With the Oscars putting Lincoln on the brain...

[Chucktshoes]

The American Lenin by L. Neil Smith lneil@lneilsmith.org

It’s harder and harder these days to tell a liberal from a conservative — given the former category’s increasingly blatant hostility toward the First Amendment, and the latter’s prissy new disdain for the Second Amendment — but it’s still easy to tell a liberal from a libertarian.

Just ask about either Amendment.

If what you get back is a spirited defense of the ideas of this country’s Founding Fathers, what you’ve got is a libertarian. By shameful default, libertarians have become America’s last and only reliable stewards of the Bill of Rights.

But if — and this usually seems a bit more difficult to most people — you’d like to know whether an individual is a libertarian or a conservative, ask about Abraham Lincoln.

Suppose a woman — with plenty of personal faults herself, let that be stipulated — desired to leave her husband: partly because he made a regular practice, in order to go out and get drunk, of stealing money she had earned herself by raising chickens or taking in laundry; and partly because he’d already demonstrated a proclivity for domestic violence the first time she’d complained about his stealing.

Now, when he stood in the doorway and beat her to a bloody pulp to keep her home, would we memorialize him as a hero? Or would we treat him like a dangerous lunatic who should be locked up, if for no other reason, then for trying to maintain the appearance of a relationship where there wasn’t a relationship any more? What value, we would ask, does he find in continuing to possess her in an involuntary association, when her heart and mind had left him long ago?

History tells us that Lincoln was a politically ambitious lawyer who eagerly prostituted himself to northern industrialists who were unwilling to pay world prices for their raw materials and who, rather than practice real capitalism, enlisted brute government force — “sell to us at our price or pay a fine that’ll put you out of business” — for dealing with uncooperative southern suppliers. That’s what a tariff’s all about. In support of this “noble principle”, when southerners demonstrated what amounted to no more than token resistance, Lincoln permitted an internal war to begin that butchered more Americans than all of this country’s foreign wars — before or afterward — rolled into one.

Lincoln saw the introduction of total war on the American continent — indiscriminate mass slaughter and destruction without regard to age, gender, or combat status of the victims — and oversaw the systematic shelling and burning of entire cities for strategic and tactical purposes. For the same purposes, Lincoln declared, rather late in the war, that black slaves were now free in the south — where he had no effective jurisdiction — while declaring at the same time, somewhat more quietly but for the record nonetheless, that if maintaining slavery could have won his war for him, he’d have done that, instead.

The fact is, Lincoln didn’t abolish slavery at all, he nationalized it, imposing income taxation and military conscription upon what had been a free country before he took over — income taxation and military conscription to which newly “freed” blacks soon found themselves subjected right alongside newly-enslaved whites. If the civil war was truly fought against slavery — a dubious, “politically correct” assertion with no historical evidence to back it up — then clearly, slavery won.

Lincoln brought secret police to America, along with the traditional midnight “knock on the door”, illegally suspending the Bill of Rights and, like the Latin America dictators he anticipated, “disappearing” thousands in the north whose only crime was that they disagreed with him. To finance his crimes against humanity, Lincoln allowed the printing of worthless paper money in unprecedented volumes, ultimately plunging America into a long, grim depression — in the south, it lasted half a century — he didn’t have to live through, himself.

In the end, Lincoln didn’t unite this country — that can’t be done by force — he divided it along lines of an unspeakably ugly hatred and resentment that continue to exist almost a century and a half after they were drawn. If Lincoln could have been put on trial in Nuremburg for war crimes, he’d have received the same sentence as the highest-ranking Nazis.

If libertarians ran things, they’d melt all the Lincoln pennies, shred all the Lincoln fives, take a wrecking ball to the Lincoln Memorial, and consider erecting monuments to John Wilkes Booth. Libertarians know Lincoln as the worst President America has ever had to suffer, with Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson running a distant second, third, and fourth.

Conservatives, on the other hand, adore Lincoln, publicly admire his methods, and revere him as the best President America ever had. One wonders: is this because they’d like to do, all over again, all of the things Lincoln did to the American people? Judging from their taste for executions as a substitute for individual self-defense, their penchant for putting people behind bars — more than any other country in the world, per capita, no matter how poorly it works to reduce crime — and the bitter distaste they display for Constitutional “technicalities” like the exclusionary rule, which are all that keep America from becoming the world’s largest banana republic, one is well-justified in wondering.

