JPFO:Abe Lincoln vs. states rights--libertarian vs. conservative

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ALERT FROM JEWS FOR THE PRESERVATION OF FIREARMS OWNERSHIP
America's Aggressive Civil Rights Organization
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February 12, 2001

ALERT: The Abe Lincoln They Didn't Want You to Learn About in School

For Lincoln's birthday, we pass along this essay:

The American Lenin
by L. Neil Smith
lneil@ezlink.com

It's harder and harder these days to tell a liberal from a
conservative -- given the former category's increasingly
blatant hostility toward the First Amendment, and the
latter's prissy new disdain for the Second Amendment --
but it's still easy to tell a liberal from a libertarian.

Just ask about either Amendment.

If what you get back is a spirited defense of the ideas of
this country's Founding Fathers, what you've got is a
libertarian. By shameful default, libertarians have become
America's last and only reliable stewards of the Bill of
Rights.

But if -- and this usually seems a bit more difficult to
most people -- you'd like to know whether an individual is
a libertarian or a conservative, ask about Abraham Lincoln.

Suppose a woman -- with plenty of personal faults herself,
let that be stipulated -- desired to leave her husband:
partly because he made a regular practice, in order to go
out and get drunk, of stealing money she had earned herself
by raising chickens or taking in laundry; and partly because
he'd already demonstrated a proclivity for domestic violence
the first time she'd complained about his stealing.

Now, when he stood in the doorway and beat her to a bloody
pulp to keep her home, would we memorialize him as a hero?
Or would we treat him like a dangerous lunatic who should
be locked up, if for no other reason, then for trying to
maintain the appearance of a relationship where there wasn't
a relationship any more? What value, we would ask, does he
find in continuing to possess her in an involuntary
association, when her heart and mind had left him long
ago?

History tells us that Lincoln was a politically ambitious
lawyer who eagerly prostituted himself to northern
industrialists who were unwilling to pay world prices for
their raw materials and who, rather than practice real
capitalism, enlisted brute government force -- "sell to
us at our price or pay a fine that'll put you out of
business" -- for dealing with uncooperative southern
suppliers. That's what a tariff's all about. In support
of this "noble principle", when southerners demonstrated
what amounted to no more than token resistance, Lincoln
permitted an internal war to begin that butchered more
Americans than all of this country's foreign wars --
before or afterward -- rolled into one.

Lincoln saw the introduction of total war on the American
continent -- indiscriminate mass slaughter and destruction
without regard to age, gender, or combat status of the
victims -- and oversaw the systematic shelling and burning
of entire cities for strategic and tactical purposes. For
the same purposes, Lincoln declared, rather late in the war,
that black slaves were now free in the south -- where he had
no effective jurisdiction -- while declaring at the same
time, somewhat more quietly but for the record nonetheless,
that if maintaining slavery could have won his war for him,
he'd have done that, instead.

The fact is, Lincoln didn't abolish slavery at all, he
nationalized it, imposing income taxation and military
conscription upon what had been a free country before he
took over -- income taxation and military conscription to
which newly "freed" blacks soon found themselves subjected
right alongside newly-enslaved whites. If the civil war was
truly fought against slavery -- a dubious, "politically
correct" assertion with no historical evidence to back it
up -- then clearly, slavery won.

Lincoln brought secret police to America, along with the
traditional midnight "knock on the door", illegally
suspending the Bill of Rights and, like the Latin America
dictators he anticipated, "disappearing" thousands in the
north whose only crime was that they disagreed with him.
To finance his crimes against humanity, Lincoln allowed
the printing of worthless paper money in unprecedented
volumes, ultimately plunging America into a long, grim
depression -- in the south, it lasted half a century --
he didn't have to live through, himself.

In the end, Lincoln didn't unite this country -- that
can't be done by force -- he divided it along lines of an
unspeakably ugly hatred and resentment that continue to
exist almost a century and a half after they were drawn.
If Lincoln could have been put on trial in Nuremburg for
war crimes, he'd have received the same sentence as the
highest-ranking Nazis.

