Posted on 03/22/2002 4:42:55 AM PST by TEXICAN II
Lincoln And The War On Terror: A Conservative Reappraisal By Paul Craig Roberts
The war on terror is creating media attention and fundraising opportunities for conservative organizations. It is also creating confusion of thought among conservatives and, thereby, opportunities for more centralized government power and a police state.
Too many Americans are coming to accept that a successful war on terror requires a police state in whole or part.
For example, the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act would give state governors the power to order people from their homes and force them into quarantines, separate parents from children, impose price controls and rationing, and confiscate guns and other property.
Supposedly, this is to protect us from germ warfare, but herding people into confined spaces is the best way to spread disease.
The Emergency Health Powers Act is sponsored by the federal agency, Centers for Disease Control. According to Phyllis Schlafly (www.eagleforum.org), the bill, conveying dictatorial powers upon governors, is already moving through state legislatures.
We are in far more danger from the belief that the ends justify the means than we are from terrorists. Fortunately, in our time of need Loyola College Professor Thomas J. DiLorenzo has stepped forward with a blockbuster of a book, “The Real Lincoln,” just released by Prima Publishing. Read it and regain perspective.
Lincoln believed that his ends justified his means. He used war to destroy the U.S. Constitution in order to establish a powerful central government.
Lincoln assumed dictatorial military powers. He used them to suppress all Northern opposition to his illegal and unconstitutional acts.
Lincoln violated every constitutionally guaranteed civil right. He ignored rulings hand-delivered to him by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney ordering Lincoln to respect and faithfully execute the laws of the United States and to protect civil rights.
Lincoln replied by suspending habeas corpus, by instituting a secret police, and by arbitrarily arresting without warrants or due process thousands of leading citizens of Northern cities, state legislators, U.S. Congressmen, newspaper owners and editors, ministers, bankers, policemen--literally everyone who expressed the slightest reservation about Lincoln’s aims and means or who was anonymously denounced by a rival or envious neighbor.
In the thoroughness with which Lincoln suppressed dissent, he prefigured 20th century totalitarians.
Lincoln’s “train of abuses” far exceeded those that provoked our Founding Fathers to declare independence from Britain.
In conducting the war, Lincoln encouraged his generals to violate international law, the U.S. Military Code, and the moral prohibition against waging war on civilians. Lincoln urged his generals to conduct total war against the Southern civilian population, to slaughter them with bombardments, to burn their homes, barns and towns, to use rape as a weapon of war, to destroy foodstuffs, and to leave women, children and the elderly in the cold of winter without shelter or a scrap of food.
In order to carry out Lincoln’s wishes, a new kind of soldier was needed. General Sherman filled his regiments with big city criminals and foreigners fresh from the jails of Europe. The war against the Southern civilian population was fought with the immigrant soldier.
Professor DiLorenzo writes that had the South won the war, there is no doubt that Lincoln and his generals, Grant, Sherman and Sheridan, would have been hung as war criminals under the Geneva Convention of 1863.
Lincoln was an American Pol Pot, except worse. Pol Pot’s barbarism was justified by the Marxian doctrine of class genocide to which he adhered. Lincoln’s barbarism was prohibited by the morality of his time and the U.S. Constitution, yet neither deterred him.
Professor DiLorenzo’s greatest contribution is to show the real reasons for which Lincoln went to war. Abolishing slavery was not one of them. Lincoln was determined to destroy the Southern states in order to remove the constraints that Southern senators and congressmen, standing in the Jeffersonian tradition, placed in the way of centralized federal power, high tariffs, and subsidies to Northern industries.
Lincoln lusted after Empire. The juggernaut he put in place exterminated the Plains Indians with the same ferocity with which Southern towns and cities were sacked and pillaged. Far from “saving the union,” Lincoln utterly destroyed the union achieved by the Founding Fathers and the U.S. Constitution.
So little is left of accountable government that the war on terror could very easily bring down the remaining timbers of a once great house. Conservatives should rethink their enthusiasm for the police state methods of the war on terror while there is still time.
Paul Craig Roberts is the author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice.
COPYRIGHT 2001 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
March 19, 2002
Congressmen & Congresswomen can ACT to clarify our purposes,
assist the Executive in the prosecution of the WAR-by DECLARING IT, &
addressing the issues Mr. Roberts details.
For example, comparing Lincoln to Pol Pot is ludicrous. There were no killing fields or mass enslavement of Southern whites, not even by the Radical Republicans, whom Lincon opposed, FYI. Pol Pot was bloodthirsty even by Communist standards, killing four million of his own countrymen. I doubt civilian deaths in the South from battle action exceeded 20,000.
Had Lincoln survived Booth's assassination attempt, he would likely have accepted the Southern white governments, so long as they pledged loyalty to the Union. Lincoln was a high tariff and internal improvements advocate; he came out of the Whig tradition, exemplified by Henry Clay, a senator from slaveholding Kentucky who was Lincoln's role model. The Black Codes would not have been challenged, given their similarities to decades-old laws in Lincoln's own Illinois and his white supremacy beliefs. There would never have been Reconstruction had Lincoln lived, which led to far more Southern bitterness than did the war itself.
