Back when we were Negroes

From The Macon Telegraph

By Charles E. Richardson, Editoral Page Editor

Charles E. Richardson

There was a time until the early 1960s when the terms to describe those of African decent, like me — African-American or Black or Afro-American — were almost unheard of. I remember a distinct conversation with a friend discussing descriptive terms for ourselves in 1963 or ’64. The term “black” was just coming into vogue and he didn’t like it one bit. “Call me a Negro,” he said, “but don’t call me black.”

Now, the word “Negro” (publications used a lower case “n”) has almost become a pejorative, so I was a little surprised when my pastor, the Rev. Willie Reid, used it during Thursday’s revival. “Back when we were Negroes,” he said, and listed several things that were different about black life in America back then.

That got me to thinking. Back when we were Negroes in the 1950s, “only 9 percent of black families with children were headed by a single parent,” according to “The Black Family: 40 Years of Lies” by Kay Hymowitz. “Black children had a 52 percent chance of living with both their biological parents until age 17. In 1959, “only 2 percent of black children were reared in households in which the mother never married.” But now that we’re African-Americans, according to Hymowitz, those odds of living with both parents had “dwindled to a mere 6 percent” by the mid-1980s. And check this, in Bibb County, more than 70 percent of the births in the African-American community are to single mothers.

Back when we were Negroes and still fighting in many parts of the country for the right to vote, we couldn’t wait for the polls to open. We knew our friends, family and acquaintances had died getting us the ballot. Dogs and fire hoses were used to keep us away and still we came. But now that we’re African-Americans, in a city of 47,000 registered — predominately black voters — more than 30,000 didn’t show up at the polls July 19.

Back when we were Negroes, we had names like Joshua, Aaron, Paul, Esther, Melba, Cynthia and Ida. Now that we are African Americans, our names are bastardized versions of alcohol from Chivas to Tequila to C(S)hardonney. And chances the names have an unusual spelling.

Back when we were Negroes, according to the Trust For America’s Health’s “F as in Fat,” report, “only four states had diabetes rates above 6 percent. … The hypertension rates in 37 states about 20 years ago were more than 20 percent.” Now that we’re African-Americans, that report shows, “every state has a hypertension rate of more than 20 percent, with nine more than 30 percent. Forty-three states have diabetes rates of more than 7 percent, and 32 have rates above 8 percent. Adult obesity rates for blacks topped 40 percent in 15 states, 35 percent in 35 states and 30 percent in 42 states and Washington, D.C.

Back when we were Negroes, the one-room church was the community center that everyone used. Now that we’re African-Americans, our churches have lavish — compared to back-in-the-day churches — community centers that usually sit empty because the last thing the new church wants to do is invite the community in.

Back when we were Negroes, we didn’t have to be convinced that education was the key that opened the lock of success, but now that we’re African-Americans, more than 50 percent of our children fail to graduate high school. In Bibb County last year, the system had a dropout rate of 53.4 percent.

Back when we were Negroes, the last thing a young woman wanted to look like was a harlot and a young man a thug, but now that we’re African-Americans, many of our young girls dress like hootchie mamas and our young boys imitate penitentiary custom and wear their pants below the butt line.

If I could reverse all of the above by trading the term “African-American” for “Negro,” what do you think I’d do?

Ten Reasons for Secession

By J. Michael Hill

A 2009 Zogby poll revealed that about one out of every five Americans believe that States have a right to peaceably secede from the United States and become independent republics. A similar percentage says that they would support a secession movement in their own State.

The greatest support for secession came from the South, where almost 26% of those polled supported a peaceful break with Washington, DC.

What is behind this increasing support for secession and independence? Perhaps the answer is this: hard reality has finally trumped the myth of a sacred, indivisible union. In other words, many citizens are beginning to see the hand writing on the wall, and the message is alarming.

There are at least ten good reasons for Southern secession in early 21st-century America:

1.  The U. S. government is an organized criminal enterprise; secession is the only way to return to legitimate government.

2.  The U. S. economy is failing; secession makes economic sense.

3.  The South’s unique history and culture is worth protecting.

4.  The criminal nature of the bank bailouts and the Fed.

5.  A dysfunctional national electoral system, secession may be the only way to restore integrity to elections.

6.  Third World immigration into the South, secession removes the federal government's interference and lack of performance.

7.  Organic community vs. the globalism of the elites.

8.  The implementation of an American police/surveillance state.

9.  The Christian South v. secular America, secession provides the opportunity to return to Our Founding Principles.

10.  Because we think we can rule ourselves better than we are being ruled by DC, secession is a path to American Liberty.

Can you think of some other reasons for secession?

About the Author:  Dr. J. Michael Hill, a former professor of History at Stillman College, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, is president of the League of the South. 

You may learn more about the League at www.dixienet.org

The Former Confederacy and the American Memory Hole

By Joseph Sobran

An extremely bright high-school student recently asked my advice about a few points concerning the U.S. Constitution. At 15, he was raising questions that didn’t occur to me until I was well into middle age. Maybe, I thought, this lad should be advising me!

But, accepting the role of wise elder in which he had cast me, I recommended a short curriculum, which I now offer to anyone who wants a corrective to the false history Americans are taught in government (as well as most private) schools. It may look simple, but I promise you’ll find it challenging.

Joe Sobran

First, three official documents: the Declaration of Indencence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution (with the Bill of Rights and the Preamble to them). Learn them thoroughly, until you see how closely the Constitution resembles the Articles and how both documents presuppose the Declaration.

Second, the debates over the ratification of the Constitution. This means The deralist Papers, but also a generous sampling of the anti-Federalist writings, of which there are many collections in print. 

Third, Thomas Jefferson’s 1798 Kentucky Resolutions. These are brief but remarkably logical and incisive. They tell you how the author of the Declaration understood the Constitution. No document in American history has been more undeservedly neglected.

Finally, the most challenging of all: Jefferson Davis’s Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. You needn’t read all 1,200 pages, but you should master the 100 or so pages making the case for a state’s constitutional right to withdraw from the Union. You may pass over Davis’s defense of slavery, which is incidental: his argument for the right of secession applies in principle to every state, not just the Southern states.

If cogent, this means that the U.S. Government abandoned constitutional government long ago. It also means that, say, Massachusetts and Hawaii still have the same right to withdraw from the Union that Virginia claimed in 1861.

You may be surprised to learn that Washington, Jefferson, and other Founding Fathers took the right of secession for granted. Probably not one American in a thousand is aware of this today. But it was inherent in the Declaration’s proposition that the original colonies “are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States.”

This is what Abraham Lincoln actually denied when he said that no state could leave the Union. Unlike Lincoln, Davis wasn’t even a lawyer; yet his grasp of law and history was far wider and deeper than Lincoln’s.

After the Confederacy was conquered, Davis was arrested and held in solitary confinement for two years on a charge of treason. But in the end the government dropped the charge and released him, having been warned by its own lawyers that Davis, defending himself in court, might well win acquittal by making a powerful case for secession — and thereby dealing a terrific blow to Union war propaganda. The intended show trial might have backfired — with Davis summoning the Founding Fathers themselves as his star witnesses!

