Posted on 01/15/2015 10:05:46 AM PST by Sean_Anthony
Lol
Free
In tribal Atrica in the 1700s
Are you that ignorant
Slavery was a fixture in the culture they came from and they lived and died at the whim of the king
With a fraction of the life expectancy in Virginia or New York
Not to mention the windfall of benefits to their descendants being born here instead of inner Nigeria
I know you have this idyllic vision of pastoral utopia on the velt
You’re a victim of propaganda or wishful thinking
There are plenty of military diaries from colonial days giving a great description of the brutish nature of life in Africa in those times
A brutish nature that’s changed little except where whites left a strong footprint but now they’re being forced out and it’ll regress
Oh but they’ll be free right
Regardless of the "why," those who do this are definitely part of the problem. Anyone who feels a need to trash traditional American role models--or disparage them;--undermines the people's ability to resist the ingredients that made Obama's election possible; the ingredients that empower the worst elements in both major parties; the disastrous sub-culture which is destroying integrity in education, in journalism, and even in the pulpit.
We either succeed in putting this nonsense into perspective, now; or we can kiss the America we have known, goodbye.
Robert E. Lee was the ultimate role model for those who believe in honor; in respect for truth; in the willingness to sacrifice personal interests for higher pursuits.
Few things are more absurd than the tendency of people who lack both the level of incorruptible intelligence of a Robert E. Lee, to either denigrate his opinions or to patronize his memory apologetically, by describing him as a product of his times. Lee, like most Virginia gentlemen of his times, grew up being schooled in the classics, in the historic pursuits of nations to deal with all of the problems in group dynamics & interaction, with which lesser men grapple today; grapple unsuccessfully without the profound intellectual background of the Washingtons, Jeffersons, Madisons Masons & Lees. Robert E. Lee was a man for the ages--an inspiration to all, whose lives he touched..
Keep fighting for an American future!
Don't just read a letter, read the entire Bible, both Old & New Testament, and identify where over thousands of years, anyone offering moral guidance had a major problem with it.
You are letting yourself be played by those who want to destroy Western Culture, in a hand-wringing over imaginary guilt.
William Flax
Your comments are the ones that fail and don't make sense. There is no mention of Lincoln, and to deny that slavery was not supported by a socialistic philosophy is absurd when the data shows this plainly.
It is absolutely true that, as it states in the article, “slavery is a form, and the very best form, of socialism.” At least the slave holding Democrats were able to admit the truth.
Virginian sovereignty--whether or not you believe the States have a right to secede--is not "a crappy cause."
Your contemptuous reference to something that was achieved in some significant part because of the service to America of Lee's father & uncle, under General Washington, displays an arrogance that contrasts sharply with the humble dedication of a Robert E. Lee.
Show me evidence that plantations or slaves were state-owned rather than privately owned and you’ll have a point.
You give perfect example of bigger governments; all Medieval feudal societies and Communism, Socialism, Fascism, or any other modern totalitarian state need bigger governments. The only society that has a check on government is one with a free people and free economy (freedom being the freedom to do right).
I stand by what I stated in my previous post.
Incidentally, freedom is the right to make decisions in your own community or State, for that community or State. Outsiders, telling you what to do in your community or State is not "freedom." The central Government, enforcing what is deemed to be politically correct in Washington, is hardly extending "freedom.," any more than was Hitler's suppression of States' Rights in 1933 Germany.
The premise that since plantations were privately owned there was no big government control is erroneous. For example; Hitler had his big government and allowed Germans to keep there private companies - and by law were able to use slave labor. Now do you get it? It takes a bigger government, not a small one, to allow slavery - the essence of socialism.
You are going off in a tangent here that is not part of the argument.
As to the origins of freedom, consider how & why the Barons rose up before Magna Carta, to demonstrate Jefferson's theory in the Declaration of Independence--the compact theory of Government--in 1215. If you think that Feudal society had the day to day control over the lives of the people that the modern totalitarian State exercises, I would suggest that you go to a law library, and look at the shelf space devoted to the present laws & regulations in Obamanist America.