If libertarians ran things, they'd melt all the Lincoln
pennies, shred all the Lincoln fives, take a wrecking ball
to the Lincoln Memorial, and consider erecting monuments to
John Wilkes Booth. Libertarians know Lincoln as the worst
President America has ever had to suffer, with Woodrow
Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson running a
distant second, third, and fourth. [This essay was
written before the appearence of the Clintons. -- ed]

Conservatives, on the other hand, adore Lincoln, publicly
admire his methods, and revere him as the best President
America ever had. One wonders: is this because they'd like
to do, all over again, all of the things Lincoln did to the
American people? Judging from their taste for executions as
a substitute for individual self-defense, their penchant
for putting people behind bars -- more than any other country
in the world, per capita, no matter how poorly it works to
reduce crime -- and the bitter distaste they display for
Constitutional "technicalities" like the exclusionary rule,
which are all that keep America from becoming the world's
largest banana republic, one is well-justified in wondering.

The troubling truth is that, more than anybody else's, Abraham
Lincoln's career resembles and foreshadows that of V.I. Lenin,
who, with somewhat better technology at his disposal,
slaughtered millions of innocents -- rather than mere hundreds
of thousands -- to enforce an impossibly stupid idea which,
in the end, like forced association, was proven by history to
be a resounding failure. Abraham Lincoln was America's Lenin,
and when America has finally absorbed that painful but
illuminating truth, it will finally have begun to recover
from the War between the States.


L. Neil Smith is the award-winning author of "The Probability
Broach", "The Mitzvah" (with Aaron Zelman) and many other books.

Permission to redistribute this article is herewith granted by
the author -- provided that it is reproduced unedited, in its
entirety, and appropriate credit given. This article is on
the Web at http://www.webleyweb.com/lneil/abelenin.html

ADDITIONAL READING ABOUT LINCOLN:

Lincoln's Economic Legacy, by Thomas J. DiLorenzo:
[go to http://www.mises.org/ and do a search on Lincoln or
on the author]

Freeing Slaves, Enslaving Free Men, by Jeffrey Rodgers Hummell

The Real Lincoln, by Charles L. C. minor

War for What?, by Francis W. Springer

You can find links to Amazon.com for these book at the web
version of this Alert: http://www.jpfo.org/alert20010212.htm

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Having practically stole a beretta 92d for 400 and 2 full capacity mags, and put a CD player in the wifes car I could only recently send the libertarians 50 bucks for subscription to the LP news but theirs always next week.
How about you?
http://www.lp.org
------------------
those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither
 
I live half an hour south of Springfield, IL. "Lincoln's hometown" in the middle of the "Land of Lincoln." Today they're breaking ground for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. You can imagine the amount of attention that gets paid to any dissenting voice on Lincoln's record.
 
The writer has absolutely no concept of politics during the Civil War. Neither does he understand that habeus corpus is a privilege, not a right, and Article 1, Section 9 permits its suspension during war, rebellion, or when the public safety requires it. He obviously has no understanding that the President does not have the power to confiscate anyone's property unless they are in rebellion, and this is why we had to wait for an Amendment abolishing involuntary servitude.

Sorry, but this article gets today's "Tedious Gibberish" award.
 
Actually no, it gets todays "Stop & Think" award. I've always been troubled in a vague sort of way by Lincoln and his handling of the Souths desire to leave the Union. His act of setting the Southern slaves free after those states had left, which he categorically had no power to even attempt to do, while specifically NOT freeing Northern held slaves, was a deliberate slap in the face to the Confederacy at a juncture where such an act was obviously pure folly.

What Lincoln truly did was make certain the several States, and the citizens thereof, knew from then on where the true power lies. Maybe he did things the only way possible but certainly todays problems, from race relations to a burgeoning Centralized Government, originated with Lincoln and his actions in response to the War Between the States.
 
race relations?

I don't see how race relations problems of today can be blamed on Lincoln. The big race problems today are mostly propagated by the left-wingers who profit from such things, demagouges like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who find racism, whether it's there or not.

Beyond that, we need to step back and look at this from another perspective. My civil war history is a little fuzzy, but the Confederates DID fire on a federal military post (Ft. Sumpter), and even though there are no casualties, that's still treason. Now, I'm not saying that Lincoln was right in all of his actions, and there may have been a peaceful solution to the problems of the era. On the other hand, there may not have been. Maybe it was a fight that had to be fought. I may get flamed for this, but you know what? I'm glad the north won the war and the United States was preserved, instead of being torn into two seperate countries. Preserving the Union was Lincoln's primary concern in the matter, I believe. Not every thing he did was right, but, the war's over, and everyone involved is dead, so there's no point in arguing it now.

But I don't know how you can possibly think race relations would be better had the south won the war. Slavery would've continued until the economics of it killed it, and then it still would've been legal for God knows how long. And after that, there'd still probably be apartheid or something, like there was up until the 60's. I know there were slaves in the North too, and that's just as wrong. Slavery is the most vile form of evil mankind has ever dreamed up, my friends. Why do we bother to fight the RKBA fight? In order to maintain freedom. To avoid that which, thoughout history, the strong have forced onto the weak.