It was a prudent decision. To this day, Union propaganda passes for objective history. But in fact so many Northerners agreed with the South — and with the Founding Fathers — that Lincoln had found it necessary to suspend the freedom of speech, the free press, and the ordinary rights of accused persons to habeas corpus and a jury trial. Dissent became a crime, and truth itself a fugitive.

But Lincoln’s crackdown — so comprehensive that the McCarthy era can’t remotely compare with it — succeeded. The North was deeply divided about his war, but effective criticism and opposition were crushed. Lincoln won reelection, the war, and a historical reputation for midwifing “a new birth of freedom.”

The long-term result has been the eclipse of the original understanding of the Union as a voluntary “confederacy” of sovereign states. Today that idea is regarded as a merely regional doctrine of the South. It was not. It was an idea once agreed on by virtually all Americans. Even Lincoln himself sometimes spoke of the Union as “this confederacy.”

It’s startling to see how often the United States were called a “confederacy” in the speeches and letters of presidents before Lincoln. His supreme achievement may be a feat of historical obliteration: he consigned America’s original self-understanding, perhaps irrecoverably, to the Memory Hole.

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Copyright (c) by Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, http://www.fgfBooks.com. All rights reserved.

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Reprinted with permission

Bill O'Reilly Spins the Abraham Lincoln Myth

Open Letter to Bill O'Reilly

from Valerie Protopapas

Dear Sir:

Bill O'Reilly

Obviously, you are not a stupid man but sadly, your intellect seems non-existent when it comes to your judgment about American leaders. You have stood foursquare against the current socialist trends in the federal government. You have condemned the excesses of Congress and the Administration and the ever growing centralization of power in Washington as well as the trashing of the Constitution. You have mentioned time and again that such excesses are diametric to the founding principles of the nation, flying in the face of that same document—and I have applauded you for your public defense of those republican (with a lower-case “r”) principles and the men (and women) who have championed them.

Yet, the other evening, I heard you—yet again—claim that the “gold standard” of American leadership was none other than President Abraham Lincoln. I actually became so enraged I turned off the TV! I could not bear to listen any longer. All that we currently endure we do so because of Abraham Lincoln! It was Lincoln who embraced the movement of power away from the Sovereign States and the People as envisioned by the Founders. It was Lincoln who adopted the socialist/communist ideologies brought into the United States from Europe with the arrival of the so-called “48ers,” the mostly German followers of Marx fleeing their failed revolutions in Europe. However, it is also true that Lincoln had adopted those same policies independently before he was influenced by Europe’s socialist upheaval. Did you know that Marx adored Lincoln for the very reason that he worked to centralize power in the federal government? And did you know that Lincoln’s government and military was filled with Marxists and socialists? It was Lincoln who abandoned all constitutionally imposed restrictions on the federal government and the presidency when he planned and initiated war against states performing an act guaranteed to them in the Constitution—that of secession from a union that was no longer in the best interest of their people. It was Lincoln who deliberately and with malice brought that war to fruition—a war that cost over a million lives both military and civilian and destroyed an entire section of what had been the united (lower-case “u”) States for a century or more. And the list goes on and on. There is no more infamous lie in the annals of American history than Lincoln’s analysis of the causes of the so-called “Civil War”—“…and war came.” War didn’t “come,” Lincoln brought it into existence in what proved to be a successful attempt to prevent the loss of eleven Southern states and the 75% of the federal revenues paid by those States. Indeed, the South, by Lincoln’s time, had become nothing more than a politically impotent economic colony supplying endless revenues to the rest of the Union while being driven ever deeper into poverty.

It was Lincoln who embraced—and profited from—Hamilton’s “American System,” which today we call “crony capitalism” and which is really nothing other than the enemy of free enterprise, fascism. Lincoln was supported for the presidency by the economic interests of states such as Pennsylvania to which he promised a high tariff to protect their manufactured goods and a continuation of the flow of capital from the South to the North. Lincoln had been a lawyer with one of the railroads supported by such tax-funded largesse and was so successful that he was allowed to choose the eastern terminus for the contemplated trans-continental railroad. It is interesting—and revealing—to note that the property he chose for that site just happened to be owned by him! Lincoln’s sobriquet at that time—Honest Abe—was bestowed by his contemporaries for the same reason that the sobriquet “Little John” was bestowed upon Robin Hood’s very large lieutenant. In other words, it was a reference to behavior diametric to the appellation and therefore not a complement.

Finally, if you think that we had election fraud in 2008, Lincoln made use of the military to assure his re-election, something that was by no means guaranteed in November of 1864. General Benjamin (Beast) Butler was sent to New York from which he triumphantly informed Lincoln that no Democrats had been permitted to vote. The same happened in other states such as Ohio where both Lincoln and Lincoln’s war were not popular. Soldiers were permitted to vote in areas in which they did not live to assure his re-election. Meanwhile, their presence at the polls was a warning to those who might vote Democrat. In fact, in many instances the ballots were color-coded so that the party chosen by the voter was immediately obvious to those partisan “poll watchers” and many Americas were “discouraged” from voting if a wrong color ballot was observed.

There is so much more on Lincoln’s illegal, unconstitutional and immoral actions that is a part of the public record and yet, he continues to be revered, even worshipped, by people who despise and reject the things for which he stood and on which he acted. Even the popular belief that Lincoln “freed the slaves” or, in fact, had any feeling for them individually or as a group is nonsense, proven over and over by his own words and actions. He cared nothing for slavery and even less for “the African” and was willing to put slavery into the Constitution in the original 13th Amendment (Corwin) if it would keep the Southern states compliant.

Even the claim so often made that he fought the war to “preserve the union” is a lie though many Northerners were deceived and indeed fought for that stated purpose. First, a union is by its nature voluntary. Coercion at the point of a bayonet is nothing but conquest and occupation, not “union.” Then, Lincoln, his government and all of the states who fought ostensibly to preserve the Union were traitors according to Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution. Indeed, the only act defined as treason in that document is the waging of war against any of the signatory states and aiding and abetting in that war. If there was ever an act more worthy of the taint of treason and the openly guilty parties more exposed to public view, it has to be America’s “Civil War” in which the federal government—or should I say, the President—declared war on seven (later eleven) signatory states and initiated total war against them. Of course, all of those who supported or permitted this war were themselves traitors to a greater or lesser degree. It is ironic that the taint of treason was spread so liberally—and so successfully—on states that had acted constitutionally in attempting to remove themselves from a hostile and eventually murderous “union” while the actual traitors have been lauded to the skies historically as heroes and “true Americans.”

