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.
Nonsense, I just take them to have a different meaning than you. I believe that there is sufficient evidence that indicates that unilateral secession as practiced by the southern states was not permitted.
...and showed your misunderstanding of the WBTS. The South never tried to overthrow anything...they just left (i.e., SECEEDED) and were forcibly brought back in to the Union.
You seem intelligent, but can't seem to grasp the basic concepts of the issue.
You have to look at slave ownership in total. When I was growing up I had two sisters and we owned one car, title in my fathers name. So you could say that only 20% of the family owned a car, but 100% received the benefits of car ownership. Likewise with slavery. Those 10% of the southerners who ownes slaves had wives and children. So in some states the number of people who lived in slave owning families approached 50%. Quite a difference.
You must also bear in mind that slavery wasn't just a Southern thing. It existed in most states of the Union.
Slavery was legal only in 15 states. New Jersey had a handful left as a result of their manumission laws.
I daresay that precious few of those in the North thought of blacks as equals -- Lincoln sure didn't.
True, but the same can be said of virtually every white person in the south. And while Lincoln believed that slavery was wrong the southern leaders and virtually all the white population believed that they were fit for nothing but slavery. So who is worse?
Hardly, considering that Jefferson Davis did institute an income tax.
What are your numbers? I have varying totals.
The figures I've seen run between 620,000 and 650,000 dead on both sides from all causes.
I suspect that as a black Muslim, Hasan Akbar's views on the Southern Cross were not much different than your own, or the rest of the Wlat Brigade.
Your attitude is kind of like telling a Puerto Rican soldier that he should not be proud of Puerto Rico.
Withdraw? Perhaps. But to do so in a unilateral manner without the approval of the other states? No.
And that is a flat out lie in so many ways. It seems you can not accept the fact that people can partake in southern pride and still support the USA. Slandering southern US soldiers by comparing them to the Muslinm fragger (even though he would support your views) will not help.
And - as a challenge to you, you can do a search of my posts and show where I have expressed hatred of the US. You will not find them, but it might be an interesting exercise for you. You might be surprised at how much we agree on except this issue.
Southerners have always served, and still do. Because we are proud of our heritage doesn't make us traitors.
You dropped off of a thread a few weeks ago when queried on YOUR service record. So, once again, unless YOU have ever taken the oath to defend OUR country, just say "Thank You" for your right to show your A$$ and shut your pie hole.
I didn't think you blue-zone socialists ever said the Pledge of Allegiance.
Just wanted to point out that he went down this road before and never ponied up.
I never suggested that you were out to ovethrow anyone. But you did initiate hostilities by firing on Sumter and by declaring war afterwards. You should be prepared to accept the responsibility for your actions.
Unless you took the oath, you have no place to question anyone's patriotism. Asan's actions were traitorous...hardly comparable to one having pride in their history.
Please don't further embarrass the rest of us Alabamians.
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