The troubling truth is that, more than anybody else’s, Abraham Lincoln’s career resembles and foreshadows that of V.I. Lenin, who, with somewhat better technology at his disposal, slaughtered millions of innocents — rather than mere hundreds of thousands — to enforce an impossibly stupid idea which, in the end, like forced association, was proven by history to be a resounding failure. Abraham Lincoln was America’s Lenin, and when America has finally absorbed that painful but illuminating truth, it will finally have begun to recover from the War between the States.


http://lneilsmith.org/abelenin.html Edited February 25, 2013 by Chucktshoes

[TMF]

There's a lot of black and white in that article that doesn't account for a lot of grey.  I mean there's stuff that I agree with, but comparing conscription with private ownership of another human being is very different.  There are plenty of things to beat up Lincoln about, but the draft isn't one of them considering it's been done many times over.  Being drafted into service for crisis or national security is an important part of being an American and maintaining our way of life.  Every time there is a natural disaster and I see a stadium full of refugees sitting on their ass, while you have volunteers driving from several states away to help with relief efforts I wonder why every able bodied adult that is not caring for a child is not drafted into some kind of disaster relief role.  Being drafted into service is a price an American pays for being an American, just like taxes.  I don't believe this should be abused, such as it was during the Vietnam War, but it certainly has a necessity.  That is different than me going down to market and buying a human (who is born with rights given to him by God) and having that human serve me against his will for my own profit.

 

I think that Lincoln was a symptom of a larger problem taking place in our country in the decades leading up to the Civil War, and that was one group imposing it's will on another.  The war could have been easily avoided if cooler heads would have prevailed, but once the Confederate States seceeded all bets were off.  I think the North forced their hand and the South acted out of desperation.  I think a valuable lesson should have been learned from that experience as we are on a similar path right now.  We have a very large group of Americans that are essentially ignored by those who run our government, and the arrogance of them being such that we aren't only ignored, we are marginalized as fruitcakes and nutjobs.  Well, if this goes on for the foreseeable future it may well be a self fufilling prophecy.

 

Oh, and I don't see why this movie was hailed as being so great.  It really wasn't.  It was like watching one of those thrown together History Channel specials that are heavy on dramatizations.  I mean, it wasn't sooo terrible that if I watched it on the History Channel I would say that it sucked, but for all the hype that it garnered I was not impressed with any of it.  But I guess it has Lincoln + Slavery + Southerners depicted as pure evil + Sally Field + Steven Spielberg you have to say it's awesome or the left wing Hollywood crowd will disown you.

Edited February 25, 2013 by TMF

[Chucktshoes]

I have to fully and completely disagree with you about conscription. To say that because later administrations followed in Lincoln's example and used a draft to enable them to wage wars (regardless of validity of the the casus belli) absolves him of guilt in using such an immoral tool is a poor sort of justification. It is the same as saying it is ok to steal from work because "everybody does it". A government that sacrifices its citizens’ freedom to prop itself up is no longer a guardian of freedom but a tool for tyranny. So ask yourself, do you exist to protect the government, or does the government exist to protect yours? By that I mean does government exist to protect the individual liberties of its citizens. I believe that to be the ONLY valid purpose of any form of government. If government’s purpose is to protect your individual rights, it cannot then claim title to your most basic right—your very life—in exchange. Any Rand tackled (and demolished it, IMO) in a 1967 lecture titled "The Wreckage of Consensus". Here is an excerpt in which she directly addressed the immorality of the draft.

Of all the statist violations of individual rights in a mixed economy, the military draft is the worst. It is an abrogation of rights. It negates man’s fundamental right—the right to life—and establishes the fundamental principle of statism: that a man’s life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. Once that principle is accepted, the rest is only a matter of time.
If the state may force a man to risk death or hideous maiming and crippling, in a war declared at the state’s discretion, for a cause he may neither approve of nor even understand, if his consent is not required to send him into unspeakable martyrdom—then, in principle, all rights are negated in that state, and its government is not man’s protector any longer. What else is there left to protect?
The most immoral contradiction—in the chaos of today’s anti-ideological groups—is that of the so-called “conservatives,” who posture as defenders of individual rights, particularly property rights, but uphold and advocate the draft. By what infernal evasion can they hope to justify the proposition that creatures who have no right to life have the right to a bank account? A slightly higher—though not much higher—rung of hell should be reserved for those “liberals” who claim that man has the “right” to economic security, public housing, medical care, education, recreation, but no right to life, or: that man has the right to livelihood, but not to life.
One of the notions used by all sides to justify the draft is that “rights impose obligations.” Obligations, to whom?—and imposed, by whom? Ideologically, that notion is worse than the evil it attempts to justify: it implies that rights are a gift from the state, and that a man has to buy them by offering something (his life) in return. Logically, that notion is a contradiction: since the only proper function of a government is to protect man’s rights, it cannot claim title to his life in exchange for that protection.
The only “obligation” involved in individual rights is an obligation imposed, not by the state, but by the nature of reality (i.e., by the law of identity): consistency, which, in this case, means the obligation to respect the rights of others, if one wishes one’s own rights to be recognized and protected.
Politically, the draft is clearly unconstitutional. No amount of rationalization, neither by the Supreme Court nor by private individuals, can alter the fact that it represents “involuntary servitude.”
A volunteer army is the only proper, moral—and practical—way to defend a free country. Should a man volunteer to fight, if his country is attacked? Yes—if he values his own rights and freedom. A free (or even semi-free) country has never lacked volunteers in the face of foreign aggression. Many military authorities have testified that a volunteer army—an army of men who know what they are fighting for and why—is the best, most effective army, and that a drafted one is the least effective.