No, Mr. O’Reilly, your “stand” against those attempting to make of what remains of this nation another “Peoples’ Republic” cannot be believed so long as you refuse to acknowledge where America started to leave the path of Aristotle, Locke and the Founding Fathers and embrace the governing theories and actions of Hobbes and Marx. Actually, you have only two choices: understand and admit that “the nation’s greatest president” was a traitor and a murderer (over a million dead) and repudiate his “vision” for the nation—a federal tyranny—or cling to delusion, deception and myth and, by doing so, render your own message null and void and yourself foolish at best and dishonest at worst. You cannot have Lincoln and liberty.

Valerie Protopapas
Huntington Station, New York

When America Went Crazy

By Eric Peters

Eric Peters

America lost its mind 146 years ago and hasn’t been the same since. Or rather, it’s been a different country ever since.


A psychotic, self-referential, duplicitous country – largely ignorant of its own history and convinced of its messianic role in world affairs. A country not merely content to live – and let live. But one determined to to force others – everyone – to live its way.


At bayonet point, if need be. 


It all goes back to the events of 1861-1865. The struggle for Southern independence, which the modern histories dishonestly – not merely mistakenly – call the “Civil War.”


Which it was not.


The Southern states had no desire to dominate the Northern states, nor to control the government of the North. (Which is what the “federal” government had become by 1861, as the Northern states and Northern corporatist cartels controlled it; Lincoln was the front man for these corporatist interests – a shyster lawyer and born grifter who would do anything – to anyone – in the service of his paymasters.)


 No, the Southern states simply wished to exercise that right which the American colonists themselves had exercised in 1776 (and which some Northern states had themselves threatened to exercise on prior occasions, for similar reasons). The right to withdraw from the voluntary union entered into by each sovereign state at the time of the ratification of the federal Constitution. The motives were no different – and no less honorable or legitimate: The Southern states, like the American colonies, had come to regard the central authority as distant, unrepresentative and increasingly tyrannical. It no longer served their interests. It no longer represented them. And to paraphrase the author of the original Declaration of Independence, when a government no longer operates in the best interests of the people as they see those interests; when it no longer represents them; and when its actions evince a systematic effort to subjugate them, when other remedies have not proved fruitful, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish the government – and start over.


This is what we celebrate on July 4th but what we also (in typically demented/ignorant/hypocritical American fashion) excoriate the Southern states for having done.


This was the Southern conception of “consent of the governed” – the same one held by the American revolutionaries – and the same one eradicated by the victory of the North over the South.


Since that unlucky event, there has been no recourse, no escape from Washington’s self-proclaimed, self-defined, self-interpreted and increasingly unlimited authority. We the People are not governed by consent but by force. This fact is too obvious to require extensive elaboration, yet many continue to believe we are “free” because we have “democracy” – that is, we may vote. But we do not have a choice. There is no freedom option. Just Government X (Republican) or Government Y (Democrat). This duopoly is far more subtle – and thus, far more effective – than the obvious single-party tyrannies of the past. But in fact we do have a single ruling elite – and so, no real choice – if your choice is liberty.


Lincoln – the ur American tyrant who set the stage for the blood-soaked Deciders to come – was the first to twist plain English and the meaning of the American Revolution into their dark matter opposites.


“Consent of the governed” became somehow a consolidated federal leviathan from which there is no appeal or escape. The consent of the Southern people (and thus, all Americans) trampled underfoot, to be kept forevermore in a forced union, like a bad marriage – at bayonet point.


“Republican” government – that is, delineated (and thus, inherently limited) powers became “democracy” – open-ended, unlimited mob rule, via the vote – administered by millions of petty tyrants from the DMV to the TSA to EPA to the IRS.


From this sprang the ends-justify-the-means (any means) rationales that have been used to abrogate every single formerly sacred right that the Bill of Rights was written explicitly to declare and protect.


And it was Lincoln and his crew – including war criminals such as Sheridan and Sherman (who would have made fine corps commanders in Hitler’s Waffen SS or Stalin’s Red Army) that gave life to the American Mission, the subjugation of the world itself.


Not merely consolidation and uniformity. A conviction that there is only one morally right way to live – the Yankee (corporatist/empire) way – and it must be brought to every corner of the Earth, by any means necessary.


There is a meaningful line in the Clint Eastwood movie, The Outlaw Josey Wales.  A union officer is confronted by a tired scout who admonishes him that the war is over; that it is time to stop the carnage. To let people be. The officer replies, “There ain’t no end to doin’ right.” In this you can hear the future echos of George W. Bush – or Barack Obama. From Iraq to Libya to main street, USA – there ain’t no end to doin’ right.


The orthodox histories pass over all this, touting instead the morally righteous crusade of the North to free the slaves and help the Black Man. Except of course the North did no such thing. Not only was slavery protected in the North and Northern-held territories until after the war was over (in other words, for nearly two years after the so-called Emancipation Proclamation of 1863) but the Northern populace would have revolted if Lincoln had touted his determination to subjugate the South – to “save the union” – as a crusade to free the black man. Not only was Lincoln himself a virulent racist (and a founding member of the Illinois “back to Africa” movement) but so was the North, which saw free blacks as threat to free white labor and which had “black codes” every bit – and often more – brutal than the black codes students are endlessly lectured about as being a Southern exclusive.


But pay no mind to that man behind the curtain. The war was about saving democracy and the consent of the governed. America is righteous. Let freedom ring.


Even though – as singer Merle Haggard put it – the average American has less real freedom today than he had as a parolee back in 1969.


Until the American people recover their senses the American consolidated Empire will only grow more oppressive, more and more openly brutal.


A people incapable of leaving their neighbors alone cannot be expected to leave the world alone.


Cloverism was born at Appomattox.


It is up to us to see it strangled.

Reprinted with permission from EricPetersAutos.com.

Copyright © 2011 Eric Peters

About the author: 

Eric Peters is a longtime car/bikes/Libertarian-minded journalist. His new book, "Road Hogs," came out June 2011.

Peters has been writing a weekly column about cars for almost 20 years now. He is the author of "Automotive Atrocities" and "Road Hogs" (MBI). He lives in rural SW Virginia with his wife and a polyglot crew of animals.

Civil War Myths and Misinformation

By Thomas J. DiLorenzo

When James M. Buchanan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1986 the first thing he said at his George Mason University press conference was that the award "does not make me an instant expert in everything." Buchanan was well aware – and amused – at how previous recipients of the award had made fools of themselves by viewing the award as a license to pontificate about anything and everything, whether they knew anything about the subject or not.


No such modesty and sense of reality occupies the mind of a more recent Nobel laureate, Paul Krugman. As a New York Times columnist he has always done what all New York Times columnists do – pretend that he does in fact know everything about everything. A case in point is his March 29 New York Times blog entitled "Road to Appomattox Blogging." After mentioning how the Times has a special "Disunion" blog to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the start of the war, Krugman gives a hilarious, elementary-schoolish rendition of his "take" on the "Civil War."

