I used to think I was a Republican, back when I thought they
stood for limited government—even abolishing unconstitutional programs and
departments, lowering taxes, protecting individual rights, et al. But that was before Rep. Newt Gingrich
succeeded in pulling off his “Contract with America†charade, along with all
his neoconservative imposters who spouted patriotism and religion.
It was also before I learned the truth about Abraham Lincoln
and what the “Party of Lincoln†really was.
I have learned more about the so-called Civil War from the writings of
Thomas DiLorenzo , especially his “The Real Lincoln†than I did in 17-18 years
in schools & universities.
George Bush is the reincarnation of Ruthless Abe and
callous/crazy Caligula.
The coldblooded killing, maiming, & destruction in this
day & time is indeed terrifying, for want of a better word. Sacrificing foreign innocents is bad enough,
but sacrificing your own people is maniacal at best. The cavalier attitudes, the profits to be
made, and the power to make it all happen are beyond comprehension. “Man’s inhumanity to man†takes on new
meaning when our very own country, once based on “life, liberty, & the
pursuit of happiness†has turned into a despotic dictatorship which strips its
citizens of their rights and protections under the rule of law and an
Enlightened philosophy of rationality, toleration, culture, heritage, and sovereignty.
Now, after all the hundreds of thousands of years it took
mankind to reach the point where a rational Constitution/Bill of Rights could
be constructed and individual rights protected from government tyranny and
predators, we not only march back into the Darkness of oppression, but as a
whole seem eager to achieve it.
Democrats are Socialist/Communist, Republicans are
Corporate/Fascists, and they work in concert with one another to achieve their
goals and to protect each other from any serious consequences…leaving taxpaying
citizens at the mercy of tyrannical self-serving politicrats/businesses/churches/government
agencies and the unchecked illegal 3rd World alien invasion.
The Party of Lincoln?
A self-fulfilling prophecy.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo123.html
Malice Toward All, Charity Toward
None: The Foundations of the American State
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
“Americans are forever proclaiming our boastful
aspersions to the world . . . that our government was based on the consent of
the people,” though in fact “it rests upon force, as much as any
government that ever existed.”
~ Letter from Robert E.
Lee to E.G.W. Butler, Oct. 11, 1867
“[H]ad the Confederates somehow won, had their victory
put them in position to bring their chief opponents before some sort of
tribunal, they would have found themselves justified . . . in stringing up
President Lincoln and the entire Union high command for violation of the laws
of war, specifically for waging war against noncombatants.”
~ Lee Kennett, Marching
through Georgia: A
Life of William Tecumseh Sherman, p. 286
In his book Battle
Cry for Freedom: The Civil War Era (p. 619), Lincoln cultist James
McPherson wrote that some 50,000 Southern civilians perished during the War to
Prevent Southern Independence. Others have made estimates that are much higher.
The only way this could be possible is that if thousands were murdered in cold
blood by the U.S. Army. This is a shocking claim, and it will be shocking to
most because such statistics say little about the actual horror of mass murder
at the hands of the state. Moreover, the state always has its court historians
and paid propagandists who put such statistics “in proper
perspective,” so that they will not alarm us. (Thomas Sowell comes to mind
as a contemporary commentator who has repeatedly belittled the number of
Americans killed in Iraq in the past four years by comparing it to the number
of deaths in World War II.)
The state funding and control of higher education that have
produced the totalitarian regime of political correctness has all but
guaranteed that there will be few (if any) publications that illuminate, rather
than obfuscate, some of the more devious deeds of the American state throughout
its history. But historian Walter Brian Cisco, who is not an academic and is
not on any state payroll, has recently written a book – War
Crimes Against Southern Civilians – that blows the lid off the
conspiracy of silence about the violent, mass-murdering origins of the American
Leviathan state (or “The New Birth of Freedom,” as both left-wing and
right-wing statists put it).
In the name of “restoring the union” the U.S.
Army, under the micromanagement of Abraham Lincoln, waged war on its own
people, shelling and burning entire cities populated only by civilians and
engaging in acts of plunder, forced evacuation, and mass murder. It is all
documented in gory detail by Mr. Cisco, who quotes conservative icon Richard M.
Weaver in his introductory chapter as having remarked that “from the
military policies of Sherman and Sheridan there lies but an easy step to total
war of the Nazis, the greatest affront to Western civilization since its
founding.”
Lincoln cultists are fond of dismissing all of this by
reciting Sherman’s “war is hell” slogan. But as Cisco points out,
murders, rapes, and robberies are also inevitable in human society, and are
likely to happen much more often if we cease to regard them as reprehensible. Those
who idolize General Sherman in this way are not “hearing the totalitarian
echo in their words.”
Lincoln was always aware of what was going on; waging war on
civilians – his own citizens – was his own policy from the very
beginning, as Cisco proves. In May of 1861, for example, Captain Nathaniel Lyon
recruited some seven thousand new German immigrants (mostly without uniforms)
to eliminate suspected secessionists in St. Louis. They rounded up some six
hundred men and paraded them through the streets playing the Star Spangled
Banner (which must have been completely foreign to the mostly non-English
speaking Germans). When the citizens of St. Louis protested, the recruits fired
on them, killing twenty-eight civilians and wounding seventy-five. Lyon was
promoted to brigadier general a week later, while some ten thousand civilians
fled St. Louis.
By 1863 Missouri, under U.S. Army occupation, was a place
were “arson, theft, and murder became so common that vast sections of the
state were uninhabited.” Cisco quotes Union General James H. Lane as
saying, “We believe in a war of extermination. I want to see every foot of
ground in Jackson, Cass and Bates counties burned over – everything laid
waste.”
