A Goy and his Blog

…and the statist shills who doggedly promote it…

Fascinating to see the Washington Examiner concerned with ‘censorship’ here in the U.S. The reason for this will require some explanation.

For a little over a year now – starting back when it first hit me that our present crisis of governance was born in the blood of over one million Americans killed or maimed in Abraham Lincoln’s devastating, illegal, unnecessary war – I’ve tried to engage Lincoln’s apologists in an objective examination of his actions (as opposed to the empty, florid prose they relentlessly mimic in an attempt to seem profound) and their parallels to Obama’s ongoing, extra-constitutional overreach, which is slowly destroying what’s left of the U.S.

The object of this effort has been to shed some light on the causes and the fallout from the fundamental transformation that the U.S. experienced during the years 1861-65. That is to say, the transformation from a free Republic of sovereign States voluntarily allied through a subordinate, general government, into a de facto empire, ruled by a permanent oligarchy in D.C., using the lingering threat of military force.

During that time I’ve discovered a veritable cottage industry and a small army of historians whom I never knew existed, all focused on promoting a wider understanding of the documented facts and inconsistencies which might reveal to Americans the true origins of our utterly corrupt, relentlessly expanding, unaccountable federal government. While I was aware of a lingering resentment and sympathy for the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy out there, I was surprised to discover the various scholarly efforts to shed light on Lincoln’s crimes against the Constitution and the American people, all of which have been systematically and vociferously attacked and demonized by an academic “consensus” that is built on nothing more than the meticulously cherry-picked history written by the victors.

This is to say nothing of the historical details I’ve been exposed to since, virtually all of which have been as forcibly airbrushed from contemporary consciuosness as have events like FDR’s criminal attempt to pack the SCOTUS bench with socialist sympathizers and Harding’s wildly successful reduction in the size and cost of the federal government, and the almost instant, positive impact of that reduction, which ended the Depression of 1920-21.

Some of these details, like Lincoln’s use of executive privilege to hide – from Congress and from the American People – orders that were explicitly aimed at provoking the war, are meticulously recorded in various, openly accessible records. Other details, such as Lincoln’s textbook racism and personal preference to ship black slaves back to Africa (see the Douglas debates), as well as his open, vocal support for the statutory protection of slavery in perpetuity (comments on the recently-approved Corwin Amendment in the First Inaugural address) are also part of the historical record. Yet thanks to the ongoing deification of Lincoln that is a function of socially-engineered worship of the leviathan state he created, these details are simply never acknowledged in polite (i.e., politically correct) company. When acknowledgement is forced, cognitive dissonance ensues, followed by parsing of words, gnashing of teeth, and the inevitable, knee-jerk retreat to “but… Slavery!! SLAVERY!!!1j1!!” or some other ends-justify-the-means, post hoc fallacy used to declare that the “debate” is over and that the “history” is settled.

Last night I read one of the most egregious misrepresentations of history I’ve seen in this context to date: an article by Mark Tapscott, of all people, demonizing President James Buchanan as, quote, “America’s first catastrophic president“. Tapscott’s view is that Buchanan “did nothing” regarding the looming crisis caused by two growing – essentially regional – conflicts. Mark’s thesis (and, truth be told, the view of most similarly-programmed American ‘citizens’) is that Buchanan, through some novel rationalization that is rooted firmly in a willful blindness to the facts, is to be blamed for the death and devastation wrought by a war his successor provoked and pursued to near-genocidal extent.

The first of these aforementioned regional conflicts was fomented by the federal government’s ongoing economic attack on the South. This attack was in many ways an eerie precursor to the economic war being waged today on productive Taxpayers – now a distinct minority in a society governed by majority / mob rule in every way that matters – in pursuit of funding for the leviathan state. That attack was pursued on behalf of northern industrialists, railroad barons, textile magnates, banksters, insurance firms and various other New England and Whig factions, whose platform (which ultimately became Lincoln’s “Republican” platform) supported federally-funded “internal improvements” (pork/graft/cronyism), fiat currency (similarly aimed at creating money out of thin air to fund crony enterprise), central banking and most of the other varied, extra-constitutional socio-economic elements – such as the tax on individual incomes and the notion of “national” citizenship – that emerged following Lincoln’s seminal act of usurpation, i.e., granting himself authority to provoke and pursue war on American citizens. [The platform described here, and the various excesses institutionalized as a result of its successful implementation once State sovereignty was eliminated as a potential barrier, is the basis of the relentless growth of the federal government and its virtually unconstrained, ongoing usurpation of authority seen since 1865.]

This economic attack on the South took the form of a devastating tariff. Of particular note is the fact that this tariff was designed by a Pennsylvania publishing magnate – Henry Carey – a “one-percenter” who traded his inherited publishing business for notoriety as an “economist”. Carey was a vocal opponent of free trade, and one of the first, most influential American advocates for exactly the sort of Hamiltonian, crony capitalism we see adding to the national debt and destabilizing our economy today.