Krugman said he has always been infatuated by the "symbolism" of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, with "Lee the patrician in his dress uniform," compared to General Grant, who was "still muddy and disheveled from hard riding." Krugman is apparently unaware that by the late 1850s, on the eve of the war, Robert E. Lee was in his thirtieth year as an officer in the United States Army, performing mostly as a military engineer. He was hardly a "patrician" or member of a ruling class. Grant, by contrast, was the overseer of an 850-acre slave plantation owned by his wealthy father-in-law. The plantation, located near St. Louis, was known as "White Haven" (which sounds like it could have been named by the KKK) and is today a national park. (On the "White Haven" Web site the National Park Service euphemistically calls Grant the "manager" of the slave plantation rather than the more historically-accurate word "overseer").

In 1862 Lee freed the slaves that his wife had inherited, in compliance with his father-in-law’s will. Grant’s White Haven slaves were not freed until an 1865 Missouri emancipation law forced Grant and his father-in-law to do so. The fact that Lee changed clothes before formally surrendering did not instantly turn the 36-year army veteran into a "patrician," contrary to the "all-knowing" Krugman’s assertion.

Krugman goes on to assert that the North’s victory in the war was a victory in "manners" by a region that "excelled at the arts of peace." Well, not really. What the North "excelled" in was the waging of total war on the civilian population of the South. The Lincoln administration instituted the first federal military conscription law, and then ordered thousands of Northern men to their death in the savage and bloody Napoleonic charges that characterized the war. When tens of thousands of Northern men deserted, the Lincoln administration commenced the public execution of deserters on a daily basis. When New Yorkers rioted in protest of military conscription, Lincoln ordered 15,000 soldiers to the city where they murdered hundreds, and perhaps thousands of draft protesters (See Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots). It also recruited thousands of European mercenaries, many of whom did not even speak English, to arm themselves and march South to supposedly teach the descendants of James Madison, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson what it really meant to be an American. Lee Kennett, biographer of General William Tecumseh Sherman, wrote of how many of Lincoln’s recruits were specially suited for pillaging, plundering and raping: "the New York regiments were . . . filled with big city criminals and foreigners fresh from the jails of the Old World" (Lee Kennett, Marching Through Georgia, p. 279).

The North waged war on Southern civilians for four long years, murdering at least 50,000 of them according to historian Jeffrey Rogers Hummel. It bombed cities like Atlanta for days at a time when they were occupied by no one but civilians, and U.S. Army soldiers looted, ransacked, and raped their way all throughout the South. The "arts of peace" indeed.

As for the war being a victory of "manners," as Krugman says, consider this: When the women of New Orleans refused to genuflect to U.S. Army troops who were occupying their city and killing their husbands, sons and brothers, General Benjamin "Beast" Butler issued an order that all the women of that city were to henceforth be treated as prostitutes. "As the officers and soldiers of the United States have been subject to repeated insults from the women . . . of New Orleans," Butler wrote in his General Order Number 28 on May 15, 1862, "it is ordered that thereafter when any female shall, by word, gesture, or movement, insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States, she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation." Butler’s order was widely construed as a license for rape, and he was condemned by the whole world. Ah, those Yankee "manners."

Krugman celebrates the victory of "a democratic nation" (the North) in his blog. But during the war the North was anything but "democratic": Lincoln illegally suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus and imprisoned tens of thousands of Northern political critics without any due process; shut down hundreds of opposition newspapers; deported Congressman Clement Vallandigham of Ohio for criticizing him; threatened to imprison Chief Justice Roger B. Taney for issuing the (correct) opinion that Lincoln’s suspension of Habeas Corpus was unconstitutional; censored all telegraphs; rigged elections; imprisoned duly elected members of the Maryland legislature along with Congressman Henry May of Baltimore and the mayor of Baltimore; illegally orchestrated the secession of West Virginia to give the Republican Party two more U.S. senators; confiscated firearms in the border states in violation of the Second Amendment; and committed a grand act of treason by invading the sovereign states of the South (Article 3, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution defines treason as "only" levying war against the states, or giving aid and comfort to their enemies).

Krugman is right about democracy in a sense: Democracy is essentially one big organized act of bullying whereby a larger group bullies a smaller group in order to plunder it with taxes. The "Civil War" proved that whenever a smaller group has finally had enough, and attempts to leave the game, the larger group will resort to anything – even the mass murder of hundreds of thousands and the bombing and burning of entire cities – to get its way. After all, in his first inaugural address Lincoln literally threatened "force," "invasion" and "bloodshed" (his exact words) in any state that refused to pay the federal tariff, which had just been more than doubled two days earlier. He followed through with his threat. This is "the kind of nation I believe in," says Paul Krugman.



Thomas J. DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the author of The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe and How Capitalism Saved America. His latest book is Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution – And What It Means for America Today.


Copyright © 2011 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

Slavery in Perspective

By Joseph Sobran

Joseph Sobran
Syndicated Columnist

The recurrent fuss about Confederate flags has always struck me as silly, and never more so than now. I’ve been reading Hugh Thomas’s impressive history, The Slave Trade (published by Touchstone/Simon & Schuster). It’s one of those books that shift your whole perspective on the past.


Thomas covers the Atlantic slave trade from 1440 to 1870. It was a literally filthy business from first to last. More than 11,000,000 Africans were brought to the New World, while countless others — probably about 2,000,000 — died of miserable conditions in the overcrowded ships en route.

What I didn’t know is that fewer than 5 per cent — about 500,000 — of these Africans were brought to this country. Some 4,000,000 were carried to Brazil by the Portuguese, 2,500,000 to Spanish possessions, 2,000,000 to the British West Indies, and 1,600,000 to the French West Indies.

All this puts something of a damper on the assumption that slavery was a sin specific or “peculiar” to the American South. The slaves had been Africans who were sold to European merchants by other Africans who had enslaved them in the first place. Several of Africa’s proudest empires were built on the sale of slaves. For centuries Africa’s chief export was human beings. When Congresswoman Maxine Waters speaks of “my African ancestors’ struggle for freedom,” she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Slavery was an African institution long before it spread to the South, and there was no abolition movement to trouble it. When Europe banned the slave trade, African economies reeled.

So it’s rather comical for American blacks to sentimentalize Africa and stress that they are “African Americans” while cursing the Confederate flag as a symbol of slavery. Africa has a much better claim to be such a symbol. Slavery still exists there, in Sudan and Mauritania and probably elsewhere.

As Christians, white Europeans always had a bad conscience about slavery. They wrestled with the question of whether Africans had immortal souls and natural rights. Even Southerners who justified slavery as a positive good felt that it needed justification.

Pagans had no such qualms. They no more felt they needed to justify owning slaves than owning cattle. Slavery was a fact of life, and slaves could be killed, mutilated, and even eaten without compunction.

In the Arab world African slaves were highly prized as eunuchs. They were used as guardians of harems and as civil servants, some of whom amassed considerable power. But many young African men died in the process because of inept or infected castration. The prevalence of eunuchs probably explains why African slavery didn’t leave the Arab world with a race problem. Given this history, it’s ironic that so many American blacks adopt Arab names to spite the white man and to achieve a supposedly independent “identity.”

