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/
“Had they done it right they likely would have permitted.”
Huh?
And even if it was 100% about slavery—so what? Slavery WAS LEGAL at that time....it would be analogous to a cadre of states wanting to secede for abortion “rights”...or gay marriage “rights”. Looking at events through a prism of 150 years of “enlightenment” is not a valid historical construct. It needs to be looked at via the context of the time.
What IS true is that Abraham Lincoln took the constitution, shredded it, tore it to pieces and threw it in the garbage. It was strictly an “ends justifying the means” device—but he set the tone for every president to do it in ever increasing frequency and method. I would not, for any amount of money, have wanted to be in his place—it was probably the absolutely worst nexus in our country’s history...but that does not change the fact that he ignored the constitution at best, and outright defied it at worst.
and without missing a beat . . .
How about
“Jefferson Davis was an aggressor, but Southerners just won’t admit it”!
The South foolishly started the war, and then the South lost the war they foolishly started.
Lincoln beat your ancestors. So get over it, sore losers!
No, but they were insistent upon continuing it.
Secession killed the old Republic. Whatever came afterward was going to be different from America before 1860.
Two hostile governments, one slave and one free that would certainly mark a change. You can say that a rump Republic would have continued the Founders' vision, but many people who were alive at the time disagreed. Separation into squabbling nations on the Latin American model would have opened a new chapter in our history.
Did the Civil War really mark a greater change than the closing of the frontier and the transition from an agricultural to an industrial society?
Obviously Emancipation was a major change in American society, but a deeper break came with the Founders system came with the Progressive Movement and the graduated income tax.
Could the aristocratic Republic of the Founders really have endured? Didn't Jacksonian Democracy represent the beginning of the end and industrialization the final knell for that vision?
The South wasn’t another country, obviously. What kind of reasoning is that?
“...it was probably the absolutely worst nexus in our country’s history...but that does not change the fact that he ignored the constitution at best, and outright defied it at worst.”
The WORST was the so-called “reconstruction” - creating an enormous impoverished (except for the sanctioned “traders”, north and South) then destroying homes, farms and infrastructure and dumping three million homeless into the streets with no provision to care for them.
Almost as stupid as creating 30 million HealthCare clients with no more doctors or faciliti8es to care for them.
But far more lethal.
It was Lincoln’s Reconstruction act of a conquered states that we all lost our state sovereignty. North Carolina was going to join the union, except when President Lincoln or North Carolina governor to muster troops and attack South Carolina. North carolina advised Licon that this was unconstitutional and refused, therefore NC seceded. If anyone truely thinks the Civil War was about slavery, even black conservative here in the south know better. Slavery was not even a agenda in the public until 2 years after the civil had begun. Lincoln polls were at it’s lowest, so he had to use a PR tool to bring his polls up. Don’t get me wrong, slavery s wrong anywhere in the world, the slave ships entered the northern ports as well as the southern ports. If you wish to seek a real world Civil War Historian, google John Ainsworth Americas Remedy. He puts up $5,000 in gold if anyone can prove his documentation false.
I can always spot a liberal moonbat, they’re the one’s that start in line this comment.
Do you realize how many union troops were allowed by Sherman to rape women after conquering the south illegally. Even Lincoln’s wife couldn’t stand him. Well maybe know one could stand her. Even Lincoln’s Generals would avoid her. Plus it truely appears to me you have much more racial tension in the north than you do in the south. Just sayin. I got lots of black neighbors with farms that we all get along here in North Carolina
According to The official proceedings of Congress published by John C. Rives, Washington, D.C.
July 26, 1861, the object of the War was NOT for:
“Oppression
Any purpose of conquest
For the purpose of subjugation
For the purposes of overthrowing or interfering with the rights of those States
For the purposes of overthrowing or interfering with the established institutions of those States (Slavery)
The object of the War was to:
Defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and all laws made pursuant thereof
To preserve the Union, with all the dignity of the several states unimpaired
To preserve the Union, with all the equality of the several states unimpaired
To preserve the Union, with all the rights of the several states unimpaired”
http://www.ncrepublic.org/lib_objectofwar.php
Lincoln is not admired by me.
And apparently some who wouldn't recognize it if it bit them in their Jefferson Davis.
ping for later
Rimshot.
I don't know about your analogy. You defend secession in defense of slavery by comparing it to secession in defense of access to abortion or gay marriage. Then or now, all three would be wrong. And unconstitutional.
“Then or now, all three would be wrong. And unconstitutional.”
But legal. Which was his point.
Abraham Lincoln: For when it happened too long ago to blame on George W. Bush.
Uhmmm...Lincoln didn't do Reconstruction. He was dead, remember?
Your post is illiterate and incomprehensible.
Never-mind the general incomprehensibility of your almost-question, how many?
ROTFLMAO!!!!
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