I got two email responses to the post yesterday re John Brown’s Jewish comrades. David Bloom pointed out that August Bondi, one of them, was not non-violent. Bloom left it at that, and I will too…
Now here is my friend Sidney O. Smith, a southerner who posts at Sic Semper Tyrannis:
As you well know, we are living in a time that
War Eagle Raimondo has brilliantly called “bizarro”. And if memory
serves me correctly, you aptly described our time as one of “ideological
disarray.”
In that vein, we owe it to ourselves to
cross-examine thoroughly all historical assumptions, primarily because the United States
in on the precipice of a type of national socialism coupled with an
extraordinarily aggressive foreign policy — one with an endgame of nuclear war
to spread “democracy”. It is Hayek’s nightmare realized, so one
should ask, “How did we get to this historical point?”
Keeping your description in mind, it almost as if
9-11 and the Iraqi invasion shattered the collective American psyche, much like
a brick thrown through a beautiful stain glass window. And in this
“disarray” one must pick up different shards and create another work.
(At least that is my metaphor for now and I am sticking to it!) And, apropos of the John Brown post, one issue to reexamine is
whether or not our founding fathers believed that a constitutional right of
secession should act as a check on the rise of an imperial state that would
eliminate the bill of rights.
I am not saying I know the answer to this question.
Are you familiar with Thomas J. DiLorenzo’s book titled, The Real Lincoln? You (and,
perhaps, your Philly wife who is reading Jung?) owe it to yourself to
read the book. I am yet to find any scholar who can refute his work, at least
without devolving into ad hominem attacks.
Dilorenzo’s work rests, in part, on the legal
analysis of the great abolitionist Lysander Spooner. Spooner wrote a treatise
that irrefutably established that slavery was unconstitutional, and its
publication even left Southerners speechless. However, he claimed that the same
rationale he used in his treatise also allowed the Southern states to secede.
According to Wiki, Spooner believed that:
“The North, by contrast, was trying to deny the
Southerners their inherent right to be governed by their consent. He believed
they were attempting to coerce the obedience of the southern states to a union
they did not wish to enter. He believed that Compensated
Emancipation was a preferable way to end
slavery, something many nations had done. He argued that the right for states
to secede derives from the same right of the slaves to be free.”
And as for Reconstruction, Spooner truly became part
of a school of realism and argued that Lincoln ‘s
war was one to promote a corporate welfare state:
“Spooner harshly condemned the Civil War and the Reconstruction period that
followed. Though he approved of the fact that black slavery was abolished, he
criticized the North for failing to make this the purpose of their cause.
Instead of fighting to abolish slavery, they fought to ‘preserve the
union’ and, according to Spooner, to bolster business interests behind
that union. Spooner believed a war of this type was hypocritical and dishonest,
especially on the part of Radical Republicans like Sumner who were by then
claiming to be abolitionist heroes for ending slavery. Spooner also argued that
the war came at a great cost to liberty and proved that the rights expressed in
the Declaration of Independence no longer held true – the people could not ‘dissolve the political
bands’ that tie them to a government that ‘becomes destructive’
of the consent of the governed because if they did so, as Spooner believed the
south had attempted to do, they would be met by the bayonet to enforce their
obedience to the former government.'”
Those above Wiki quotes aside, I would like to offer
something else for consideration. Neoconservatives are using — or perhaps
exploiting — the cult of Lincoln
to justify the suspension of constitutional rights as well as promote a foreign
policy that, ostensibly, is to emancipate others. How many times has FOX news
compared Bush to Lincoln ?
But such is a pretext. Bush and Kristol care about Arabs about as much as Lincoln cared about
African-Americans, meaning not at all.
And if you’ll note, Victor Davis Hanson and his
cohorts argue that the only proper military tactic in the Middle East is one
that replicates that of Sherman ‘s March through Georgia.
Sherman‘s March was the 19th century
equivalent of nuclear war. So Hanson might be said to be using code to promote
the use of weapons of mass destruction against Islamic populations, meaning it
is “patriotic” to kill Muslim civilians in large numbers. (Lincoln was the first to
sanction the mass destruction of civilian populations such since the Middle
Ages, I believe).
Finally, I would like simply to offer one other
thought for consideration. It seems to me that the American Civil War has created a type of national ethos that permitted Americans to project racism
onto others instead of an opposite approach — one of looking within first,
transforming one’s self, then one’s family, then neighborhood, and then town
and so on.
One extreme and slightly outdated example is
offered for your consideration. In the 1970’s, a few (certainly not all) Boston
Brahmins would sit in their parlors in Beacon Hill and talk about all the
unenlightened people in Arkansas, when the fact is that desegregation did not
come to Boston until 20 years after Little Rock and the resistance was just as
fierce. Perhaps, just perhaps, the Boston Brahmin should
have look within first and then one’s family and then Boston. Perhaps such Brahmin should have volunteered
in a soup kitchen in Roxbury instead of talking about the racism of
others. In other words, transform within first and then work
outwards.
Just to try to provoke further, one can
apply the same idea to Philly WASPS. One could argue that,
today, Philly is a racial mess, much worse than Atlanta .
One last example. Much of the MSM has raised the
notion that to not vote for Obama suggests racism. Maybe. Maybe not. (I am
voting for him, with a very slight chance of writing in Ron Paul). But no
one has raised the fact that Colin Powell in 1996 was more popular in the Deep South than any other region. Why? Is it the MSM projecting one’s racism onto others? In 1996, was the rest of the nation
more racist than those of the South?
And if Ilan Pappe and Jimmy Carter are correct, then our
Democratic platform of 2008 is racist to the very core. People can
call themselves enlightened when voting Democrat in 2008, but MLK Jr. would
have never supported apartheid in the Middle East, much less ethnic cleansing.
So seen from that angle, to vote Democrat 2008 is to vote racist, to a degree
much worse than we ever saw from George Wallace. (The entire world would shout
“Hallelujah” if we could just reach the notion of separate-but-equal
resolution in the I-P conflict, again assuming Pappe and Carter are
correct and I don’t know the answer to that one).
So is Spooner right and did the American Civil War
actually lead to an arrested development in race relations in the United States ?
At a bare minimum, you may want to look at Brazil. Brazil had slaves until the 1880’s
but did not experience a horrific civil war that left a deep wound in their
national soul. And today, Brazilians seem much more racially progressive than
those of the United
States. Where are race relations better… Rio or Philly?
I am not saying I know
the answers. Just examining historical assumptions. Also, I am partial to the federal
judiciary, while DiLorenzo and company are not.
[Weiss adds: Since the Iraq war, I’ve been perplexed by the fact that nearly 700,000 Americans died in the Civil War, and have wondered whether I would have been an isolationist then. My wife says she would have been disappointed in me if I did not fight slavery then. But how would you feel if I went off to fight in a bloody war for the union? I said. “Well at least no one would be pulling the sheets over.”]