Thomas indirectly punctures another cherished American notion: that Abraham Lincoln “ended slavery.” Lincoln is mentioned only three times, very briefly, in the entire book. Against the huge backdrop of the slave trade, he was only a local, marginal, and rather tardy figure. By 1850 it was clear that slavery was doomed throughout the Christian world. But just as we exaggerate our role in fostering slavery, we exaggerate our role in destroying it. We Americans tend to be self-important even in our self- flagellations.

The slave trade was so vast that a European might speculate in it, and profit by it, without ever seeing a single slave. Such distinguished authors as John Locke, Edward Gibbon, and Voltaire drew income from it. Voltaire was especially hypocritical. He took the self-serving view that it was less immoral for a European to buy Africans than it was for other Africans to sell them; and after denouncing the slave trade for years, he “accepted delightedly” when a merchant offered to name a slave ship after him.

Thomas tells the whole story without much moralizing. He knows the facts speak for themselves, in all their horror and pathos: people stolen from their homes, robbed of their freedom and even their identities, often dying namelessly amid unspeakable squalor, with no families or friends to mourn or memorialize their passing. The ones who survived to be slaves in the New World, though unenviable, were relatively lucky.

But in the end, the Christian conscience prevailed. Thank God.

See the original column here: http://www.sobran.com/columns/1999-2001/010531.shtml


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Copyright (c) by Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, http://www.fgfBooks.com. All rights reserved.

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Southern National Congress Statement on Just War and Defense

With the American Empire currently waging unnecessary, illegal and unconstitutional wars on three fronts:  Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, I am republishing the 2008 statement made by the Southern National Congress concerning Just War and Defense.

Remonstrance and Petition for a Redress of Grievances

Just War and Defense 

We, the Delegates of the Southern States, in Congress assembled, make the following Findings and Affirmations:

The Southern States and People of the nascent United States played a pivotal role in the War of Independence. Without their contribution and sacrifice, America’s freedom from England could not have been won. Thereafter, Southerners have faithfully served in every conflict, representing a disproportionate share of the enlisted ranks and officer corps of the U.S. Armed Services, and sadly, of the killed and wounded as well.

Although subjected to unjustified aggression in the War Between the States and cruel exploitation thereafter, the Southern People, at the urging of their former Confederate leaders, embraced the obligations of citizenship and have proven to be among the most loyal and patriotic Americans.

Southerners have won a reputation for courage, valor, and martial prowess in all the country’s conflicts. We have rallied to the colors whenever called with an intensity of devotion that has been an example to the rest of the country and cannot be doubted.

Regrettably, since the beginning of the twentieth century and most recently the so-called Global War on Terror, the United States Government has embarked on a path of imperialism and military adventurism that has not brought us greater security but has actually made us less secure. This policy of aggressive war abuses the willingness of Southerners—indeed, of all Americans—to risk our lives in defense of the country. Moreover, these endless wars are as staggering in their costs as they are tragically unnecessary, with an enormous human price in dead, maimed, and displaced; and in untold billions of dollars, contributing to the current economic crisis that threatens the very foundations of our society.

Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution grants the exclusive power to declare war to the U.S. Congress. But the President and Executive Branch have usurped this power and levied aggressive war without just cause and through deceiving the People as to the threats, necessity, and costs of these conflicts. The Congress has failed in its Constitutional responsibility to check an imperial Executive, while improperly authorizing the use of force and appropriating funds for an unconstitutional, undeclared war.

The right of the People to petition the Government for a redress of grievances is recognized by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Therefore, we, the Delegates to the First Southern National Congress, remonstrate against unnecessary war and the use of armed force to establish American hegemony across the globe, and petition the Government of the United States to:

Refrain from the use of deception and fear to institute aggressive, unjustified, and undeclared military actions.

Restore the sovereign authority of the States and the People and obey the Constitution by levying war only with a proper declaration of war issued by the U.S. Congress.

Observe moral law and the long-established law of nations regarding just war, under which conflict is exercised with a just cause, right intention, probability of success, proportionality, and respect for the immunity of non-combatants.

______________________

Adopted 6 December 2008 by the First Southern National Congress at Hendersonville, North Carolina and ordered to be transmitted to the Delegations to the United States Congress of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia; to the President of the United States, and to the State Governments of these Southern States.

On Behalf of The Fourteen States, Officers, and Board of Governors of The Southern National Congress

Thomas Moore
CHAIRMAN

Learn more at the Southern National Congress website:  http://www.southernnationalcongress.org/

HOW I SEE IT: The Truth about the Confederate Flag

By Christopher H. Ezelle

Five Confederate flags flew between 1861 and 1865. The Confederate Battle Flag is the one most people know best. Some believe this flag is a sign of hate, racism and repression; but the truth is that it’s a symbol of honor, valor, truth, heritage and faith in Jesus Christ.


After confusion of flags during the Union and Confederate engagement of First Manassas, Brig. Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard charged his aide, Col. William Miles to design a battle flag.

Accepted was an adapted Scottish Cross of St Andrew-based flag, the famous battle flag known today.

St. Andrew, a disciple of Jesus Christ, was martyred by crucifixion at Patras, Greece, ordered by the Roman governor. He deemed himself unworthy of being crucified and nailed to a Latin cross like Jesus Christ. He requested crucifixion on an “X”-shaped cross and to be bound, not nailed. He preached the word of God to all that passed until he died. His martyrdom was during the reign of Nero, A.D. 60. Latin and Greek churches keep Nov. 30, his death date, as a day of feast. St. Andrew is honored as chief patron by Russia and Scotland.

Here are some more interesting facts surrounding the flag:

» In the 1860s, two-thirds of the country’s population was Scotch or Scotch Irish. This flag design was a carryover of the Scottish National Flag and ancestry.

» The Confederate States of America was a nation from 1861-65.

» The battle flag was the flag of common soldiers for only four years.

» No historical document exists to support that this flag represented hate, slavery, racism, deceit, infamy or repression. Not one flag of the Confederacy was ever described in its placement to represent anything other than the Confederate States of America.

» No Confederate ship ever ran slaves.

» The Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) adopted the battle flag as part of its logo in 1896, long before “hate” groups began to abuse the flag, and they condemn misuse of any Confederate flag.

» The KKK and other “hate” groups didn’t use the flag until late 1950/early 1960s.

In his book “What They Fought For, 1861-1865,” historian James McPherson, after reading more than 25,000 letters and over 100 soldier diaries from both sides of the War for Southern Independence, concluded that Confederate soldiers "fought for liberty and independence from what they regarded as a tyrannical government."

See the original "HOW I SEE IT" piece in the Star*Exponent:  http://www2.starexponent.com/news/2011/mar/14/how-i-see-it-truth-about-confederate-flag-ar-903740/

The only legitimate Reasons for War

American men slaughtered in Abraham Lincoln's War to Prevent Southern Independence

By Michael Gaddy

It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it.

