So let that flag wave proudly as a monument to the last Army in this country that actually fought for the Constitution. I am proud to have ancestors who fought with them. ....
Amen brother! Let her fly...
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/
What do you keep yammering about? "conservative movement"Yes indeed, limited government, consent of the governed, individual freedom, and decreasing the size and scope of the general government. Raising army's and sending them to torch the neighbors house just because you don't like the way the live, seems very socialist to me. Senator Louis Wigfall pointed to your socialist hyprocisy, that you've twisted into make believe conservitisim.
They confederated with the other states to save themselves from the power of old King George III; and no sooner than they had gotten rid of him than they turned to persecuting their neighbors. Having got rid of the Indians, and witches, and Baptists, and Quakers in their country; after selling us our negroes for the love of gold, they began stealing them back for the love of God.
Let's look at the quote in full, shall we? What Lincoln said was:
"If I were to suggest anything it would be that as the North are already for the measure, we should urge it persuasively, and not menacingly, upon the South. I am a little uneasy about the abolishment of slavery in this District, not but I would be glad to see it abolished, but as to the time and manner of doing it. If some one or more of the border-states would move fast, I should greatly prefer it; but if this can not be in a reasonable time, I would like the bill to have the three main features---gradual---compensation---and vote of the people---I do not talk to members of congress on the subject, except when they ask me."
And a few days later when the DC Emancipation Act was passed it had two of the three - compensated and the vote of the people as expressed through their representatives in Congress.
“I will say, then, that I am not, nor have ever been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races ... I am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.” -— Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln also said, "...but I hold that, notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence-the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects-certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man."
In doing so he set himself in complete opposition to men like Davis and Lee and the Southern Chief Justice who all believed that the black man had no rights and deserved none. So on the one hand you have Lincoln supporting white supremacy, same as every Southern leader you care to name and virtually every Northern leader as well. On the other hand you have Lincoln supporting equality of the races in terms of rights guaranteed under the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, unlike any Southern leader prior to or during the rebellion. So you tell me, MJ, which is worse? The racist who believes in rights for the black man? Or the racist who doesn't?
“I have heard, in such a way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the Army and the Government needed a Dictator. Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those generals who gain successes can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship.” -— Abraham Lincoln, upon his replacement of General Burnside with General Hooker for command of the Army of the Potomac
And just what the hell is the purpose behind this quote?
Do I need to add the </sarcasm> tag or are you capable of recognizing sarcasm when you see it?
On the other hand neither did Booth.
S.O.P. in Chicago of the 60's and 70's
I suppose they could have turned the firehoses and dogs on them like they did in Birmingham. Shades of Davis' threat to have troops fire on women and children during the Richmond Bread Riots?
He's right, and the speeches of the period proves it. Sorry.
And to hinder the rebel war effort by negating the runaway slave laws. It was a combination of all three, and it was effective since what slim chance of rebel recognition remaining after Antietam died with it.
Pursuit of the same recognition, by the way, that led to two Lee campaigns into the North, to seek a Confederate "Saratoga"-analogous victory that would bring recognition.
Well one campaign at any rate. Had Lee's 1862 campaign been successful then British recognitition, or at least a push for a negotiated settlement, may have resulted. But by Lee's 1863 campaign all hopes of recognition were dead and most rational people knew it. The goals of Lee's 1863 campaign were to keep from having part of his army sent in a vain attempt to relieve Vicksburg and also to strip the North of food and supplies his army needed and which the inept administration of Davis was incapable of providing him.
The chance of mojitojoe getting factual or well documented about anything hover somewhere between zilch-point-shit and none.
So let that flag wave proudly as a monument to the last Army in this country that actually fought for the Constitution. I am proud to have ancestors who fought with them. ....
Amen brother! Let her fly...
