Posted on 12/29/2004 12:50:20 PM PST by bruinbirdman
Preach on brother!
The truth of this is so obvious I'm surprised the reviewer found it surprising.
But, one might object to this account, was not the American settlement conceived in sin? How can one say that Americans always sought to live freely when the earliest Puritan settlers began their "free" society by theft of Indian lands?
A truly asinine comment from the reviewer. There is no connection between the previous statement and this childish PC carping. In fact, the reviwer's PC whine is pointless in any context.
how's that?
I just ordered the book a week ago based upon the title alone - I truly hope it's objective fact that can effectively correct revisionist history
Those Puritans took it from the Indians the same way those Indians took it from the previous tribe.
The Mises institute is just one of the triad of Lew Rockwell.com and antiwar.com. While Mises confines itself to economic matters, the other two preach a constant theme of the evils of government, all government. Lew Rockwell is pretty heavy into civil war revisionism where Lincoln is a war criminal. The common thread for all, is that government always wishes to get bigger and uses war as it's engine of it's own growth.
That might be the fault of the reviewer though.
Maybe you missed his point. His review implied that others might make this claim, and then immediately refutes it.
Then again, maybe I misunderstood your comment.
I will re-read the review. Thanks.
"A Patriot's History of the United States."
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1595230017/qid=1092168718/sr=1-5/ref=sr_1_5/002-0543492-4011203?v=glance&s=books
Last week, the background of schoolbooks on the country's history was discussed on C-Span. A guideline suggested for all historical schoolbooks is that neither mountains nor oceans should be mentioned.
The reason is because some schoolchildren haven't seen a mountain or ocean and it isn't "fair" to make them feel either curious or inferior. Honest. C-Span. Last week.
"The common thread for all, is that government always wishes to get bigger and uses war as it's engine of it's own growth"
And this is wrong, how?
Ping for later
If the Indians owned those lands first-Let's see the deeds, showing that the Indians bought the lands from their predecessors.
PING
Woods has presented the theory that the Civil War was actually a religious conflict between the "orthodox" South and the heretical North. There's nothing new or revealing or accurate in that view. It's a theory that some prominent champions of slavery and secession adopted after the war when support for slavery became unacceptable.
But most people aren't so gullible as Thomas Woods is. If Robert Lewis Dabney supported slavery before the war, more or less defended it later, and advanced a theory of the war as a religious conflict when his earlier views became untenable, we can pretty much connect the dots and figure out what he was about.
Not Thomas E. Woods Jr., though. His is a willed ignorance. It looks like he accepts the claim that the Confederacy was some kind of bulwark against the destructive tendencies of modernization, and his mind shuts down at that point and just accepts whatever pro-Southern propagandists shovel into it.
And yes, LewRockwell.com, the Mises Institute and the League of the South are very tied in closely together. It's degrading and scandalous how they ceaselessly promote his book without acknowledging their connections. Once you realize that it's all a scam, it's hard to have much respect for the Rockwellites and the Mises Institute.
Where they are wrong is in assuming that because war makes governments grow, that all wars that they disagree with were fought with the intention of making governments grow more powerful. There's a foolish belief that the losing side in history would have been more libertarian had they won. All growth in government power is ascribed to the evil designs of the winners. The evils that would have arisen had the other side won are just ignored.
In the end, they don't really care about history and sifting out evidence and facts and opinions to find out what actually happened. At least as far as the Civil War is concerned, they pluck facts or rumors out of their actual context to support their arguments and ignore facts that do not support their conclusions. They are just imposing their own economic orthodoxy on the actual record and torturing it until they coincide.
How is this wrong? Well, see 'x's post below for starters.
I'd like to add that Mises, Rockwell, and antiwar all see the "War on Terror" in general and our actions in Iraq in particular as a on-going conspiracy to enlarge government. In effect, they are saying that our support of Israel was a calculated ploy on our part to get enrage the Muslim world causing them to attack so the conspirators would have justification for enlarging government.
They also believe FDR deliberately provoked the Japanese so he'd have an excuse to expand government and that Lincoln deliberately antagonized the southern states so they'd secede and give him an excuse to expand the government.
IOW, every war we've been involved in has been our fault, the result of a conspiracy to expand the power of government.
Thanks - saved me $19.95.
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