The tariff bill created by Carey was proposed for passage by a Vermont congressman and the tariff, as designed, acted both as trade protection for northern manufacturing – allowing northern industries such as the burgeoning steel industry to deflect competition and keep prices artificially high – and also as a net generator of federal revenue earmarked for the early equivalent of bona fide corporate welfare in the North. Some 75% of this revenue would be extorted from the Southern States through a tax on imports that increased the cost of imported goods, ultimately, by almost 50%.

Notably, an identical attempt at similar extortion had been beaten back through the use of nullification and the threat of secession in 1832 – another event that is, by turns, either willfully misrepresented or simply airbrushed from U.S. History entirely, because it exemplifies the essence of the Founders’ Republican Form of Government, guaranteed to every State, and the manner in which it was intended to function in extremis, i.e., when extra-constitutional federal overreach, driven by special interests, threatened regional or State interests. But this effort was once again resurgent in the 1850s, culminating in passage by Congress of the onerous Morrill Tariff, and signed into law by Buchanan as he exited office. The regional nature of the conflict engendered by this law can be seen in the distribution of the House vote on this bill, which occurred prior to secession and which was almost perfectly split along regional – i.e., Northern/Southern State – not party lines.

The second source of regional conflict was driven by the controversy stemming from two directly-related issues, both of which revolved around the Constitutionally-recognized institution of slavery.

The first of these was the question of State sovereignty with respect to newly admitted States’ authority over the proscription of chattel slavery – an area that was unequivocally recognized as a State issue by the Constitution. Northern labor interests naturally opposed the spread of cheap (black / slave) labor to the new States and territories; industrialists saw the spread of slavery to the new States and territories as a potential competitive threat, if applied to industrial manufacturing – a competitive threat that could not be neutralized via tariff. And so northern sentiment was focused on leveraging its electoral advantage to force federally-mandated abolition in any new States, effectively usurping control over an institution which the Constitution clearly identified as one to be determined by the individual sovereign States.

Notable in this context is the fact that some northern States had passed immigration legislation intentionally designed to prevent or limit immigration into those States by free blacks. Also notable in this context is the subsequent well-known warfare waged against the American native indians, driven primarily by northern factions, which puts the lie to the risible myth that rank-and-file northerners had some higher, altruistic motivation for freeing slaves in the South.

The second of these slavery-related issues was the active refusal of former slaveholding States in the North to meet their lawful obligations regarding “Person[s] held to service”, outlined in Art. IV of the U.S. Constitution. Controversy repeatedly arose on this issue, in the form of opposition to the Fugitive Slave Laws which – again, notably, and somewhat ironically – led to the use of nullification as a recourse in support of State or regional interests.

The language of the U.S. Constitution regarding the institution of slavery – as ratified by every State through 1865 – is an inconvenient truth to which virtually every Lincoln apologist seems willfully blind. Today we recognize as a monumentally regrettable fact that black slavery was an integral part of civilized society for most of human history well into the 19th century. Reasonably well-informed, rational people recognize that the sea change upon which abolition rode – peacefully, in the case of every other first-world nation but the U.S. – derived from a growing scientific and corresponding social recognition that members of the black, African race were not merely a scant step up from four-legged beasts of burden, to be likewise sold as property and used for menial labor, but are in fact human beings with human rights and legal standing comparable to that of every other race. Unfortunately, this regret is a factor in the phenomenon of “white guilt” that is fomented and exploited today by race-baiting politicians, community organizers, academics and media pundits as they leverage the overreach of the federal government – again, made possible by Lincoln’s fundamental transformation of the U.S. – to pursue their statist, collectivist ends.

What is not so readily recognized is the fact that this institution was far from isolated to the United States, as is so commonly implied, especially by advocates of moronic proposals like “reparations” and even “affirmative action”. In fact, slavery flourished throughout most of Western Civilization and, as well, among the African people who spent that same history kidnapping and selling their countrymen to Dutch, British and Portuguese slave traders. These traders, in turn, brought the institution to the New World. Nevertheless, the almost universal acceptance of slavery as an institution throughout the civilized world up until the mid-1800s was a fact – one that is directly relevant to the regional conflict that grew in the U.S. during the 1850s.

That popular acceptance of slavery was expressed in the U.S. as late as March of 1861, immediately preceding the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, who in turn gave that expression – the now-virtually-unknown Corwin Amendment – his unconditional, vocal (read: politically convenient) support during his First Inaugural Address.

Historian Daniel Crofts describes the cognitive dissonance generated by acknowledgement of this expression thusly:

Above all, though, the amendment tells modern Americans something about our national history that we do not want to know. Today we look at slavery with dismay — as we should. But this often undercuts our ability to see the United States as it was. We celebrate slave runaways and relish more information about the Underground Railroad. We persuade ourselves, incorrectly, that large numbers of slaves escaped from bondage, and that many Northern whites reached out to black fugitives.

More than anything else, this conscious resistance to see the U.S. “as it was” renders most Americans utterly incapable of objectively examining the facts, events, rationale, law and conflicting social sensibilities that led to the crisis in 1860. Most Americans are completely ignorant, for instance, of the fact that there were more free blacks living in the South than in the North at the start of the “Civil” War.

