Posted on 01/19/2009 6:54:00 AM PST by Iron Munro
We end up with Obamas because we tolerate within our ranks those who would make excuses for slavery. It is deplorable that some of the comments on this thread should appear in print on a forum that subscribes to the notion of individual liberty. We can debate all we want HOW you transition from a socio economic system based on slavery to a "liberal" society. But we cannot for one minute argue that slavery was anything other than a moral abomination.
Thank you for your post. So very true and so poorly known, thanks to revisionism. It is also important to note that slavery was largely conducted by Arab slave traders, who purchased slaves from tribal chiefs who had conquered another tribe or got rid of their own trouble makers for a price. The shippers: Boston shipowners and their bankers— the center of the trade. Later these same lovely people traded in Chinese opium. And their descendants now wring their hands in white multigenerational guilt.
Having skillfully milked this guilt, we have a descendant of the African/Arab slave traders, who is not a natural born citizen who will be our supposed “president”. Still serving these same Yankee masters on the ever expanding government “plantation”. So now our people will be equally miserable wage slaves, taking what handouts they can for their vote.
Powell had only made it up to major by his second tour in Vietnam, so I have idea what you are blathering about here.
Gee, maybe because it was the unlying cause of the rift that led to the war? The Missouri Compromise was not about tariffs.
Gen.Lee is a shining example of devotion to duty and selfless service.We would all do well to aspire to his example. Might I humbly suggest,stevecmd,that you examine the man and his life.We could certainly use men of his caliber in our nation today.As a native Virginian,I understand his love of home, my own family was in Virginia before the American Revolution.Even though I have been gone these many years,I still consider myself a Virginian. Virginia to me is about kin and friendships bonded through the many generations,held together by shared joys an tragedies. Gen. Lee epitomizes this, and when I think of the good general, I think of him fondly and with a spirit of reverence. Happy Birthday General Lee.
Lee’s ‘gift’ beyond inspiring his troops, was in the counter attack.
Offensively, he was stuck in the Napoleanic type set piece warfare, and simply didn’t ‘get it’ that the new weapons of war made that method of battle obsolete.
The fact is Lee didn’t learn from Malvern Hill, and after Chancellorsville his contempt for the Army of the Potomac and its leadership grew by levels of magnitude.
He simply did not believe his infantry could ever be defeated if properly led by his office corps.
And thats why he lost at Gettysburg. He wasn’t ‘stupid’ he was following his own training, based upon what he had observed of his opponents for the previous year.
Bottom line is he should have listened to Longstreet, failed to do so, and lived out the rest of his life (vie years after the war ended) regretting it.
The irony of Gettysburg is this. Even if Pickett’s Charge had been successful in splitting the Union lines, and forced a loss upon the Union, it wouldn’t have won the war for the South, nor would it have led to the extermination of the Army of the Potomac. The road network favored the Union at Gettysburg, and as such guaranteed the Army of the Potomac would have escaped.
Lee was looking for something that simply was not possible in the summer of 1863. A single battle of annihilation, that in one day would decide the war.
He should have learned that wasn’t possible in 1846, in Mexico...but he didn’t.
You see a moral equivalency in trading in a commodity with trading in human souls. The purchasers of the end commodity had a choice in whether or not to partake in it. Slaves had not choice in negotiating the terms of their bond.
Lincoln’s first election was a close won thing. Anti-slavery was not central to his powerbase, despite all the “organizing” boilerplate you cite. Also, as a “nation” the greater voting populace was in the North. Lincoln’s powerbase was the Westward expansionists, the railroads and industrialists. By the time of Gettysburg, Lincoln was extremely unpopular and on his way out. Moralizing about slavery does not change that Lincoln was willing to compromise on slavery to preserve the “Union” (and his political future) of an ever increasing central federal government. Suggest reading of the great biographies of Lincoln for some perspective on this. The Emancipation Proclamation was NOT directed at slave states within the Union. It was simply a propaganda tool. Lincoln would gladly have deported every slave— about which, see— Liberia. Also, take a look at the citings on these posts. Also, Leonard Pitts’ column in WaPo today.
It is very easy to call recorded documented history as “self-serving”- especially when it doesn’t comport with the “revisionist” crap taught by university tools of the oligarch. Those of us who have kept our family businesses and our history through the last century- we understand what the war was about because we lived it. We have our scholars ,too!
Like the Brits, the US simply converted slaves to colonial capital under the righteous banner of religious morals from the oh so pure liberals. Liberals who continued to rape the world with institutional global and corporate socialism.
As did population, transportation, and industrial production. Lee was on a fool's errand, whatever his tactical brilliance, and one hope's that modern generals ask the question that Petraeus asked "tell me how this ends."
HS.
Very well thought out comments, JSM.
Two points I’ll offer for your consideration:
1. JEB Stuart getting surprised and in fact humiliated at Brandy Station set the stage for his willfully ignoring Lee’s very specific instructions to ‘move and feel Ewell’s right’. He went on that joy ride to regain his sense of his own honor, and glory. And the price for that ‘joy ride’ was Buford was the most influential cavalryman of the battle, and some say just might have saved the Union on that first day of July, 1863.
2. MacArthur. He should have been relieved of command by the end of December, 1941 for his abysmal failures of command in the wake of the December 7th attack at Pearl Harbor. Every report I’ve seen says he went into a ‘funk’ for days after the attack, which led to almost all of his available airpower being destroyed on the ground, prior to the Japanese attack on the Phillipines.
JMHO.
The argument was exactly over the introduction of slaves into the west. I suppose Lincoln's unpopularity is why he won election in 1864, despite being "on his way out." By the end of any war any president gets to be pretty unpopular. War is hell.
Very good point.
Nor the Nebraska and Kansas Acts, which were about as close to proximate causes of war as one can get.
Commodity or not, choice or not— the point is the same Yankee liberal money comes from this exploitation of humanity. It is these people who look down their noses, and pontificate to us what is politically correct, financed by their generational ill gotten gains and saddled with generational guilt. Been around quite a few of these “trust fund” liberal babies. Useless lives, preaching guilt to everyone else. Hey, but they will finance you if you will dance for them— natural rhythm!
Robert E. Lee helped to refine many useful tactics in warfare. The fact that Lee decided to surrender instead of trying to fight his way back down South was reason enough not to hang him.
I have a problem trying military officers as they are simply the ones who doing the fighting for the Politicians. I'd be more comfortable prosecuting Political leaders who start a war, ultimately blood in on their hands.
First, we did not convert slaves to colonial capital under the the banner of religious morals. We kept slavery until the emancipation act. American imperialism is a different vice and that the North was not in 1860 morally pure in its pursuit of economic interests is no justification for involuntary servitude in any of its forms.
You have warped view of history.
Well said.
If you want to decry the liberal expansion of credit under Greenspan for the benefit of the banking and securities manipulation class, I will join you in that. We can do that without trying to find excuses for the exploitative socio economic system of the South based upon the curtailment of the civil liberties of Americans of African origin.
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