~ Robert E. Lee

Throughout history, those who have the tendency to "grow too fond of war," in most cases have never fought in one. Soldiers who have "seen the elephant" are impacted by the horror of it for life. Many who are unable to cope with the recurring thoughts and visions resort to escape mechanisms – alcohol, drugs, and in extreme cases, suicide. One soldier that I knew, a Vietnam Vet, literally ate himself to death. I visited him in the hospital shortly before his death. He was forced to sleep sitting up because when he reclined the fat compressed against his lungs and made breathing impossible. He had been forced to endure a court-martial during Vietnam for shooting a turncoat "Chu Hoi" for leading his unit into an ambush where several soldiers of his Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG) unit were killed.

A close friend tells the story of asking his dad, a WWI Vet, what the term "over the top" meant when he was just a young boy. He relates that his father got up from the table, went onto the porch and retched. His mother told him to "never mention that again!" There is great meaning to be found in the term: "no one loves peace like a soldier."

Just War

What in heaven’s name could be just about killing people you don’t even know because some lying politician needs to improve the bottom line of his corporate cronies and campaign contributors. Wars should be initiated for defense of country and liberty only. There is no one alive in this country to read these words that fought in a war that was not in some way predicated by political lies and deceptions. There is no one who fought in any of this country’s wars in the last sixty years that fought in a constitutional war. You know, the Constitution soldiers swear to uphold and defend. Could the domestic enemy we swore to defend our country and Constitution from be our politicians who ignore the Constitution and lead us into illegal wars? Who is a greater threat to our liberty, out of control politicians or terrorists created by these same politicians and their insane foreign policy that makes billionaires of their cronies? Who passed and confirmed the Patriot Act? Does Usama bin Laden care what library books you read, who you talk to on the phone or whether or not you own a gun or how many rounds that gun’s magazine holds?

What does it take to get an American to die for lies: words from a politician with no integrity, a few colored ribbons, a quest for glory, or a John Philip Sousa March? Even former Commandant of the Marine Corps, Major General Smedley D. Butler, said that in his 33-year military career he never had an original thought!

"There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag."

~ Major General Smedley Butler

In my humble opinion, the last Just war that was fought in this country ended at Appomattox, Virginia in 1865.

"We should meet the federal invader on the outer verge of just and right defense and raise at once the black flag. No quarter to the violators of our homes and firesides."

~ Thomas Jonathan (Stonewall) Jackson, May 1861

Smedley Butler, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee were correct: war should be so terrible that it would never be considered except as a retaliation for invasion or an attack on liberty. Were an invasion of homes and firesides or an attack on liberty to occur, there should be no quarter given to those invaders and usurpers–death and total annihilation to those who would violate the sanctity of home or an attack on our liberties.

The terrible truth is: the invader that Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee had to war with from 1861–1865, is the same invader the people in Iraq and Afghanistan are warring with today and the same invader the American Indian fought to protect their homes and property from during and after the War Between the States. The attacks on our liberties are not coming from al Qaeda or terrorists – they are coming from our elected leaders and their money grabbing, freedom destroying, death machine.

About the Author:  Michael Gaddy, an Army veteran of Vietnam, Grenada, and Beirut, lives in the Four Corners area of the American Southwest.  This article is copyrighted by and was first published by http://www.lewrockwell.com/ .

The New Intolerance

by Patrick J. Buchanan

“This was a recognition of American terrorists.”

That is CNN’s Roland Martin’s summary judgment of the 258,000 men and boys who fell fighting for the Confederacy in a war that cost as many American lives as World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq combined.

Martin reflects the hysteria that seized Obamaville on hearing that Gov. Bob McDonnell had declared Confederate History Month in the Old Dominion. Virginia leads the nation in Civil War battlefields.

So loud was the howling that in 24 hours McDonnell had backpedaled and issued an apology that he had not mentioned slavery.

Unfortunately, the governor missed a teaching moment—at the outset of the 150th anniversary of America’s bloodiest war.

Slavery was indeed evil, but it existed in the Americas a century before the oldest of our founding fathers was even born. Five of our first seven presidents were slaveholders.

But Virginia did not secede in defense of slavery. Indeed, when Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated, March 4, 1861, Virginia was still in the Union. Only South Carolina, Georgia and the five Gulf states had seceded and created the Confederate States of America.

At the firing on Fort Sumter, April 12-13, 1861, the first shots of the Civil War, Virginia was still inside the Union. Indeed, there were more slave states in the Union than in the Confederacy. But, on April 15, Lincoln issued a call for 75,000 volunteers from the state militias to march south and crush the new Confederacy.

Two days later, April 17, Virginia seceded rather than provide soldiers or militia to participate in a war on their brethren. North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas followed Virginia out over the same issue. They would not be a party to a war on their kinfolk.

Slavery was not the cause of this war. Secession was—that and Lincoln’s determination to drown the nation in blood if necessary to make the Union whole again.

Nor did Lincoln ever deny it.

In his first inaugural, Lincoln sought to appease the states that had seceded by endorsing a constitutional amendment to make slavery permanent in the 15 states where it then existed. He even offered to help the Southern states run down fugitive slaves.

In 1862, Lincoln wrote Horace Greeley that if he could restore the Union without freeing one slave he would do it. The Emancipation Proclamation of Jan. 1, 1863, freed only those slaves Lincoln had no power to free—those still under Confederate rule. As for slaves in the Union states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri, they remained the property of their owners.

As for “terrorists,” no army fought more honorably than Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Few deny that.

The great terrorist in that war was William Tecumseh Sherman, who violated all the known rules of war by looting, burning and pillaging on his infamous March to the Sea from Atlanta to Savannah. Sherman would later be given command of the war against the Plains Indians and advocate extermination of the Sioux.

“The only good Indian is a dead Indian” is attributed both to Sherman and Gen. Phil Sheridan, who burned the Shenandoah and carried out Sherman’s ruthless policy against the Indians. Both have statues and circles named for them in Washington, D.C.

If Martin thinks Sherman a hero, he might study what happened to the slave women of Columbia, S.C., when “Uncle Billy’s” boys in blue arrived to burn the city.

What of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, at whose request McDonnell issued his proclamation? What racist deeds have they perpetrated of late?

They tend the graves of Confederate dead and place flags on Memorial Day. They contributed to the restoration of the home of Jefferson Davis, damaged by Hurricane Katrina. They publish the Confederate Veteran, a magazine that relates stories of the ancestors they love to remember. They join environmentalists in fighting to preserve Civil War battlefields. They do re-enactments of Civil War battles with men and boys whose ancestors fought for the Union. And they defend the monuments to their ancestors and the flag under which they fought.

Why are they vilified?

Because they are Southern white Christian men—none of whom defends slavery, but all of whom are defiantly proud of the South, its ancient faith and their forefathers who fell in the Lost Cause.

