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/
How?
I'm asking because Jefferson did indeed face secessionist threats during his presidency. The North threatened secession over the Louisiana Purchase and again over his ill-conceived embargo. He made some concession and held the country together with statesmanship. Lincoln wasn't a statesman. He was an ambitions railroad lawyer with an economic agenda he intended to implement ho matter what.
Not necessarily, I am a southerner (Texan actually) and I think both sides were wrong. Slavery was wrong and horrible, so was the Civil War and reconstruction was monsterous. Lincoln was president and he should have been able to settle the dispute before it came to war and he certainly was responsiable for reconstruction.
Reconstruction didn't start until well after Lincoln's assassination.
‘dragging black Repubs out of their homes and shooting them in front of their families’
You forget, they also dragged WHITE Repubs out of their homes and shot them in front of their families.
My mistake, thanks for reminding me.
...in order to prevent the white southerners from governing their slaves.
I think it depends upon how much history one has read. I've never lived south of New York City. That Lincoln essentially destroyed the form of government established by Jefferson, Madison, and the boys, is really beyond doubt.
ML/NJ
You answered your own question. He did face secessionist threats during his presidency and he did address them. He didn’t let a bunch of hotheads rend our nation. He kept our nation whole.
Lincoln was a statesman but the rebellion was a forgone conclusion before he ever took the reins. The south never gave him anything but hard choices He accepted responsibility and made them.
That's called a Revolution. So do you admit that the Confederates were in Rebellion against Intolerable Oppression? What was the Oppression? Where is their Declaration of Independence spelling out their grievances?
BTW, the notion that Washington would have ever raised his hand against Virginia is simply laughable.
Washington was no sentimental fool hung up on some 'heritage' issues like Bobby Lee. He would have kicked ass big time to preserve the nation he sacrificed so much to create. The instigators would not have gotten off as easy as they did under Lincoln and Grant.
Really? Where does Lincoln say that?
“That Lincoln essentially destroyed the form of government established by Jefferson, Madison, and the boys, is really beyond doubt.”
BTTT
No it isn't. The correct term is secession. The War of Independence was fought to preserve our form of government. It was the British who were trying to replace it.
Say whaaa?!
Here ya go...
“Not necessarily, I am a southerner (Texan actually) and I think both sides were wrong. Slavery was wrong and horrible, so was the Civil War and reconstruction was monsterous. Lincoln was president and he should have been able to settle the dispute before it came to war and he certainly was responsiable for reconstruction.”
Hey, Texas Sharpshooters were sure considered Southerners during the war! ;^)
I agree. This never should have come to a war. Every other civilized nation managed to do it without killing and destroying half their countries.
There was a “time line” that had to be met, though and it had to be done the 20 or 30 years earlier than it took everyone else (where have I heard THAT one before) and it couldn’t wait any longer ... too bad we couldn’t work up such ferocity over a couple of million dead babies a year.
Besides, the North thought it was going to be a cakewalk ... cripes, they came out with picnic baskets and brought the families to watch the nasty “Rebels” put in their places.
I think that even if though it did come to a war, Second Manassas should have told everyone that there HAD to be a better way. There was no turning back from the Republican Party Platforms of 1856 and 1860, however. They were going to do this, hell or high water. Both sides should have known better.
It was HELL.
Can you imagine what might have happened if the south had actually attempted to do it right?
Signed up in August. No posts except posting his own blog articles. Hmmmm ...
He ran in, lobbed a grenade and retreated — and two dozen freepers took the bait and threw themselves on the grenade.
SnakeDoc
“Can you imagine what might have happened if the south had actually attempted to do it right?”
Had they been permitted, we might still have a Republic ... instead of this mongoloid pseudo Democracy.
Had they done it right they likely would have permitted.
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