Posted on 06/26/2002 3:32:44 PM PDT by Aurelius
I have followed with great interest the attacks on Economics Professor Thomas DiLorenzo for writing The Real Lincoln. Yes, I do in that first sentence say that the attacks have been very much against DiLorenzo. Certainly they are about the book, but they are driven significantly by a desire to smear the author and thereby win the field as DiLorenzo simply must, his attackers feel, slink back into shamed anonymity. The Real Lincoln exposes not merely the cloyingly false mythology surrounding the person of Abraham Lincoln, but in doing so it also exposes the hollow mythology of centralized government empire that has been necessary to the erection of the race-based socialist American welfare state that demands more and more taxes to execute more and more control over every aspect of our daily lives—in order to do unprecedented good for us, the centralized government and its apologists and the bureaucrats as well as its chief beneficiaries swear while crossing their hearts and hoping to die.
DiLorenzo reveals himself to be a heretic of the first order because modern democracy seems incapable of existing locally, instead creating empire as kings create empire: forcing their will upon others. The European Union is as significant, though to this point more peaceful, an example as the USA, with its apparently overriding tendencies to intrude into everything and manufacture new agencies staffed with bureaucracies, with its 19th-, 20th- and now 21st-century readiness to war endlessly to do good (free slaves; free the prairies of red savages so white Protestants could farm hitherto wasted land; free victims of ‘fundamentalist’ religion; free peoples from racial or sexual discrimination; free victims from monarchical or oligarchic tyranny; free peoples from the horror of choosing a governmental or economic system obviously bad for them and thus inimical to the American Empire; free peoples of small nations the indignity of not sharing in the glories of a mighty empire; free people from lacking the higher culture of Madonna, Jesse Jackson race-hustling, and Gay Pride parades, etc.).
There is so much good to do, and so little time in which to do it, the least Americans could do is cheerfully surrender all their rights and financial assets to the centralized government that does good around the globe. Pax WASPiana. Of course, it was one of those pesky Celts, ignorant and ungrateful in his chained conquered state, who informed the Roman general proud of his declaiming about Pax Romana, "You have made a desert and call it peace."
The Imperial Conservative always finds momentary peace when he has slaughtered enough people. He is always justified in his soul in going to another land and killing any number of people in order to bring peace and civilization to them. The very fact that they resist with violence is proof that they are savages who must be conquered to protect the world from their barbaric violence, which if not checked through their being conquered and administered colonially (replaced in this age of overlapping PC and "compassionate conservatism" with "nation-building") could result in their sending an army to conquer some nation in order to rule it as a colony. Plus, if left alone they might discriminate against blacks or women or homosexuals or non-Christians, and the tolerance-promoting PC Yankee Empire cannot tolerate anything so barbarous.
The English and the Irish provide the best example in the modern world. The English are self-justified in any ruthlessness, in any Irish body count, in any artificially created Irish poverty, because the English are certain that their nine centuries of violence in Ireland has been necessary to civilization, because without that violence there would be no English rule in Ireland. The English are equally certain that all Irish resistance to foreign rule proves irrefutably that the Irish are violent savages (the best analogy is with those rapists who decide that the resistance proves the victim deserved it). In going to Ireland to kill the Irish and destroy or deny their full national independence, the Englishman proves himself to be a servant of civilization; in fighting to free his nation from imperial enslavement to the English, the Irishman proves himself to be a barbarian. In order to have peace and civilization in Ireland, the English Imperial Conservative knows, there must be gunpoint rule by the English, and the Irish must cheerfully and gratefully accept their status as conquered contributors to the Empire that had to slaughter hundreds of thousands of Irish people and destroy Irish economics and attempt to inflict genocide on the Gaelic language and Irish folk culture in order to bring peace, prosperity, culture, and morality to Ireland.
The Imperial Conservative is always right in using against you whatever violence he decides must be used to get you to serve his desires; you are always wrong, always the epitome of violent barbarism, in using any means to resist being enslaved to the Imperial Conservative’s desires.