Undeniably, the Civil War ended in the abolition of slavery and restoration of the Union. But the Southern states believed they had the same right to rid themselves of a government to which they no longer felt allegiance as did Washington, Jefferson and Madison, all slave-owners, who could no longer give loyalty to the king of England.

Consider closely this latest skirmish in a culture war that may yet make an end to any idea of nationhood, and you will see whence the real hate is coming. It is not from Gov. McDonnell or the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

Copyright © 2010 Patrick J. Buchanan - All Rights Reserved

This article appears on Mr. Buchanan's website.  You may see it here:
http://buchanan.org/blog/the-new-intolerance-3878

Intolerance of Southern accents - the last acceptble prejudice?

By Kip Burke, News Editor
The News-Reporter, Washington, Georgia

It's amazing how blind some people are to their own inborn prejudices, but I got a chance to open one or two women's eyes last Fourth of July.

Three women were visiting Athens from Connecticut, and happened upon our fair city with about 10,000 other people for our annual Independence Day celebration. I was volunteering at the Chamber of Commerce's Welcome Center, helping visitors with questions on where to eat, what to do, and how to spend their money in town.

The three Connecticut women came in to cool off, sit a spell, and complain to me about the heat as if I had arranged it personally for them. They were educators, they said, which are like teachers only better paid, apparently.

While we were talking, a handful of local kids came in to use the restrooms, and they chattered away while they waited. To my eyes, they were bright and smart, a fine crosssection of our local kids, our pride and joy.

The Connecticut educators, however, saw and heard something far different. "My Gahhhdddddd," one woman said through clenched teeth. "The schools here must be terrible! Listen to those little… I can't understand a word they're saying with that hideous accent. Can't the schools teach them to speak correctly? Are the teachers as ignorant as they are?"

And it went on, the three of them mocking the schools and the teachers who would allow children to speak with the rural Southern accent that these precious children were born to. I admit I got pretty angry, which is rare. When it happens, The Ancient Burke comes forth, the spirit of 390 years of my Southern ancestry.

The Ancient Burke spoke the truth, and hoped it would hurt.

"I am absolutely shocked," I said quietly. "I'm shocked and appalled that you educators would be so intolerant of our diversity."

They all gasped and went wideeyed and pale. I could tell that tolerance and diversity were gods to them, at least in theory. Certainly they'd always thought they worshipped at the altar of tolerance and diversity, but I'd just caught them being very intolerant of our children's rural Southern diversity. And they knew it.

So, of course, I twisted the blade a bit. God forgive me, I enjoyed it.

I looked down my nose and asked them, "Do you really think it's acceptable for teachers to express such ugly intolerance against children with diverse linguistic backgrounds?"

"Oh, no, we're not really…" they began to babble, suddenly realizing what they'd said.

"Surely you don't teach your students that your way of speaking is the only one that's good, that it's perfectly fine to discriminate against minority accents because they don't sound just like you?"

I could tell that one hit bone. One woman broke into tears, then another, and they got up to leave, blubbering apologies and swearing that they weren't really intolerant, "We're just, just …"

"Hypocrites?" I suggested. "Blind to your own intolerance? Seems to me that you think discrimination against rural Southerners is the last acceptable prejudice in America. You came here, guests in our community, and mocked our children as hopeless and stupid little rednecks and back-country black kids, simply because you're so prejudiced you think that being Southern means being backward and ignorant."

I held the door open for them. "We appreciate visitors who come here with open hearts and open minds, but some folks make it clear that they just don't belong here. In the words of the great Georgia philosopher Lewis Grizzard, 'Delta is ready when you are.' Good day."

See the original article here:  http://www.news-reporter.com/news/2009-07-02/opinion/022.html

Fighting for a Future

By David O. Jones

An address given at Carnton Cemetery, Franklin, Tennessee

on the occasion of Confederate Memorial Day, 4 June 2000.

We are here today to remember the past. But our honoring of the brave men of the Confederacy falls short if we fail to understand their cause or refuse to continue to fight for the future for which they prayed, and bled and died.

The fight of the Confederacy was against invasion of their duly constituted nation and for independence and self-determination. Lincoln’s War permanently established an American empire defined by autocratic rule and economic centralization. It was called the “War of the Rebellion” by the U.S. government. If we had succeeded, it would have been called the Second American Revolution and the War for Southern Independence.

Abraham Lincoln’s actions in usurping the delegated powers in the U.S. Constitution is unparalleled in the history of Christendom. H.L.Mencken, wrote in 1931, “Lincoln has become one of our national deities and a realistic examination of him is thus no longer possible.” But our freedom demands that we take an honest look at our history, our leaders, and our actions.

The facts?

•Less than a week after his subterfuge in provoking an attack on Fort Sumter, Lincoln ordered the blockade of Southern ports

•April 21, he ordered the navy to buy five warships

•April 27, he started suspending the privilege of habeas corpus Soon thereafter he started shutting down newspapers

•May 3, he called for more troops

•September 12 & 13, all suspected Southern sympathizers in the Maryland state legislature were arrested along with other influential citizens, and were locked up in prison at Fort McHenry.

•In November all members of the federal armed forces voted in Maryland elections. Voters had to pass through platoons of Union soldiers. It was said of that event, “It was as perfect an act of despotism as can be conceived. It was a coup d’etat in every essential feature.”

Lincoln’s justification of his actions was that constitutional legislative powers applied to the commander in chief in difficult times. In fact, Lincoln had the audacity to inform Congress that he had the right to suspend the Constitution in order to save it. He also took the position that he had the final say on any Constitutional question, not the court, and his power to make such a determination was a higher power than the Supreme Court.

Lincoln usurped congressional and judicial power, and then with Congress’s blessing created an American gulag for an estimated 20,000 citizens who disagreed with him. It should be noted that by comparison, Mussolini is reported to have jailed only two thousand men.

The British press wrote, “It does seem the most monstrous of anomalies that a government founded on the ‘sacred right of insurrection’ should pretend to treat as traitors and rebels six or seven million people who withdrew from the Union, and merely asked to be let alone.”

Again the British press asked, “With what pretence of fairness can you Americans object to the secession of the Southern States when your nation was founded on secession from the British Empire?”

But when the Chicago Times editorialized, “We then repeat the question as to what adequate motive we have for inaugurating a civil war?” In a short time, a military officer arrived at the newspaper, shut it down and sealed its presses. Eventually over 300 northern newspapers would be closed by Union troops and the journalists who dared question Lincoln’s actions were jailed.

Charles Dickens concluded, ”The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern states.” And later he wrote, “Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North.”

Preserving the Union was so important economically and for the perceived destiny of the American nation that the country as a whole didn’t seem to mind if Lincoln pushed the Constitution aside, ignored its checks and balances, and assumed the role and power of a Roman consul, a virtual dictator for the duration of his life.

Our freedom demands that we take an honest look at our history, our leaders, and our actions. Journalist Tom Brokaw in a recent question and answer period following a speech promoting his book on the “Greatest Generation” dodged a question about whether the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan was a war crime because of the massive civilian casualties. We can’t afford to dodge the questionable actions of our national government. A pledge to a flag does not make it all right.

