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/
During the war waged against Great Britain by her colonies on this continent a common danger impelled them to a close alliance and to the formation of a Confederation, by the terms of which the colonies, styling themselves States, entered "severally into a firm league of friendship with each other for their common defense, the security of their liberties, and their mutual and general welfare, binding themselves to assist each other against all force offered to or attacks made upon them, or any of them, on account of religion, sovereignty, trade, or any other pretense whatever." In order to guard against any misconstruction of their compact, the several States made explicit declaration in a distinct article-- that "each State retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States in Congress assembled."
Under this contract of alliance, the war of the Revolution was successfully waged, and resulted in the treaty of peace with Great Britain in 1783, by the terms of which the several States were each by name recognized to be independent. The Articles of Confederation contained a clause whereby all alterations were prohibited unless confirmed by the Legislatures of every State after being agreed to by the Congress; and in obedience to this provision, under the resolution of Congress of the 21st of February, 1787, the several States appointed delegates who attended a convention "for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation and reporting to Congress and the several Legislatures such alterations and provisions therein as shall when agreed to in Congress and confirmed by the States, render the Federal Constitution adequate to the exigencies of Government and the preservation of the Union." It was by the delegates chosen by the several States under the resolution just quoted that the Constitution of the United States was framed in 1787 and submitted to the several States for ratification, as shown by the seventh article, which is in these words: "The ratification of the conventions of nine States shall be sufficient for the establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the same." I have italicized certain words [italics redacted in copying, mostly emphasizing the word "several" where it appears -- LG] in the quotations just made for the purpose of attracting attention to the singular and marked caution with which the States endeavored in every possible form to exclude the idea that the separate and independent sovereignty of each State was merged into one common government and nation, and the earnest desire they evinced to impress on the Constitution its true character-- that of a compact between independent States. The Constitution of 1787, having, however, omitted the clause already recited from the Articles of Confederation, which provided in explicit terms that each State retained its sovereignty and independence, some alarm was felt in the States, when invited to ratify the Constitution, lest this omission should be construed into an abandonment of their cherished principle, and they refused to be satisfied until amendments were added to the Constitution placing beyond any pretense of doubt the reservation by the States of all their sovereign rights and powers not expressly delegated to the United States by the Constitution. [underlining for emphasis added]
The point here is that the authority to which you appealed, also points out the nature of the Union at the ratification of the Constitution, ie. under the Old Republic. This interpretation is fully supported by Madison in The Federalist, a document which a U.S. senator of Davis's long experience cannot have failed at some point to have read for comprehension.
Now, as to the Cornerstone Speech, which you also quote liberally, it needs to be said again that Stephens, if you read his addresses a few days earlier to the Georgia secession convention, was himself a Union man up until the die was cast, and his own opinions differed markedly from those of the "fire eaters".
The point to take away here is that the Cornerstone Speech is a consensus political document, intended by Stephens for broadcast to the public expressing reasons for secession and the nature of the Constitutional changes (quite small) that the Southern politicians had adopted for the continued government of the Confederacy.
The principal, essential change to the Confederate Constitution was not the language on slavery (which was subject to amendment anyway) but the absence of the hostile Northern politicians the exclusion of whom from their public life the Southern States had quite precisely seceded in order to obtain, for their peace and security.
Oddly enough, whenever these two speeches are reproduced and posted the discussion stops dead in its tracks.
Oh, please. Is that your way of saying, "this is my big, Killer Argument that makes all the other kids cry and run away"? Then say it.
Not impressed, sorry.
You're showing us some really ugly personal characteristics here, champ, but go ahead, strut your bullyboy stuff, we're all adults around here anyway.
[You, snarking] I'm mildly surprised it took you this long to haul out the Nazi references.
Valid, in this case, and not subject to Godwin, because Hitler did in fact analyze and sum up (for his purposes) the U.S. Constitution in very much the same terms you Declarationists like to use when nobody's comparing your analysis to that by the Leader of the Thousand-Year Reich.
You have repeatedly used Hitler's very arguments for the surdity of the States.
That isn't an accident. All three of you -- Lincoln, Hitler, and you Declarationist/Triumphalist types -- want to transport the United States to the same place. You want it understood as a centralized nation-state, an Empire founded on the smoking ruins of the federal Republic by a victorious Lincoln.
So you can ignore the references and the quotes later on, anyway, when you start in on another n006, to persuade him of Harry Jaffa's blinding light of truth?
The parallels between Hitler’s Germany and Jeff Davis’ confederacy are even more striking.