Note here that I am not endorsing pacifism that precludes self-defense; rather, I am showing the utter hypocrisy that drives the Imperial Conservative. Hopefully, many who read this will recognize more than the utter hypocrisy that drives Imperial Conservatism. Hopefully, they will comprehend that Imperial Conservatism necessarily nudges, virtually forces, many people into accepting some form of leftism in hope of escaping the violent tyranny (first of armies conquering and then of increasingly centralized government) and cultural destruction that highlight, that very much define, Imperial Conservatism. They are fools to think they will find escape in leftism, but they are not fools to see horror and tyranny in Imperial Conservatism.
The Paleoconservative desires the freedom of local cultures and folkways, of local self-rule; the Imperial Conservative must necessarily destroy most of what the Paleoconservative holds near and dear. The English Imperial Conservative destroyed not merely much of what the Irish Paleoconservative held most dear, he also eventually destroyed most of what the English Paleoconservative held most dear. That is the ultimate cost of Imperial Conservatism: in a different way, at a different pace, and for very different, often antithetical, reasons, it achieves very much what full-fledged Leftism achieves.
And it was Yankee WASP Imperial Conservatism that won America by armed force during the War Between the States.
Once you grasp that fact, you must realize that the South, that all of Southern culture and heritage – no matter how slurred as racist or merely dismissed as hillbilly or redneck and therefore inferior, is indispensable to anything in American culture, political or otherwise, that is truly conservative. It is impossible to maintain any part of conservative American values (save certain aspects of the economy) or to downsize government unless the nation allows Southern culture to thrive, which requires the nation to stop funding cultural wars of genocide against the South.
Both Imperial Conservatives in the Yankee WASP tradition and leftists recognize all that, and thus each camp is anti-Southern in its own way. And just as each must work to cripple or, preferably, totally destroy Southern culture, each must have as one of its great heroes Abraham Lincoln. DiLorenzo has revealed the Emperor to have no clothes. Much of the Left is quite happy to see The Great Emancipator revealed as holding "racist" views, some of them far more harmful to the best interests of black Americans than those of the average slave owner of the time, for such knowledge can be used to demand more race-based socialism.
But the Imperial Conservative cannot afford any dismantling of the sanctified reputation of the American Empire’s founding father. Why, if Honest Abe were wrong, he splutters, then states do have real rights that the Federal government cannot abrogate, and if that is true, we cannot have any Empire, for states may secede when the Federal government becomes tyrannical. With that realization, the Yankee Imperial Conservative turns immediately to the Left to make a deal: for growing the central government, curtailing further the states’ rights that long since have existed in little more than name, hating Southern culture, and canonizing the philandering, plagiarizing, race-based socialist Socinian Martin Luther King.
The Yankee American Empire requires the unofficial deification of Lincoln as surely as the Roman Empire required the Senatorial deification of Julius Caesar. DiLorenzo has shown that Lincoln the father, and thus the Empire from its inception, was motivated principally by mercantilist economics, including the tariffs paid preponderantly by Southerners. That vision is one of a continually growing central government co-opting increasing amounts of the economy and using it to reward those citizens loyal to the central government (seen by region and state and ethnicity) and punish those historically disloyal to the central government.
Proto-National Socialism, I call it. That explains how Martin Luther King has progressed so quickly from beatification to sanctification to deification.
DiLorenzo is the enemy of the Yankee Empire because he has told an ugly truth, and his approach is one of the two most important to show people the falseness of their accepted national mythology: that we are a propositional nation whose founding fathers were all Anglo-Saxon and the propositions have progressed naturally for greater freedom. The other necessary approach is the Celtic-Southern thesis. It will take each approach to win this part of the culture war by freeing the minds of many who have known nothing but what the Empire’s school teachers, journalists, and professional politicians have told them.
No one's attacking DiLorenzo FOR writing anything. They're attacking WHAT he wrote. That this minor shift in emphasis is lost on you folks--and that you seize on legitimate criticism as yet another example of attacks on your "heritage" (whatever that is)--says volumes.
