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/
Note that they referred to the states with the same verbiage they did Great Britain...using the word "state" as a synonym for "nation." Each "state" considered itself a separate "nation" and they forged an alliance for their benefit--not for their detriment. That others have changed the original intent is no surprise--after all, there are those who say there is no right to bear arms, when it is plainly stated exactly that way...there are others who have interjected a "separation of church and state" when it most decidedly is NOT there...
You're right. It wasn't the Constitution.
...why would they accept a lesser status to ratify the Constitution? That makes no sense and gives them no benefit.
Because the Articles of Confederation didn't work and they needed something that did.
See: Dual Sovereignty
REALLY???????????????? He’s the lib’s darling, darling.
No problem with dual sovereignty—just the appropriate proportions.
Even in what you quote from the Articles it recoginizes that powers given to the United States are it own. In the case of rebellion and acts of war against the United States the President is Commander-in-Chief and was goven the power and sworn to defend the Constitution of the United States.
No where is any process for seccession written out beyond possibly an act of agreement by all of the States. The President has a sworn duty to protect every United States citizen from an act of war or rebellion against them.
He didn’t have a choice after what happened in Fort Sumter,read Harry Turtledove if you want to know what would have been done if the South had won.
I would also point out you could accuse modern Presidents of being terrorists under the same guidelines.
You can proportion it all you like as long as you realize that the individual states were subordinate to the union of the combined states, also known as the federal government.
As designed.
2)Name another war where it's happened on this scale in the US
3)Sorry, was placed under martial law
4)and 5)John Merryman, for one--although, I agree, can't find much that supports Lincoln having Taney arrested.
6)Of course--ex parte Milligan was during Reconstruction....but it was the closest the Supreme Court came to directly ruling on Lincoln's suspension of Habeas Corpus...except for ex parte Merryman.
Very well. You have persuaded me. Well done. ;-)
Let me ask you why it is that in all the years since the Civil War it is that all of you libertarians who are suffering from Lincoln Derangement Syndrome have not made any Amendments to the Constitution at all in order to sure up your right to secession?
Personally I believe it is because you really have no interest in it at all but instead have been too busy getting cozy with the progressive Marxists in bashing Bush just as you still like to bash Lincoln.
And if I am being too strong with my opinions about Libertarians and Marxists and the connections against them then this thread surely did nothing to help me not be.
Calling Lincoln a terrorist. Praising the man who assassinated Lincoln and wanting monuments built for him. On and on it reads like a leftist rant against Bush or anyother conservative or republican that they (libertarians and liberals) disagree with.
Over the top garbage.
I had kin on the Confederate side(one of them was killed at Kennesaw Mountain defending my home state from Sherman)and I too say that slavery was wrong, wrong, wrong. I had at least one kin on the Union side(an East Tennessee Unionist at that)but nevertheless ever since Lincoln’s war the government has grown bigger and meaner. The more I read about the Late Unpleasantness of 1861-1865,the more it seems to me that to say that the war was about any one thing
is too simplistic, whether it be slavery or states’ rights.But if you could have asked the average soldier of either side why they were fighting, you’d probably get simple reasons. The average Confederate would probably say he was defending his home from an invading army. The average Northerner would probably say he was fighting to preserve the Union. Funny thing—when you bring folks together at the point of a bayonet,you have union all right,but not necessarily unity. It took a while after the war for unity to be a reality.
As I recall, the subject of this thread was Abraham Lincoln, not Jefferson Davis. While I don’t agree he was a “terrorist”, I do think he expanded the role of the federal government beyond its intended limits, and his successors have built wildly on his foundation.
“The average Confederate would probably say he was defending his home...”
So I guess that is why they formed terorist groups like the KKK?
The rebels were not interested in defending their homes but in defeating the Constitution and burning the homes of those who disagreed. All to uphold slavery, their right to secession from the Constitution, and their right to wage war against the citizens and laws of the United States.
It is ironic that you argue in favor of the southern rebel democrats but then use the words of Franklin in your tagline...
(”A republic, if you can keep it.......”)
Franklin despised the ‘mob rules’ outlaw type of mentality of democracy whereas a majority mob could rise up and destroy the rights of all. Yet that is exactly what the rebels stood for. They waged war even in order to destroy the Republic and to denounce the Constitution. They held an Outlaw mentality that disregarded the rule of law, human rights and human nature under God. Thanks to Lincoln though we kept the Republic and defended the Constitution.
There is no irony in the fact that Lincoln was a Republican. He defended and preserved the Republic that Franklin was nervous as to whether we could keep in his famous statement. He was a great President during a very trying time in American history.
“The rebels were not interested in defending their homes”.
That’s news to me. I guess the average Confederate soldier(a non-slave owner), just *loved* the idea of his home being torched and his family threatened so his neighbors could keep their slaves. Yeah,right.
It is not news to me though. The average Confederate soldier stood against the Constitution in their desire to to leave the rule of law of the Constitution. The KKK was formed by these same average confederate soldiers. Libertarian type Outlaws went into Union states and burned Union homes and terrorized United States citizens. Slavery was always a big issue for these scumbags as well.
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