Posted on 04/14/2003 8:52:11 PM PDT by Aurelius
The founding fathers of the United States of America knew exactly what they meant by freedom, or liberty, and the liberty for which they fought and established this nation.
I'm concerned that our generation doesn't understand liberty. It is the right to make free choices within the boundaries of laws that protect the citizens. Freedom is the right to live one's life according to one's own choices, also within a framework of laws designed to protect people from one another.
Freedom is not anarchy and it is not "government" or unauthorized control of one set of people by another. Anarchy obliterates freedom because it takes its own as being superior to that of others. Government control is the antithesis of freedom because laws enacted by the few without the consent of the many are the substance of tyranny.
It is decidedly regretful that the Union won over the Confederacy and that the fiction of emancipation of the slaves was used as the cover-up and many people to this very day, if they know there was a War between the Union and the Confederacy, believe that Lincoln freed the slaves and that the North was morally superior to the South ... the former being good and the latter being evil. That such a myth could be foist upon the American people in the first place is bad. That it should persist to this very day is absurd, an evidence of the lack of substance in our system of education.
Union was not the objective of the founders. King George III (the British king, not the present George II) made an agreement with the thirteen individual colonies, not with Washington D.C. or a union called the United States. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, part of the Bill of Rights enumerating what government may not do, stated clearly that states' rights prevailed over any government power not specifically delegated to the central authority.
For many years the moniker "states' rights" has meant -- to most Americans -- the right to forced segregation and prior to that, the belief in the benefits of slavery. Actually, at the time the Union was fighting the Confederacy, "northern" states also had legalized slavery. All slavery was ended by the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln was credited with freeing the slaves but in actuality, the power of the Christian faith and the idea that one person might own another person were moving like a Bradley fighting vehicle though nineteenth century thought. Slavery was wrong. It would have disappeared from the South under far friendlier terms had the Confederacy survived.
Additionally, the survival of the Confederacy would have prevented America's future ills by prohibiting the federal government from seizing powers that belong to the states via Supreme Court interpretations and opinions that override the original Constitution and Bill of Rights without power to do so, other than that granted by the courts to themselves.
Why is this important? Because the more Union we have the less unity we have as a nation and the less freedom we have as individuals. Just as cultures differ between nations, they differ in regions of large nations.
The plain fact is, the United States was designed to be a confederacy and not a centralized union. The idea of union simply crops out as some individuals saw "needs" that were more in their own ideas than in the facts of the time. What Lincoln did was not to free the slaves as much as to make slaves of us all to the Union system of centralized, powerful government that has now grown into a budding monarchy.
Various documentaries have tagged Lincoln's many failures and then shifted gears to show his outstanding "success" as the man who liberated the slaves. Malarkey. In the 1820's there was a plan afoot by the churches and some states, with the approval of the fed, to buy Liberia (which was done, incidentally, and I think the US would do well to enforce its ownership of that piece of Africa) as a home for all blacks who wished to return to their native land. It could now be used as a base for saving white Afrikaners and others who oppose the African National Congress and other communist/Marxist organizations that are destroying the people and animals of the dark continent while raping its enormous mineral wealth.
As I said, slavery was on its way out long before Lincoln. His contribution, if it can be called that, was not in freeing the slaves but in establishing union over confederacy as the governmental model for the USA.
What we would not have if we had a confederacy as originally constructed is a burgeoning bureaucracy where the idea of control of the masses grows like toxic mold amidst the marshes of government employees and departments, bureaus and administrations so that it is hardly known just how much money the government actually spends, on what, with what results, and at what cost to the people. No federal income tax could have been perpetrated on a confederacy. With a union, it was a cinch, legal or not.
Even at the birth of this nation there were those on hand who wanted a strong central government rather than a free confederacy of sovereign states.
When the Union won, this nation was on its way to a quasi-monarchy or oligarchy that the founders would have found reprehensible, noxious and contrary to the intent of the entire Revolutionary war. The moment much power is vested in or appropriated, unchallenged, by a central government and a central leader, then the freedoms guaranteed to the people become privileges extended to the masses by the elites. That is precisely the opposite of the original intent of creating the US.
If we were a confederacy, then each state would have to debate whether or not we wished to go to war, and Congress would not dare delegate its constitutional responsibilities to the executive branch. Executive orders would be few, far between, issued in emergencies only, and never used as a substitute for legislation that a president feels he might not receive from Congress.
A confederacy would put a sudden halt to the bizarre globalist world. A sovereign nation comprised of sovereign states would never go along with the objectives and tyranny of globalism, so the question of America becoming a part of the Global Village would be totally moot. It could not, would not happen.
Each state could defend its own borders with our neighbors to the south and north of us, protecting the persons and property of the owners and occupants of the land and with undisputed authority to do so. As it is, a whole bunch of ineffective government agencies are figuring out ways not to offend illegal aliens to the detriment and endangerment of our own citizens.
This travesty on freedom is ridiculous and deadly.
Over two hundred and fifty thousand Americans died on U.S. soil in the war between the North and the South or, more correctly, between the Union and the Confederacy.
Oddly enough, our strongest patriots are still in the South. The North is home to most of the liberals who have not only joined hands with the globalists but have led the march toward tyranny and anti-American sentiments that delight our enemies abroad.
In its own way, the war between the Union and the Confederacy not only devastated the South for generations, but it paved the way for all those ills that now plague us by reason of a strong, bloated and tyrannical central government.
Slavery would have been abolished eventually in every state. Public pressure and churches would have eventually caused abolition to come to pass.
What we would not have is slaves of all colors to a federalized regime that is totally out of control by the people who are supposed to be the "consenting governed."
If we don't consent then we are tagged as enemies of the state. More properly, the nation.
Meantime, our freedoms have been absorbed, abrogated or negated by a central government against which there is, absent a time machine, no way to control or downsize.
Thanks a bunch, Abe.
Not quite; I respectfully submit that it is not the confederate flag that flies today as the "national" flag in the southern states.
War settles debates.
The Emancipation Proclamation only ended slavery in the states that left the Union.
Baptist?
Show me where is specifically allows unilateral secession and I'll agree with you.
"All slavery was ended by the Emancipation Proclamation...No federal income tax could have been perpetrated on a confederacy...Over two hundred and fifty thousand Americans died on U.S. soil in the war between the North and the South..."
You gonna go with the author's thesis on these, too?
When our American ancestors consented to calling into existence the federal government in 1787, the means by which they did so was the document known as the Constitution. Contrary to popular opinion, the Constitution was not — and is not — a grant of rights to the citizenry. Instead, the Constitution is a “barbed-wire entanglement” designed to interfere with, restrict, and impede government officials in the exercise of political power.
For example, the Constitution does not grant anyone freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to assemble, or the right to bear arms. In fact, one searches in vain for any language in our Constitution that grants any rights to the people whatsoever.
The Constitution was to control the Federal Government only.
It was already pointed out to you that many people you slander as "hating the US" proudly served in the US military (unlike you). We walked the walk. You just talk. Your "patriotic fervor" amounts to nothing more than flaming people who don't agree with you.
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