plenty of it when I had to spend time in Chicago one winter. It was sheer hell every day I was there. The sun didn’t shine one single time, well maybe for a few minutes. Dirty, no leaves on the trees, disgusting place. They used the N word more in that my short time there than I hear down here in years.
Why are you so obsessed with slavery, something that has been over for so long? Just curious? Your main goal in life is to fight the civil was again. You admitted you came to FR because JR was lenient and would let you go off on Southerners. Is that your life? Sad, really sad.
And suffered the fate he deserved.
There. Fixed it.
If you really want to think of the cenfederacy that way I won’t mind ;-)
Madison explained it, as I said. There was an awkward period in which nine States met in Congress under the Consitution, and the other four just sort of hung around looking for something to do.
Not really, not if Lincoln were going to reify and realize the Gilded Age by prosecuting John Quincy Adams's concept of a civil war to "reorganize" the South and eliminate the planters from the Big Table.
He’s a troll. When I first came to FR, someone sent me the troll list. He was on it. FR is a conservative forum, right? All you have to do is read his past posts. He’s an egotistical concern troll.
He hates:
The Army and anyone in it
Southerners
Palin
both Bush’s
Fox news
Baptists
Glenn Beck
Anyone that questions O’s credentials
I could go on and on but I don’t have the list handy that other Freepers have compiled. Now that sounds like a list of DU’s dislikes.
He Likes:
he’s pro homo
pro choice
loves Jon Stuart
MSNBC
He posts his side of the CW and his side only. He is a master copy and paster and he is seriously obsessed with Lincoln, the South and slavery. He loathes the South, anyone in it and anything to do with it.
You'd be amazed at what we call you.
Anyone stalking you is another figment of your deranged imagination fo shizzle. Right?
Is that why you claim to have pictures of me?
How's that inconsistent with my analysis of the punking process?
The Midwesterners could have stopped it, but their land greed got in their eyes -- and they were screwed, blued, and tattooed before they ever figured out the ag markets in Chicago were rigged to screw them. That that was what their boys in blue died for, hasn't yet caught up with them.
Of course not. All those speeches and declarations that mentioned slavery, slavery, slavery? They were just funnin' with us, right?
It was about New York paydays and who was going to get any.
New York was paying for iteself very nicely, thank you very much. I mean, it wasn't like the South was producing much in the way of tariff revenue.
There, fixed it.
Flaunt your malevolence if you like. But at least the South fought. The rest of you never even got it.
Just like their Southern counterparts.
The Trent affair? That had been successfully resolved eight months before Lincoln announced the proclamation. It's another of the southern wet dreams that Britain ever seriously considered declaring war on the United States. At most, the British might have considered recognizing the confederacy, but would have maintained their neutrality. A declaration of war would have almost inevitably caused a US invasion of Canada, which the British recognized they were in no way able to defend against even a small fraction of the military of the US possessed at that time.
Really? You're still here.
I'm not interested in your "alternate take" on reality. You can't get your arms around the Civil War? Not my problem.
So now it is the silly “Yankees took my slave regime and I can't own people” whine.
Post up a quote of my wanting to own slaves. AS IF that were the issue, which I told you it wasn't, and isn't.
Laughing at you.
"First they laugh at you, then they fight you......"
And then you went and put your spin on it.
There was an awkward period in which nine States met in Congress under the Consitution, and the other four just sort of hung around looking for something to do.
Only two actually. By the time the first Congress met in March 1789 all the states had ratified except for North Carolina and Rhode Island. And they could have met in Philadelphia under the Articles of Confederation if they had wanted. But the long and the short of it is that neither North Carolina or Rhode Island were set adrift to fend for themselves as sovereign nations. They were part of the United States before the Constitutional Convention met, they were part of the United States prior to ratifying, and they were part of the United States after they ratified. Their status didn't change at any point.
What is there to fight? You guys never do anything.
European, particularly British, recognition of the Confederacy was a continuing problem, and the EP was a response to that threat. It was also, I think, part of his longer-term, closely-held intention (always held, and only gradually revealed) to strip the South of their slaves to incapacitate them economically, particularly the planters, who were the Yankees' bugbear. They were the leaders of the opposition to industrial policy, and so they had to be eliminated.
It wasn't their slaves, it was THEM that had to go.
Part Two, Lee attempted the Gettysburg campaign in summer, 1863, as part of this continuing quest for European recognition. So it was still a live possibility, at least in Davis's and Lee's eyes, until that date.
Is that why you claim to have pictures of me?
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You moron, we addressed that months ago. I posted the picture I was given and you said it wasn’t you. End of story. Get over it. It was a geek pic. A joke, get it? I see you’re still worried, wondering was the geek photo posted to avoid the discussion and do they really have a photo of me? Well, keep letting the voices in your head screw with your mind. I will never tell. Now get lost, I don’t have time for your repetitive crap today. Isn’t it almost time for you to go to work?
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