The Klan was formed after the war. How could the non-existent Confederacy have formed it? Since the South was full of such obviously evil people—men,women,children, and even babies in the womb—and the North was full of such obviously righteous people, the North would have been better off without the South. North good,South bad. Need we know more?
Support for the Confederacy isn't a libertarian idea either, though some people try to make it so. Sandefur undoubtedly is a libertarian, and has done practical legal work to increase individual liberty. He's earned the right to reexamine the Civil War as much as you or I or anyone else. You may not want to call the result libertarian, but that's an indication of the uneasy fit between libertarian ideals and the actual events of political history.
I don't know about this coinage of "Declarationist" as a way of grouping and rejecting ideas you don't like. Do Goldwaterite Harry Jaffa and Liberal/Social Democrat James McPherson really have that much in common? Does Jack Rakove have much to say about the Civil War or Jaffa's theories? Also, "Declarationist" doesn't appear to fit Sandefur that well either. Judging from the abstract Sandefur's article doesn't appear to be very much influenced by Harry Jaffa's writings on Lincoln the Declaration:
According to many libertarians, the Union's victory in the Civil War represented a betrayal of American Constitution and of the fundamental principles of American political philosophy. These writers contend that secession is a legitimate, constitutional action under the Constitution and that, despite the evil nature of slavery, the federal government had no authority to prevent the southern states from leaving the union. In this paper, I contend that this argument is deeply flawed, and rests on a confusion between secession (a purportedly constitutional act) and revolution (an exercise of coercive force considered legitimate in libertarian political theory only when engaged in as a form self-defense). To counter this confusion, I propose a systematic, two-step analysis: first, does a state have the legal authority under the United States Constitution, to secede unilaterally? And, second, if secession is unconstitutional, was the Confederacy's action in 1861 justified as an act of revolution? I contend that the answer to both questions is no.
Sandefur's argument is about the Constitution more than about the Declaration. He does mention the Declaration, but that's because the Declaration is so often cited as justifying the secessionist rebellion. He does say -- how can you not say? -- that there's something wrong with a rights-based rebellion of slaveowners, but that doesn't make him part of some Jaffaite school, just somebody who sees what's in front of him.
3. The links to Eugene Volokh's weblog (yours, and the one in Sandefur's article separately) show that he, too, is frankly hostile to the South and is happy to consider the whole region stained ground and its people as the equivalent of only slightly-reclaimed Nazi Germans.
I'm not familiar with Volokh, but hostility to the Old South's slaveowners and secessionists doesn't constitute hostility to the whole region and its people. There's more to Southern history than 1860-1865, and more to the South than secessionist ideologues will tell you.
4. Sandefur's article contains a number of erroneous claims, esp. w/ respect to the nature of ratification and his claim that the Constitution was in fact ratified by a jumbo-ized, nationalized, lumpen-proletariat "Peepul" of an organic and unitary United States (rendered by the infamous paperhanger in German as, Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuehrer!" ). This claim is flatly untrue, but is advanced (cynically IMHO) to support the novel inventions of Webster and Lincoln about their "Mystical Union". (We've been over all that, by the way. Sandefur is just wrong.)
The idea that we are citizens of a nation-state is not inherently more totalitarian than the idea that we are citizens of a state (in the sense that most Americans use that word). People who write like you do here generally have some other idea of citizenship that they think is immune from totalitarian usage. You don't. And some of those other theories (about Southern peoplehood, or natural born citizens as opposed to 14th Amendment citizens) can have some pretty scary applications themselves.
I can mention any thing I want, it doesn't make it so. They knew the differences were much greater than one issue, as you do.
Slavery was protected under the Federal Constitution. If they could prove that you Northern socialists were not catering to the Constitution in good faith, then it would be breached and they rightfully claimed it to be so. As your hero Webster said in 1851, "I have not hesitated to say, and I repeat, that if the Northern States refuse, willfully and deliberately, to carry into effect that part of the Constitution which respects the restoration of fugitive slaves, and Congress provide no remedy, the South would no longer be bound to observe the compact. A bargain cannot be broken on one side and still bind the other side."
So big deal. They listed it as one reason for secession. It was after all "protected" under the Constitution, and the bargain had been breached. Just maybe they wanted to list something other than "irreconcilable differences"...
Wardaddy did you flame on this tread yet? I recall we had a civil(pardon the pun) exchannge a few years ago.
Don't forget George Washington. I'm sure you can find some Nazi reference for his notion of "American," too.