As for Sherman's army being filled with the dregs of Europe and the prisons of the Northern cities, his army drew mainly from the Midwestern states, which in the 1860s, lacked large cities, St. Louis and Chicago excepted. The Army of the Potomac, which spent almost all the war in Virginia, was more likely to have big city men, yet this army was not accused of major crimes of looting or burning. There were many Irish, German, Dutch, and Scandinavian-born soldiers in Sherman's forces, but they were hardly mercenaries. Rather, they were immigrants who were as liable for military duty as were the native-born.
Lincoln was rough on dissent, but so were Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt during wartime. How can a nation wage a major war while dissidents form a fifth column? The North won the Civil War and the United States the two world wars with suppression of internal dissent, but during the Vietnam War, dissent went basically unchallenged and proved an effective weapon for the Communist foe.
Let's not forget that the South was hardly a libertarian idyll; the Southern states suppressed anti-slavery propaganda and activism years before Fort Sumter. Several dozen Union sympathizers were hanged in Gainesville, Texas, for being pro-Yankee and not for waging war against Texas and the Confederacy. Quantrill's guerillas were as ruthless to Unionists in Missouri and Kansas as the Redlegs were to Rebel supporters. Confederate privateers did immense damage to the New England whaling fleet. Had the U.S.S. Monitor not stopped the C.S.S. Virginia at Hampton Roads, the ironclad would likely have sailed north to level her guns at New York City (ironically home to a large number of Southern sympathizers).
FWIW, I believe Lincoln was unjustified in attempting to stop the secession of the Southern states. Southerners fought, by and large, for their freedom from Northern political dominance and economic oppression, and not to preserve slavery. Anti-black prejudice was extremely high in the North, as witnessed by the black codes and the anti-draft riots. However, hyberbole and misinformation, such as Roberts wrote, do the cause of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis no honor.
I had many ancestors directly affected by the Union tactics dealt between Atlanta and Savanah-their behavior is beyond words, though it is memorialized, with my family's home place even spelled out, on metal historical plaques. As to it having been official policy-only documentation might prove or disprove that question. Women were raped wholesale, civilians murdered, graves dug-up so jewelry might be stolen, plantations-occupied by non-combatants-were burned, animals stolen & those remaining shot, crops destroyed, all far beyond the normal events and mis-behavior common in ANY wartime circumstance, on a repetative and frequent pattern. So extreme was this campaign, any contemporaneous reparations, rather like those suggested for slaves or their descendants, would never have assuaged the deliberate HARM perpetrated. Somehow, I should imagine word of this action reached Washington,DC. Other heinous crimes were a matter of policy during the OCCUPATION of all the formerly Confederate States.I have no further desire to discuss these matters & shall not.
I posted an article, hoping it might draw our attention to more contemporary problems.
We face a WAR & a crisis that is large beyond our compreshension, shall endure ( if we survive to see it )beyond many of our lives. The govenrment has shown some resolve, taken some rational action & also some irrational & improper action, thus wasting time and political capital.
Every day may bring fresh assualts, from which me may find recovery nearly impossible.
I once posted an article that, while it had good points, were marred by an author's prejudice, in this case against Charles Darwin. Darwin's theory of evolution has been used by numerous people as a proof of the nonexistence of God, the supremacy of the white race, and the inevitable triumph of Communism. Darwin himself did not believe in any of these views, yet many creationists and some conservatives, who disagree with his theory of evolution, portray him as depraved as Marx or Nietzsche. This position, in turn, inflames deists, Objectivists, and even Christians who see no irreconcilible inconsistency between the theory of evolution and the God of the Bible. All of these people see Darwin as a scientist in pursuit of objective truth, who is unfairly maligned by creationists. As a result, a valid point of the author on the dangers of public education or big government becomes a creationist vs. evolutionist food fight.
Many paleoconservatives, neo-Confederates, and libertarians have fallen into the same trap with regard to Lincoln that creationists have with Darwin. Because Lincoln's administration was the turning point that permanently fixed Federal supremacy in America, he must be the principal cause of all the socialistic, secular humanist, and centralizing notions that have plagued our nation. Thus, paleos, etc., often swallow every smear ever mentioned relative to Lincoln: militant atheism, homosexuality, etc.
Lincoln was not the plaster saint revered by many biographers, but neither was he a Midwestern Lenin or a log cabin Hitler. He believed in vigorous government, a la Henry Clay, but he was no socialist. He also opposed the Radical Republicans, such as Thaddeus Stevens, and had he survived to fill out his second term, Reconstruction and its attendant toll upon the South would not have happened. Lincoln was also a strong advocate of returning American blacks to Africa, and he might have pursued that goal vigorously had he lived past April 1865. Tariffs would have been high, but his policy in that area would give Pat Buchanan, a paleo-conservative hero, no problem.
Despite some actions to expand the Federal government's powers under Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson, it was not until Franklin Roosevelt's administration that Federal power went into exponential growth. Ironically, it was the 11 states of the former Confederacy that helped send FDR to the Presidency four times. His strongest opponents were often Northern men, like Alf Landon, Joe Martin, and Hamilton Fish, whose political home was the party of Lincoln.
The license plate that shows an old Rebel saying, "Forget, hell!" has the right attitude, so long as we remember what actually happened, rather than someone's spin on events.
Taxation & Control are their only ends. They only want everything we produce.
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