Another practice of the Union Army that is reminiscent of
totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century was forced relocation of
suspected dissenters. Cisco gives chapter and verse of how this occurred in
Missouri, Tennessee, and elsewhere, as thousands of civilians were forced to
leave their homes. This even included Ohio Congressman Clement Vallandigham.
Plunder and pillage was also the Official Policy of the
Lincoln regime from the start of the war, as Cisco shows. Before being defeated
in the Battle of Fredericksburg the Union Army occupied the town for a short
while. Cisco quotes a Union Army officer as saying that “the men had
emptied every house and store of its contents, and the streets, as a matter of
course, were filled with chairs and sofas, pianos, books, and everything
imaginable. . . .”
An entire chapter is devoted to the sacking of Athens, Alabama,
in 1862. Every store and shop in the town was looted, along with most private
homes, where U.S. troops went about “stealing what they wanted and
destroying the rest.”
The commanding officer in charge, a Russian immigrant named
Col. John Turchin, told his soldiers that he would shut his eyes while they
went about plundering the town. That was the way of the Russian Cossacks, he
said. One of Turchin’s superior officers, General Don Carlos Buell, relieved
Turchin of his brigade command for committing such crimes against civilians.
But he was overruled by the Lincoln regime, which promoted him to the rank of
brigadier general instead.
Cisco also describes the shelling of civilian-occupied
cities like Charleston, South Carolina by the Federal Army. “[D]uring one
nine-day period in January no fewer than 1,500 shells fell on the city. Later,
a single gun nearby threw 4,253 missiles into Charleston. . .” (Much of
Cisco’s information comes from the U.S. Government publication, War of the
Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate
Armies.) This is how many of those 50,000 Southern civilians were killed.
Atlanta was shelled by Sherman for days after the
Confederates evacuated the city and left it defenseless. Cisco describes how a
Mr. Warner had a shell crash “into his home . . . . Both his legs were
severed by the missile and he died within two hours. Warner’s six-year-old
daughter was cut in two by the same shot.” Sherman ordered more and more
artillery to be shipped to Atlanta, “with which we can pick out almost any
house in the town,” he said. After the shelling stopped Sherman ordered
the remaining surviving civilians to evacuate their homes just as winter
approached and the land all around had been stripped of food by the army. The
city was then burned. An “ocean of fire” covered the city, according
to one Union officer, “leaving nothing but the smoldering ruins of this
once beautiful city.”
Cisco also details the war on civilians in the Shenandoah
Valley, conducted by such cowardly murderers of women and children as Sheridan
and Custer. “Unable to vanquish Robert E. Lee on the battlefield,”
wrote the editor of the Staunton, Virginia newspaper, “Grant has turned
his arms against the women and children of our land.”
War Crimes Against Southern Civilians is a must-read
for anyone who wants to educate themselves about Sherman’s “March to the
Sea.” (For the cartoonish version, see the History Channel rendition.) The
true story is a story of the continued plunder and rape of the civilian
population, along with the gang rape of mostly black women by Federal soldiers
under Sherman’s command. “Female servants were taken and violated without
mercy” by Federal soldiers, wrote a war correspondent.
South Carolinians were so hated by Lincoln’s army that they
even killed every dog in sight upon reaching the state on the
“march.” “The dogs were easily killed. All we had to do was to
bayonet them,” boasted one brave Union soldier.
Cisco also proves what delusional liars such Lincoln (and Sherman)
cultists as Victor Davis Hanson are. Hanson has claimed in print that Sherman
was some kind of egalitarian who was motivated by indignation over the degree
of racial inequality in the South. The truth, of course, is that Sherman was
every bit as much a racist and white supremacist as were virtually all other
white Northerners, including Lincoln. He was also an anti-Semite, and of course
hated red-skinned people almost as much as he hated South Carolinians – and
would later kill them in even greater numbers.
Cisco documents “Abuse of African-Americans” by
Sherman’s army in his final, stomach-turning chapter. Slaves were raped,
pillaged, and murdered indiscriminately along with the white population of the
South, and Sherman did nothing to stop it.
A favorite pastime of Sherman’s “bummers” was to
tie a black man up by his thumbs until he told them where any valuables might
be hidden. Sometimes they were hung by the neck instead, and quite often killed
in that way. “They tied me up by my two thumbs and try to make me tell
where I hid the money and gold watch and silver, but I swore I didn’t
know,” said a former slave, quoted by Cisco from The Slave Narratives.
There
is nothing truly consensual about government. It is always and everywhere based
on force, intimidation, and violence. When the founding generation formed a
confederacy with the Articles of Confederation, and later the Constitution, it
was at least a voluntary union of the states. The citizens of each state
understood that their state, and all others, was free and independent and
sovereign. They were free to participate in the union, or not.
The union of the founders was destroyed in 1865. War
Crimes Against Southern Civilians explains in great detail how, in addition
to killing some 300,000 dissenters to rule by Washington, D.C. on the
battlefield, the U.S. Army, under the micromanagement of Abe Lincoln, also
murdered tens of thousands of Southern civilians, including thousands of slaves
and free blacks, while stealing tens of millions of dollars of their private
possessions as well. None of it was necessary, of course, for the purpose of
ending slavery; all other countries on earth ended slavery peacefully during
the nineteenth century. This included the British, Spanish, French, Dutch, and
Danish colonies, where 96 percent of all the slaves in the Western Hemisphere once
existed. The purpose of the war was to finally realize the Hamiltonian dream of
a consolidated, monopolistic government that would pursue what Hamilton himself
called “national greatness” and “imperial glory.” The
purpose of the war, in other words, was a New Birth of Empire, one that would
hopefully rival the Europeans in the exploitation of their own citizens in the
name of the glory of the state.
May 9, 2007
Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send
him mail] professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the
author of The Real
Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War,
(Three Rivers Press/Random House). His latest book is Lincoln
Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe
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