We can ill afford to ignore the facts. Nor can we justify the facts and pretend that all is well now. We have fought the Spanish-American War, two World Wars, and in Korea and Vietnam as a united Union and have many honourable Southern veterans. But there are questions.

•Question: The sinking of the Maine prompted the Spanish war, but wasn’t that probably an accident blown out of proportion by leadership to achieve desired political ends?

•Question: It is widely agreed that U.S. code breakers had already intercepted Japanese intensions to bomb Pearl Harbor, but why did our leadership allow the military base to be destroyed without warning?

•Question: The Gulf of Tonkin incident which prompted greater activity in Vietnam was challenged almost from the moment it happened.

Were our leaders honest? We can ill afford to ignore the facts. Nor can we justify the facts and pretend that all is well now, because the world will not let us forget. Just this last year, at a news conference with President Clinton (8 April 1999), Chinese premier Zhu Rongii, responded to questions about China’s use of force upon Taiwan. The Communist Chinese premier said, “Abraham Lincoln, in order to maintain the unity of the United States … resorted to the use of force … so, I think Abraham Lincoln, president, is a model, is an example.”

Charles Adams in his recently published book, When in the Course of Human Events, on page 1 writes, “With the Civil War, America failed the world as well as itself.”

The fight of the Confederacy was against invasion and for independence and self-determination. Today our fight is against total intrusion into our lives and for independence and self-determination.

The Constitution survived Lincoln’s War, but not as originally intended by the founding fathers and not as conceived of during pre-war years. The war to preserve the Union turned out to be a war that destroyed it. People today have no idea of the real dangers to American society that were on the line, and few realize just how fortunate succeeding generations are that the military despotism that plagued the land for over five years did not last forever. The consequences of Lincoln’s War afflict us every day.

Southerners had a cause—independence and repelling an invading foreign army—a just cause like the American War for Independence in 1776. But Northerners had no such noble cause. “Preserving the Union” can be translated into conquering the South and imposing Northern will on the Southern people.

During the War for Southern Independence, the London Times wrote, ”If Northerners…had peaceably allowed the seceders to depart, the result might fairly have been quoted as illustrating the advantages of Democracy, but when Republicans put empire above liberty, and resorted to political oppression and war…It was clear that nature at Washington was precisely the same as nature at St. Petersburg…Democracy broke down. …when it was upheld, [it was done] like any other Empire, by force of arms.”

We are quick to be trite in saying of our form of government, “It may not be perfect, but it’s the best the world has ever known.” Is that really true? In the twentieth century, when over a hundred new nations have come into being, most often from Europe’s colonial empires, American democratic forms have not been adopted—it has been British parliamentary government that swept over the globe. The world in turmoil understands the despotism which is possible from an unfettered executive, and the nations of the world who gain their freedom do not wish to visit that despotism upon themselves.

The American empire managed out of Washington, DC is dying, gasping its last breaths. It is grasping for life by sending troops around the world to prove that Big Brother still exists even though there isn’t one in Moscow anymore. There is no proverb more true than that a man without authority will attempt to exert control. It is also true of our national government. As it has lost respect and authority not only from its own citizenry but also lost it around the world, it will attempt to exert even greater control.

We must stand with our fallen brothers of a century ago and denounce every action of the U.S. government which seeks to impose the will of a minority upon others, whether it is in Bosnia or Bethesda. We must fight against total intrusion into our lives and for independence and self-determination. We must fight for a future of freedom for our children and our grandchildren.

About the Author:  David O. Jones is headmaster of Heritage Covenant Schools and an ordained Christian minister.  He is the current (2010) chairman of the Perry County (Tennessee) Chamber of Commerce and is also chairman of the Tennessee League of the South.

Happy Secession Day

By Thomas J. DiLorenzo

Perhaps the best evidence of how American history was rewritten, Soviet style, in the post-1865 era is the fact that most Americans seem to be unaware that "Independence Day" was originally intended to be a celebration of the colonists’ secession from the British empire. Indeed, the word secession is not even a part of the vocabulary of most Americans, who more often than not confuse it with "succession." The Revolutionary War was America’s first war of secession.

America’s most prominent secessionist, Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, was very clear about what he was saying: Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and whenever that consent is withdrawn, it is the right of the people to "alter or abolish" that government and "to institute a new government." The word "secession" was not a part of the American language at that time, so Jefferson used the word "separation" instead to describe the intentions of the American colonial secessionists.

The Declaration is also a states’ rights document (not surprisingly, since Jefferson was the intellectual inspiration for the American states’ rights political tradition). This, too, is foreign to most Americans. But read the final paragraph of the Declaration which states:

That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved; and that, as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and do all other things which independent states may of right do (emphasis in original).

Each colony was considered to be a free and independent state, or nation, in and of itself. There was no such thing as "the United States of America" in the minds of the founders. The independent colonies were simply united for a particular cause: seceding from the British empire. Each individual state was assumed to possess all the rights that any state possesses, even to wage war and conclude peace. Indeed, when King George III finally signed a peace treaty he signed it with all the individual American states, named one by one, and not something called "The United States of America." The "United States" as a consolidated, monopolistic government is a fiction invented by Lincoln and instituted as a matter of policy at gunpoint and at the expense of some 600,000 American lives during 1861–1865.

Jefferson defended the right of secession in his first inaugural address by declaring, "If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left to combat it." (In sharp contrast, in his first inaugural address, Lincoln promised an "invasion" with massive "bloodshed" (his words) of any state that failed to collect the newly-doubled federal tariff rate by seceding from the union).

Jefferson made numerous statements in defense of the defining principal of the American Revolution: the right of secession. In a January 29, 1804 letter to Dr. Joseph Priestly he wrote:

Whether we remain in one confederacy, or form into Atlantic and Mississippi confederacies, I believe not very important to the happiness of either part. Those of the western confederacy will be as much our children & descendants as those of the eastern, and I feel myself as much identified with that country, in future time, as with this; and did I now foresee a separation [i.e., secession] at some future day, yet I should feel the duty & the desire to promote the western interests as zealously as the eastern, doing all the good for both portions of our future family which should fall within my power.

In an August 12, 1803 letter to John C. Breckinridge Jefferson addressed the same issue, in light of the New England Federalists’ secession movement in response to his Louisiana Purchase. If there were a "separation" into two confederacies, he wrote, "God bless them both, & keep them in the union if it be for their good, but separate them, if it be better."

So on July 4 stoke up the grill, enjoy your barbecue, and drink a toast to Mr. Jefferson and his fellow secessionists. (And beware of any Straussian nonsense about how it was really Lincoln, the greatest enemy of states’ rights, including the right of secession, who taught us to "revere" the Declaration of Independence. Nothing could be further from the truth.)


July 4, 2006

Thomas J. DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the author of The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe and How Capitalism Saved America. His latest book is Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution – And What It Means for America Today.


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