To a lesser degree, they did – it still needed a bigger government than necessary to control the people back then.
Incidentally, freedom is the right to make decisions in your own community or State, for that community or State. Outsiders, telling you what to do in your community or State is not "freedom." The central Government, enforcing what is deemed to be politically correct in Washington, is hardly extending "freedom.," any more than was Hitler's suppression of States' Rights in 1933 Germany.
Yeppers, the slave holding states never used the federal government to expand slavery while they were in control of the federal government.
Do you think slavery is a “freedom” that should be allowed?
Tribal societies with no central government at all practiced (and in some cases still practice) slavery. Try again.
I've always thought that Neo-Confederates who claim that Unionists were proto-Communists were foolish at best or dishonest at worst. Now I've met their equally ignorant and dishonest counterpart, those who claim that Confederates were proto-Communists.
And I suppose that when southern slave owners demanded the return of fugitive slaves from the north, they were only interested in rescuing them from their oppressors, right?
My personal feelings about RE Lee, and most of the men who fought for the South, were very well expressed by US Grant.
“I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. I do not question, however, the sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us.”
Sovereignty is not in and of itself a worthy cause. It is worthy or unworthy according to the uses to which it is put.
As the Founders stated in the Declaration, rebellion is justified when “any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.”
“These ends” are, of course, the maintenance and expansion of the “inalienable right” to “ Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
A rebellion openly and explicitly started to prevent the expansion of those rights is not a noble cause.
Or, as Burke put it, “ The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do before we risk congratulations.”
The freedom the Confederacy was defending was its freedom to maintain and expand their complete denial of freedom to 1/3 of their own population.
I never stated this. The point is that they needed a bigger than necessary government to uphold and expand slavery.
Tribal societies with no central government at all practiced (and in some cases still practice) slavery. Try again.
Either you are missing the point or obfuscating the truth of slavery to say this, so I will ask again - Do you think slavery is a “freedom” that should be allowed?
I wonder how you would argue that man can "expand" on the rights granted by the Creator. But just what are you suggesting here? Surely it would not expand or in any sense augment the rights of Virginians to self-government, if General Lee had simply acquiesced in a Union conquest of Virginia. That is really a rather strange notion.
In taking a second glance at this, I see how ludicrous an example this is; to compare tribal societies to modern day societies? Yeppers, there could never be a progressive state of evolvement leading to a "civilized" society with a bigger than necessary government with Democrat Party slavery.
How ignorant and dishonest to think that the Democrat slaver Confederates never used the federal government to uphold and expand slavery!
We never had slavery in Ohio. It was forbidden by the Northwest Ordinance, that opened Ohio for politically organized settlement. I have never thought that that restriction was not a good idea.
But our status as a "free" State did not empower us to interfere in the rights of any other State to manage their own affairs. We did not have the right to violate the rights of other States, which is implied by the context of your question.
Put another way, what General Lee was fighting against was the equivalent to what Hitler did to State sovereignty in Socialist Germany. Neither General Lee, nor I nor any of the Founding Fathers subscribed to the Jacobin/Marxist/Nazi doctrine that the end justifies the means. Playing word games, regardless of the context, to the use of the word "freedom," is not an argument. (It reminds me of the gross, and repeated misuse of the term in George W. Bush's second inaugural address.)
“Self-government” is not one of the rights listed in the DoI. It is a means to the end of recognizing and enforcing inalienable rights for individuals.
Republican or democratic government does not necessarily do so. To give some fairly obvious examples: Rome was for the first half of its existence a Republic. The vast majority of those who lived under its sway did not have their inalienable rights respected. Venice was a Republic. It was also a tyranny with an efficient secret police. The Nazis came to power using republican and democratic means.
Man cannot expand on the rights granted by the Creator. However, he most certainly can, and generally has, refuse to recognize or respect them.
Our own country only really began to fully live up to those rights around the 1960s, by which time women and some minorities were finally granted them. Not exactly what I’m trying to say, as they’d always had those rights. But they most certainly weren’t respected for most of our history.
Virginia seceded from the Union and voluntarily joined a (self-proclaimed) nation that had already formally declared war on the United States.
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