The unity of government which constitutes you one people is also now dear to you. It is justly so, for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very liberty which you so highly prize. But as it is easy to foresee that, from different causes and from different quarters, much pains will be taken, many artifices employed to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth; as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed, it is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned; and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.How does it feel to be exactly the sort of person that George Washington warned us about?For this you have every inducement of sympathy and interest. 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. With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles. You have in a common cause fought and triumphed together; the independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint counsels, and joint efforts of common dangers, sufferings, and successes.
The KKK was formed by veterans of the Confederacy. And I have never made any statements of calling people of the south evil so that thought is purely your own mind. As has been pointed out by Madison a State government is not neccesarily representative of its people especially when it acting with a mindset of supremacy as the democrats of the Confederacy were. For any so-called libertarian rebel they view freedom as a means of supremacy over people.
This attitude has never died within the democrat party or with libertarians either. Of course Robert KKK Byrd is considered a great Constitutionalist by the progressive movement and many libertarians as well.
The ideal held by libertarians that they can be pimps, drug dealers, sexual predetors, slave owners, etc..... and that we have no natural right to oppose these things through law is basically not an ideal of individual liberty but an ideal of individual supremacy over others. It is the Outlaw mentality of the libertarians. The libertine attitude of the libertarian that appeals to progressives and the Marxists.
Libertarians basically believe in purging goverment as a place to express morality through law. Not much different from Marx who basically preached the destruction of traditional morality as well.
I still have never got an answer as to why the LDS libertarians have never been able to mount any movement at all towards making a Constitutional Amendment to reaffirm their natural right to secession.
So maybe you will answer this question. Can a county secede as well in your view? Can an individual or group secede his/their property from the laws and rule of the United States? How do you view the law in this regard? Is it only a state right? Not an individual or minority right?
Obviously. But would you care to cite the specific clause of the US Constitution that prohibited State secession?
Of course not....
;>)
Never-mind that the “oppression” that the south claimed never rose to the point of legitimate protest, there was a right way to secede and then there was the way the south went about it.
If you believe Mr. Jefferson (Kentucky Resolutions)) and Mr. Madison (Virginia Resolutions), it was up to the people of the individual States - not you - to judge whether the terms of the compact had been abided by...
They initiated the problem, they provoked a war, and then they suffered the consequences.
Actually. it might be said that the North "initiated the problem, they provoked a war," and the South "suffered the consequences."
I do wonder how things might have turned out had they gone about their secession honorably and legally.
And how would that have happened, in your enlightened opinion? Please cite the US Constitution in your reply.
I won't stay up waiting.
Yawn...
;>)
no flaming ...I leave that to the experts
(not really but I am this time...I did post upthread a bit)
And the parallels between Hitler’s Germany and our current national government are even MORE striking...
;>)
Yet the Constitution delegates power to the President as Commander-in-Chief of all of the States and he takes an oath to defend the Constitution (the law) of all of the States and to defend all United States citizens from rebellion, invasion or an attack on our Constitution.
I would say that it pretty well outlined that the President was not simply a figure head for a treaty among the States but the leader of all of its people empowered with the duty to defend the Constitution and all people of the United States.
Under your ideal though a simple majority of a state could enslave people and rebel against the Constitution without any due process at all to its people or the people of other states and wage war against the United States legally. Yet there is no portion of the Constitution that makes the actions of democrat rebels to do so legal at all. It is all just hyberbole and not backed up by the Constitution at all.
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
.
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
.
Read it and weep...
;>)
My last reply to you was over the top. I’m sorry about that. But I still stand by my belief that the average Southern soldier was fighting to defend his home and the average Union soldier was fighting for the Union. I grew up learning to respect them both and I still do. Discovering kin on both sides has helped me maintain this respect. I’m no Yankee-hater. I don’t get on these Civil War threads often because of the nasty passions ignited by the “antis” of either side. Have a good night.
Read what and weep. This is the Constitution that the democrat rebels were rebelling against and no where did it make their actions legal.
Can you show me whereas due process was given to the citizens of the United States within and without the rebel states and a decision was made to support your view that these Amendments proved that the democrat rebellion was just?
There was nothing over the top about it. I took no offense. I have been using some pretty strong opinions in this thread and I am not trying to make this into more than it is. It is good to exchange ideas and have strong debate sometimes. I consider myself as someone with much still to learn in regards to history and ideology.
All the best to you. Enjoy you evening!
"Rebels?" "Rebelling against?" Would you care to cite a specific constitutional clause that prohibited State secession?
Of course not...
;>)
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