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To: BlackElk
I say with all sincerity I have missed your higher brow critiques of the paleo-right in these recent months. That said:

The Letter:

http://www.marxists.org/history/international/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm

Also:

"In his book Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution [James] McPherson notes, on pages 24 & 25: "Lincoln championed the leaders of the European revolutions of 1848; in turn, a man who knew something about those revolutions - Karl Marx - praised Lincoln in 1865 as 'the single-minded son of the working class' who had led his 'country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.'" Note Marx's comment about the "reconstruction of a social world."
79 posted on 08/21/2003 10:02:26 AM PDT by JohnGalt ("the constitution as it is, the union as it was")
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To: JohnGalt
Yeah, well I never claimed to be other than a street fighter but I stand by that reference to Marx which I have posted. You had originally posted 1863 and now post-1865 for the claimed language supporting Lincoln. Marx despised Lincoln the person, admired Confederate leaders personally by comparison. By 1865, praise was mere opportunism. I made no reference to slavery other than my own opposituion to it.

When you have experienced weekly Fleming's inane notions of post-1900 America in his "Real American History" course, including such lunacies as all labor unions were, of course, communist, I'll take your paleo prejudices seriously. I believe that we have previously established that we are speaking over a generation gap since I am a very early Boomer and you are (I believe) not. I was there to participate in the actual conservative movement of the late 1960s and the 1970s and the early 1980s. You most likely were not. Paleos were virtually non-existent, even more so than now.

Whatever your personal beliefs may be, I do not share with the Raimondos and the Sam Francis types the "high brow" notion that distinguished intellectual leaders among New York's Jews, as such, are not welcome in the conservative movement or that as converts to conservatism they are not welcome. They are welcome. So are blacks who become conservatives. So are Hispanics. So are cnverted Marxists. We are not a movement of "blood and soil" nor an hereditary one which cannot distinguish between the William Green/George Meany/Lane Kirkland AFL-CIO (i.e.) pre-John Sweeney and the communist labor movements that abounded abroad. Bean-counting in the back room of the bank in Snoreville, Pennsyltucky is not the breadth of conservatism. If it tacks on either internationalism or isolationist cowardice, it is simply NOT conservatism at all. Nor is it conservative to consort with lavender advocates of national cowardice and sometime Pravda columnists like Raimondo.

As David Frum (whom I had not previously much liked) stated so well in his NR piece, the paleos of today invented themselves in about 1986, when recognizing without admitting that their respective personal and philosophical eccentricities meant that they would never be hired by socially normal folk in Reagan's White House, threw a temper tantrum and declared themselves heirs of John Flynn, Charles Lindbergh and Garrett Garrett (none of whom were around to defend heir thusly abused posthumous reputations) and that all who had been known as conservative for decades were henceforth to be known among the paleo-eccentric as "neo-conservatives" (lions and tigers, etc). Since then, the paleos have succeeded in addling Pat Buchanan's ideas of foreign policy from the sensible and sometimes brilliant to the absolutely mythical and embarassing, ruined Pat as a political figure, and gotten about 17 years older and nearer the grave.

Paleos were not helped by 9/11/01 aka Pearl Harbor II which rather graphically demonstrated their obsolescence yet again. Hoping that was low-brow enough to satisfy your expectations, I imagine we will be clashing some more but, other than drawing attention to "paleo" views with minimal risk that a handful of the gullible may be recruited to paleo-eccentricity, that is not a matter for regret. It is like the child's card game War (you should pardon the expression) in which it is easy but seldom very useful to take the other guy's deuces and IS very useful to take his kings. When he has no aces, or face cards or anything above a four, he has a theoretical chance at winning due to the "wars" that result from leading the same value cards on a trick which might net some value among the hidden cards, sort of like the US might "lose" a war against Haiti, but don't bet your future or your civilization on it.

89 posted on 08/21/2003 10:57:23 AM PDT by BlackElk ( We're off to hunt the RINOs, the RINOs who want to rule Oz! Becuz, becuz, becuz.....)
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