The Real Lincoln exposes not merely the cloyingly false mythology surrounding the person of Abraham Lincoln, but in doing so it also exposes the hollow mythology of centralized government empire...
DiLorenzo doesn't "expose" anything but his own intellectual dishonesty. He picks and chooses quotes from Lincoln, as well as from other works, to form a distorted picture. It is the sorriest piece of work I've seen since The South Was Right!.
To me, it's amazing that your ilk LOVES to champion silly, revisionist histories written by folks who PLAINLY have an agenda, but you castigate anyone, such as James McPherson, who DARES to simply write a balanced account of that period in our nation's history.
And re this incredibly ignorant charge, often made by you incredibly ignorant types, that Lincoln instituted "tyrannical central government," it just shows, once again, how stupid you are when it comes to history.
What Lincoln helped establish--along with Congress, the courts, and the Unionists in the former slaveholding states that were finally able to make their voices known without fear of their lives--was the UNITED STATES as an inseparable Union. Because of him, and the other leaders of the time, The "United" States is just that. Without him, you would have soon had eleven little banana republics where you think your "confederacy" was supposed to be (North Carolina and East Tennessee were already talking of seceding from the secession to form THEIR own entity before the war was half over).
Lincoln was THE greatest President of the Nineteenth Century, beside which all but a handful are dwarves.
That's the VERY REASON why books like this keep coming out, and why pissants like you keep buying 'em.
It never occurs to you that there might be a REASON they are disregarded by 99.9% of the rest of the citizenry. Or if it does, I'm sure you swallow another "Confederate"-flag coated happy pill, and you feel better in an hour.
The Real Lincoln exposes not merely the cloyingly false mythology surrounding the person of Abraham Lincoln, but in doing so it also exposes the hollow mythology of centralized government empire that has been necessary to the erection of the race-based socialist American welfare state that demands more and more taxes to execute more and more control over every aspect of our daily lives—in order to do unprecedented good for us, the centralized government and its apologists and the bureaucrats as well as its chief beneficiaries swear while crossing their hearts and hoping to die.Near-Faulknerian length, in the style of Donald Duck.
Such a question had to have crossed the minds of the State delegations who joined the Union in 1787.
I also wonder why secession was not addressed in the Amendments ratified shortly after the War Between the States.
| Abraham Lincoln... | Darth Vader... |
| ...has the same number of letters in his first name as his last. (7) | ...has the same number of letters in his first name as his last. (5) |
| ...fought in a war few people know about (The Blackhawk War) | ...fought in a war few people know about (The Clone wars) |
| ...wore a black stovepipe hat. | ...wore a black helmet. |
| ...suspended habeas corpus to crush the rebellion in various states. | ...used the dark side of the force to crush the rebellion on various planets. |
| ...despite his power, still had to answer to Congress. | ...despite his power, still had to answer to the Emperor. |
| ...changed generals several times during the Civil War. | ...changed admirals several times during The Empire Strikes Back. |
| ...was a lawyer. | ...was Dark Lord of the Sith. |
| ...had an enemy with popular theme music (Dixie) | ...had an enemy with popular theme music (Theme from Star Wars) |
| ...was born in a log cabin. | ...was born in a log cabin. |
| ...was involved in a war which later became a series of movies (Gettysburg) | ...was involved in a war which later became a series of movies (The Star Wars Trilogy) |
| ...oversaw the reconstruction of the Union (before he was assassinated) | ...oversaw the reconstruction of the Death Star (before he died) |
Otherwise, the piece merits no response.
Cheers,
Richard F.
"Of course, it was one of those pesky Celts Picts, ignorant and ungrateful in his chained conquered state, who informed the Roman general proud of his declaiming about Pax Romana, said 'You They have made make a desert and call it peace.' "
I am strange though, even my wife'll agree with you on that one.
Neither is the right of the Supreme Court to rule on Constitutional law.
I'm saving this one. I'll never use it but I'll read it whenever I'm depressed.
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. [Emphasis added].
Amendment X"
Yes sir, it is.
I had not thought about the Tenth Amendment in relation to secession, but there it is.
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