Speaking of nolu chan I keep running across his stuff on scribid, where he keeps posting reasoned and well-argued comments on just why Lieutenant Colonel Lakin deserves his court martial and where he rips birthers up one side and down the other. I assume it's the same guy. I may have disagreed with the man on the War of Southern Rebellion but I never thought he was anything but an incredibly intelligent individual. Not at all like the Lost Causers we have around here today. Present company excepted, of course.
Sure there was, 1861 to 1865. Unsuccessful. It was in all the papers.
Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Jay and a few others would have looked at you in amazement at a comment that ridiculous. The colonists did not 'secede'. They rebelled. They didn't pretend their actions were legal, unlike the confederate rebels. They didn't expect their acts to be unopposed. They knew that they were starting a war that would lead to their independence or their execution, and they accepted it. And they also won their rebellion, unlike others.
You guys can argue all day long about slavery and the need to hold the Union together, but what it always comes down to, and why so many hundreds of thousands died, is because the Southern States believed they had the right to secession from on over-bearing northern centralized government and form "a more perfect union" once again.
Someone should have told the leaders of the period that.
"What was the reason that induced Georgia to take the step of secession? This reason may be summed up in one single proposition. It was a conviction, a deep conviction on the part of Georgia, that a separation from the North-was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery." -- Speech of Henry Benning to the Virginia Secession Convention
"This new union with Lincoln Black Republicans and free negroes, without slavery, or, slavery under our old constitutional bond of union, without Lincoln Black Republicans, or free negroes either, to molest us.
If we take the former, then submission to negro equality is our fate. if the latter, then secession is inevitable" --- -- Address of William L. Harris of Mississippi
"History affords no example of a people who changed their government for more just or substantial reasons. Louisiana looks to the formation of a Southern confederacy to preserve the blessings of African slavery, and of the free institutions of the founders of the Federal Union, bequeathed to their posterity." -- Address of George Williamson, Commissioner from Louisiana to the Texas Secession Convention
Once again, STATES' RIGHTS are at the forefront for restoring our Constitutional Heritage.
And when the South launched their rebellion in 1861, one of the first thing they tossed into the dumpster was the concept of state's rights. Hopefully next time around we won't be led by Southerners and maybe state's rights will survive.
You have to understand that mojitojoe has been here all of 2 years and has an over-inflated opinion of himself. Ask him to send you that picture of me he claims to have.
No there wasn't any rebellion. As one great Statesman said:
Secession belongs to a different class of remedies. It is to be justified upon the basis that the States are sovereign. There was a time when none denied it. I hope the time may come again, when a better comprehension of the theory of our Government, and the inalienable rights of the people of the States, will prevent any one from denying that each State is a sovereign, and thus may reclaim the grants which it has made to any agent whomsoever.
You steroid injecting federalist have somehow placed the sovereignty tag on the agent, the general government.
So assuming you have read the South Carolina declaration of causes, would you have gone to war in support of them?
Denial is not only a river in Egypt it seems. It also flows through Lost Causers everywhere.
As one great Statesman said...
Oh barf. Jefferson Davis was anyhing but a great statesman.
Another libertarian pitch. Right, give them power and see what happens?? Providing for the common defense is the major role charged to the federal government. Tell me the history of libertarian support for the military. And social issues for libertarians (aka liberals)?? Anything goes, even homosexual behavior, the #1 vector the spread of infectious diseases goes unchecked and compromises public health of all normal citizens.
You are betraying your ignorance. The colonies lived under a monarchical form of government where all must swear allegiance to a King. The revolution was not intended to preserve a monarchy, or even about replacing one monarch with another. Its intent was to end monarchy and create a Republic based on the rule of law.
It is an insult to history to equate the cause of the Revolution and the lame excuses (only conjured only after the war) for the secession of the slave states. At the time of secession, they were quite honest that the only difference they had and the only thing they cared to preserve, was their ability to spread slavery where ever they could.
To be clear, I as a conservative, do not think Lincoln was a good president. Pitting brother against brother in a brutal domestic war is no basis for being good at anything.
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