Post by RS Davis on Aug 31, 2004 2:26:27 GMT -5
Lincolnian Totalitarians
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
In his book Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War the literary critic Edmund Wilson explained the most important consequence of that war in a single profound paragraph:
The impulse to unification was strong in the nineteenth century . . . and if we would grasp the significance of the Civil War in relation to the history of our time, we should consider Abraham Lincoln in connection with the other leaders who have engaged in similar tasks.
The chief of these leaders have been Bismarck and Lenin. They with Lincoln have presided over the unifications of the three great new modern powers . . . . Each established a strong central government over hitherto loosely coordinated peoples. Lincoln kept the Union together by subordinating the South to the North; Bismarck imposed on the German states the cohesive hegemony of Prussia; Lenin . . . began the work of binding Russia . . . in a tight bureaucratic net.
Each of these men, wrote Wilson, "became an uncompromising dictator" and was succeeded by newly formed bureaucracies that continued to expand the power of the state and diminish freedom so that "all the bad potentialities of the policies he had initiated were realized, after his removal, in the most undesirable ways."
Defenders of the free society have long recognized this truth. In the August 24, 1965 issue of National Review, for example, the magazine’s editor, Frank Meyer, wrote that Lincoln’s "pivotal role in our history was essentially negative to the genius and freedom of our country." This was so because of the "harshness of his repressive policies and his responsibility for methods of waging war approaching the horror of total war," among other things.
"Under the spurious slogan of Union," wrote Meyer, Lincoln "moved at every point . . . to consolidate central power and render nugatory the autonomy of the states. . . . It is on his shoulders that the responsibility for the war must be placed." "We all know his gentle words, ‘with malice toward none, with charity toward all," Meyer said, "but his actions belie this rhetoric." Here Meyer referred to Lincoln’s win-at-any-cost strategy, his refusal to consider a negotiated peace, his imposition of a "repressive dictatorship" in the North and the "brigand campaigns waged against civilians by Sherman" in the South.
"Were it not for the wounds that Lincoln inflicted upon the Constitution, it would have been infinitely more difficult for Franklin Roosevelt to carry through his revolution [and] for the coercive welfare state to come into being . . . . Lincoln, I would maintain, undermined the constitutional safeguards of freedom as he opened the way to centralized government with all its attendant political evils."
This of course is precisely why totalitarians of all stripes have always lionized Lincoln. In Mein Kampf (1996 Houghton-Mifflin edition, p. 566) Adolf Hitler paraphrased the (false) theory that Lincoln introduced in his first inaugural address that no such thing as states’ rights ever existed in America to make his case for the abolition of states’ rights in Germany.
When some 3,000 Americans, most of whom were members of the Communist Party U.S.A., went to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War on the side of communists, they thought it quite natural to call themselves the "Abraham Lincoln Brigade." Indeed, in his book Lincoln Reconsidered, Pulitzer prize-winning Lincoln biographer David Donald wrote that the Communist Party U.S.A. adorned its office walls with huge portraits of Abe, and held annual "Lincoln-Lenin Day" parades in New York City.
Karl Marx himself wrote Lincoln on January 28, 1865 to say, "Sir: We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority." In the same letter Marx assured Lincoln that the European communist movement was with him: "From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class," the father of totalitarian communism wrote. (This and other of Marx’s writings can be found at http://www.marxists.org.)
Many of the dubious theories of the causes of the War to Prevent Southern Independence that have become accepted dogma among modern "Lincoln scholars" were dreamed up by Karl Marx. For example, despite the fact that in his first inaugural address Lincoln promised to invade any state that refused to collect the newly-doubled Morrill Tariff, and kept his promise, Lincoln scholars adamantly – and sometimes violently – deny that tariffs had anything at all to do with the war. In a recent issue of North and South magazine, historian William C. Davis threw a fit over my suggestion that the tariff was important and smugly denounced the idea as an "old chestnut." This was Karl Marx’s position as well.
In an October 20, 1861 article entitled "On the North American Civil War," Marx wrote, "Naturally in America everyone knew that from 1846 to 1861 a free trade system prevailed, and that Representative Morrill carried his protectionist tariff through Congress only in 1861, after the rebellion had already broken out. Secession, therefore, did not take place because the Morrill tariff had gone through Congress, but, at most, the Morrill tariff went through Congress because secession had taken place."
As is true of almost everything Marx ever wrote about economics, this statement is patently false. The Morrill Tariff passed the U.S. House of Representatives on May 10, 1860, before Lincoln’s election and before any state had seceded. It passed the U.S. Senate on March 2, 1861, two days before Lincoln’s inauguration. (Abe vigorously lobbied for the bill, telling a Pittsburgh, Pa. audience two weeks before his inauguration that no other issue – none – was more important.)
Whenever the Lincoln cult admits that Lincoln and the Republicans did not oppose Southern slavery in 1861, but only the extension of slavery into the new territories, they usually ignore the actual reasons that were given for this position by the Republican Party (the desire to keep the territories all white and to limit congressional representation of the Democratic Party) and repeat another one of Marx’s dubious theories. As Gerald Gunderson duly repeated in a review of The Real Lincoln on an economic history web site (see my LRC article, "The Economics of Slavery"), the Republican position was supposedly to "pick the low-hanging fruit," i.e., oppose the introduction of slavery into the territories, so that the institution would eventually die off.
