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/
Say what?
First of all, the war started before Lincoln was sworn in. Secondly, Reconstruction came after he had been assasinated.
Care to try for strike three?
No other country had a large segment of their population willing to launch a war to protect their slave property.
Second Manassas should have told everyone that there HAD to be a better way.
What was so special about Second Bull Run?
Which is my point.
The confederacy a Republic? After what Davis did in office? Are you serious?
Ping
Both Presidents Lincoln and Johnson favored a lenient approach to reconstruction. It was their belief that the nation could be best served by leaving the brutality of the Civil War behind quickly.
Johnson enacted Lincoln’s Reconstruction Act.
Radical Republicans, led by Thadeaus Stevens, argued that the South should be punished for starting the Civil War. Eventually, the dispute would lead to an attempt to impeach and remove President Johnson. Although the official reason for the impeachment of Johnson was his violation of the Tenure of Office Act, the underlying reason was Congress’ disagreement with Johnson over Reconstruction. Although Johnson was impeached by the House, the Senate fell just short of convicting and removing him.
The United States as a nation was more than a magazine subscription that you could drop at the slightest whim. There were commitments and shared responsibilities.
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.
They initiated the problem, they provoked a war, and then they suffered the consequences. I do wonder how things might have turned out had they gone about their secession honorably and legally.
My guess is that they would have been consumed by the Brits.
Actually, importing slaves was banned in 1808, so any slave trade taking place was slaves already here.
A more correct analogy would be states rebelling over a threat to the expansion of abortion rights or gay marriage rights.
What IS true is that Abraham Lincoln took the constitution, shredded it, tore it to pieces and threw it in the garbage.
In what way?
For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.Of course, as anyone knows, Lincoln expressly denied any intent to abolish slavery, and, not having yet taken office, could not have taken any action signaling such an intent. South Carolina's grievance, then, is no actual grievance, but rather the fear that the North would eventually give them a grievance, despite their express statements to the opposite.This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.
On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.
How does one reconcile Lincoln's assertion that he won't impose the North's anti-slavery sentiment on the South with the warning SC cites? I guess CW would say SC presumes Lincoln's lying. (If so, why not wait until his actions betray the truth?) But the other reconciliation is that Lincoln hopes to undermine the South's democratic support for slavery, by exposing it for the evil it is. If this latter explanation is so, that explains why SC was in such a hurry to secede: rend the fabric of civil discourse before slavery is undermined. This, of course, would mean that the confederate cause was undemocratic.
He looks more like an activist than a historian.
And I could put up $5000 dollars in gold if I'm proven wrong (so long as I get to decide if I am wrong).
Seriously, though, there may be a support group in your area for people who want to get out of a cult organization. Check them out.
Yeah, Lincoln almost certainly would have pursued a lenient approach.
Maybe Southerners shouldn’t have blown his brains out, eh?
“The United States as a nation was more than a magazine subscription that you could drop at the slightest whim. There were commitments and shared responsibilities.”
which part of the Constitution was that in?
Really Wrong.
Yes I know, I had a great great grandfather who fought for the south,he died long after of a smoldering infection from a wound. I still think the whole thing including slavery was wrong wrong wrong.
It isn’t enumerated in the Constitution as you well know. That doesn’t change the fact that they way the south went about quitting the union was illegal and immoral.
And for that they paid a dear price.
bump
And I can always spot a Lost Cause Moron. They're the ones who post nonsense like this and then accuse anyone who disagrees with them of being a liberal.
You should go to college sometime. It really is enlightening. Try my statement out on almost any mainstream history professor and see what he says.
ML/NJ
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