With all that and more in mind, I posted the first comment in reply to Tapscott’s article at the Washington Examiner via Disqus. Tapscott’s goal, clearly stated, was to paint Obama with the same aura of ineptitude, misfeasance and dereliction Americans are relentlessly trained to heap onto Buchanan, for the unforgiveable crime of preceding a war criminal as POTUS. The irony, which I attempted to point out in my comment, is that Americans are essentially programmed to demonize Buchanan for Lincoln’s crimes and that, furthermore, Obama’s serial crimes against the Constitution and the American People are a perfect mirror of the actions pursued by Lincoln, which he consistently rationalized based on a war he provoked. Obama has acted in a similar fashion, rationalizing his overreach by never letting a crisis go to waste – especially when he, as a Senator, was an integral element in the cause of the crisis.

Even more significant, in light of the crisis we face as a result of unrestrained federal usurpation of authority, is the fact that the power Obama wields in his efforts to these ends can be traced directly back to the fundamental transformation affected by Lincoln’s usurpation of authority in 1861, which rendered State sovereignty and, with it, any practical constraint on federal overreach, essentially null and void.

Although that comment has been recorded in my Disqus history, indicating that the moderators at the W.E. acknowledged it, it does not appear under the list of comments posted in response to the article. This is the one and only time I’ve ever seen this phenomenon. Typically, if a comment is held for moderation or deleted, it doesn’t appear in the Disqus history. Unless they’ve changed something there, it’s pretty clear the folks at the W.E. aren’t interested in their readers being exposed to notions that color outside the lines of the picture the federal government has painted over the truth for 150 years.

So once again we see the power of the federal government’s decades of propaganda over rational thought in the U.S.

Note, in the above, that my comment – recorded on the Disqus servers – has been deleted without a trace from the list of comments below the W.E. article.

Since the W.E. has chosen to censor my thoughts, providing no justification whatever, I repeat them here.

“Buchanan did nothing…”

Mark… really??? This breathtaking assertion is almost criminally wrong.

Buchanan is to be demonized as a “catastrophic President” because he managed to maintain the peace? Because he chose NOT to unilaterally provoke a bloody, illegal, utterly unnecessary war that killed and/or maimed over one million Americans? Because he did NOT issue an executive order that stood in unequivocal, direct violation of the Constitution? Because he chose NOT to blatantly contradict a resolution duly passed by Congress, ratified by two States, and for which he had given his public, vocal support… when it was politically convenient to do so?? Because he chose NOT to wage war on American civilians? Because he did NOT jail Americans for the crime of opposing his statist, Whig agenda? Because he chose NOT to openly lie to Americans and misrepresent his own unprovoked acts of war and his invasion of the South as a “response” to “insurrection”? Because he did NOT unilaterally suspend the writ of habeas corpus or threaten to arrest jurists for opposing his despotic statist agenda? Because he did NOT cravenly invoke “executive privilege” to hide from the public his actions, and those of his direct subordinates, designed to provoke a war?

These “failures” are the “nothing” for which Buchanan is to be demonized?

How is this attack on Buchanan any different from the unhinged statists of the left, relentlessly blaming “Republicans” and “conservatives” for all the ills their mindless, morally adolescent collectivist fetish has caused? How is this baseless, willfully blind attempt to shame Buchanan any different from Obama, Pelosi and Reid blaming Bush for their own misfeasance, ineptitude, socially suicidal policies and divisive rhetoric?

Here we have an undeniable sign of a society and culture in the process of
irretrievable breakdown: it has devolved – crushed under the weight of 15 decades of propaganda and “history written by the victors” (i.e., the federal government, its useful idiots and statist ideologues) – to a level where even the people WHO SHOULD KNOW BETTER promote the ridiculous claim that Buchanan did “nothing”… simply to rationalize his successor’s serial crimes against the Constitution and the American People.

Neither Buchanan nor Lincoln swore any oath to “free the slaves”. Neither swore any oath to “save the union”. No, the sacred oath that both Buchanan and Lincoln swore was to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.

Buchanan lived up to that oath AND also somehow managed to preserve both the peace AND the Union… right up until Lincoln’s election forced the South to exercise Tenth Amendment powers and separate themselves – just as their fathers and grandfathers had been forced to separate themselves – from a region and a government which openly sought to economically decimate them.

Lincoln, for his part, ignored that oath almost from the day he was inaugurated, hiding behind the florid prose his idolators mindlessly quote today without ever once objectively examining his serial, criminal actions, much less their destructive impact on the Republic.

So, Lincoln is deified for causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans and all but destroying the concept of State sovereignty which had kept the overreach of our now-out-of-control federal government nominally in check. Meanwhile, Buchanan is openly demonized for his inability, apparently, to persuade and/or force the South to commit economic suicide. This is all the evidence any objective observer needs to see how this nation has lost all sense of itself, and why it will likely never recover.