[glow=red,2,300]Continued...[/glow]
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
In his book Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War the literary critic Edmund Wilson explained the most important consequence of that war in a single profound paragraph:
The impulse to unification was strong in the nineteenth century . . . and if we would grasp the significance of the Civil War in relation to the history of our time, we should consider Abraham Lincoln in connection with the other leaders who have engaged in similar tasks.
The chief of these leaders have been Bismarck and Lenin. They with Lincoln have presided over the unifications of the three great new modern powers . . . . Each established a strong central government over hitherto loosely coordinated peoples. Lincoln kept the Union together by subordinating the South to the North; Bismarck imposed on the German states the cohesive hegemony of Prussia; Lenin . . . began the work of binding Russia . . . in a tight bureaucratic net.
Each of these men, wrote Wilson, "became an uncompromising dictator" and was succeeded by newly formed bureaucracies that continued to expand the power of the state and diminish freedom so that "all the bad potentialities of the policies he had initiated were realized, after his removal, in the most undesirable ways."
Defenders of the free society have long recognized this truth. In the August 24, 1965 issue of National Review, for example, the magazine’s editor, Frank Meyer, wrote that Lincoln’s "pivotal role in our history was essentially negative to the genius and freedom of our country." This was so because of the "harshness of his repressive policies and his responsibility for methods of waging war approaching the horror of total war," among other things.
"Under the spurious slogan of Union," wrote Meyer, Lincoln "moved at every point . . . to consolidate central power and render nugatory the autonomy of the states. . . . It is on his shoulders that the responsibility for the war must be placed." "We all know his gentle words, ‘with malice toward none, with charity toward all," Meyer said, "but his actions belie this rhetoric." Here Meyer referred to Lincoln’s win-at-any-cost strategy, his refusal to consider a negotiated peace, his imposition of a "repressive dictatorship" in the North and the "brigand campaigns waged against civilians by Sherman" in the South.
"Were it not for the wounds that Lincoln inflicted upon the Constitution, it would have been infinitely more difficult for Franklin Roosevelt to carry through his revolution [and] for the coercive welfare state to come into being . . . . Lincoln, I would maintain, undermined the constitutional safeguards of freedom as he opened the way to centralized government with all its attendant political evils."
This of course is precisely why totalitarians of all stripes have always lionized Lincoln. In Mein Kampf (1996 Houghton-Mifflin edition, p. 566) Adolf Hitler paraphrased the (false) theory that Lincoln introduced in his first inaugural address that no such thing as states’ rights ever existed in America to make his case for the abolition of states’ rights in Germany.
When some 3,000 Americans, most of whom were members of the Communist Party U.S.A., went to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War on the side of communists, they thought it quite natural to call themselves the "Abraham Lincoln Brigade." Indeed, in his book Lincoln Reconsidered, Pulitzer prize-winning Lincoln biographer David Donald wrote that the Communist Party U.S.A. adorned its office walls with huge portraits of Abe, and held annual "Lincoln-Lenin Day" parades in New York City.
Karl Marx himself wrote Lincoln on January 28, 1865 to say, "Sir: We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority." In the same letter Marx assured Lincoln that the European communist movement was with him: "From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class," the father of totalitarian communism wrote. (This and other of Marx’s writings can be found at http://www.marxists.org.)
Many of the dubious theories of the causes of the War to Prevent Southern Independence that have become accepted dogma among modern "Lincoln scholars" were dreamed up by Karl Marx. For example, despite the fact that in his first inaugural address Lincoln promised to invade any state that refused to collect the newly-doubled Morrill Tariff, and kept his promise, Lincoln scholars adamantly – and sometimes violently – deny that tariffs had anything at all to do with the war. In a recent issue of North and South magazine, historian William C. Davis threw a fit over my suggestion that the tariff was important and smugly denounced the idea as an "old chestnut." This was Karl Marx’s position as well.
In an October 20, 1861 article entitled "On the North American Civil War," Marx wrote, "Naturally in America everyone knew that from 1846 to 1861 a free trade system prevailed, and that Representative Morrill carried his protectionist tariff through Congress only in 1861, after the rebellion had already broken out. Secession, therefore, did not take place because the Morrill tariff had gone through Congress, but, at most, the Morrill tariff went through Congress because secession had taken place."
As is true of almost everything Marx ever wrote about economics, this statement is patently false. The Morrill Tariff passed the U.S. House of Representatives on May 10, 1860, before Lincoln’s election and before any state had seceded. It passed the U.S. Senate on March 2, 1861, two days before Lincoln’s inauguration. (Abe vigorously lobbied for the bill, telling a Pittsburgh, Pa. audience two weeks before his inauguration that no other issue – none – was more important.)
Whenever the Lincoln cult admits that Lincoln and the Republicans did not oppose Southern slavery in 1861, but only the extension of slavery into the new territories, they usually ignore the actual reasons that were given for this position by the Republican Party (the desire to keep the territories all white and to limit congressional representation of the Democratic Party) and repeat another one of Marx’s dubious theories. As Gerald Gunderson duly repeated in a review of The Real Lincoln on an economic history web site (see my LRC article, "The Economics of Slavery"), the Republican position was supposedly to "pick the low-hanging fruit," i.e., oppose the introduction of slavery into the territories, so that the institution would eventually die off.
[glow=red,2,300]Continued...[/glow]