I think American history shows just how imperfect mankind is. That a nation founded on individual liberty would harbor slavery for so long shows that even the Constitution is imperfect, and alone, cannot guarantee us freedom, which, again, is why we need RKBA.

Besides that, the real explosion of federal power in this country didn't begin until the Great Depression, when people became desperate, and we have FDR to thank for that.
 
To me it portryas the greastest step our country
has ever taken towrd socialization and we neve even
knew it.
To the victor go the spoils and the history books,
bad part is we still dont see that we keep losing.

Habiuc corpisus you say?
Ive also heard it said a president (dictater) cant write or
pass a law without the backing of congress, saw with me now
EXECUTIVE orders abused to this day.

Im glad some have the faith they do in the existing and the federal government that rose from the ashes much less the leaders that began to rule afterward, I refuse to romanticize them so they are greedy lawyers nothing more
I often feel the best of them are only allowed to remain to give us a false sense of hope kindve like the sherrif's deparntment.
Hay we can elect him we the people have 'SOME' control over the local LE HA! here comes the appointed PD whom you cant touch.
Yeah Ok that was a tidbit of an example.
Before the war between the states people actually paid taxes , today it seems its simply taken from the working
given to those in control and promised to the needy and dependent.
Control over your firearms, control over your taxes,
Control over the roads your agriculture what communist nation your tax dollars go to support trade with.
Come on I want to hear it again......
we have......states....rights?????

Try finding today a history book taught to elementary or even high school kids that details to any degree how the
NAZI's disarmed the jews before enslaving so many of them
and pherphaps even that minor detail about how the records kept of their firearms was used against them.
Yet many of us want to put faith in the media's description of events far older than that.
How deeply we are blinded.The victor truly has the spoils
and control of the media 'public education' how long have we lived with that joke
that time the victor was not those who beleived in a free republic for the people by the people.
Today itd be more like for the rulers by the lawyers.

100 years from now for his efforts to make peace with our neighbors (communist vietnamese,cubans,chinese further empowerment of the UN) his efforts to make the children safe
( by banning such a large number of fireamrs)and ofcourse his efforts to make all the people safer by more greatly policing the people ( by a greater number of BATF agents and police still controlled in the long run by the government) Bill Clinton will be viewed as the same kindve hero Abe Lincoln is today.
 
NIGHTCRAWLER-The big race problems today are mostly propagated by the left-wingers who profit from such things, demagouges like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who find racism, whether it's there or not. --

I agree with you try telling that to the NAACP
but I feel the post was not making topic out of race relations or blaming them on Lincoln but bringing out that he was merely using them as a guise for attacking and subduing them south and all
'americans' under his new system that was nicely set up to profit politicians and all our new rulers to this day whether we liked it or not, not only with money automatically from out pockets but with power.
Itd be nice if somehow we can avoid taking this into an all race relation discussion me and the wife get along just great now (after the second time I took her shooting and a have read her numerous acounts of self-defense shootings or times when crimes were stopped.Takes some work to get out all of that brainwashing from the media that anyone with guns thugs/gangsters as she once said.)

Ive been under the impression for sometime that further
govenement control and regulation are our enemy not people
who want to keep enjoying the rights especially RKBA
that we have today.
But hey who am I to day stay on topic.
 
Let me see, slavery ends as a result of the economics costs of it as well as the realization across an ever widening segment of citizenry that it is fundamentally wrong vs slavery ending post haste by a war that was never really about slavery in the first place, but rather states rights. Hmm, which would have likely resulted in less tension over the long term? Less bitter and even violent feelings? Which would likely NOT have spawned things like the KKK?

The quickest solution is not always the best. And I frankly do not believe we would have mindless race baiters like Jackson and Sharpton if Slavery had been allowed to die a natural death. But we'll never know now. Likewise I do not believe we would have remained two separate nations because economics and world events would ahve forced us to become one again. But a desire for maintaining and increasing a centralized bureaucracy outweighed all other possibilities and situations, including the supposed main event, slavery.

My vague troubles with Lincoln center mostly on the certainty that he fought a war not to free men but to protect a centralized power. I don't believe, from his actions, that slavery was any real concern to him at all. We can argue about this all we want but nothing will ever convince me it was handled even remotely in the best interests of all concerned nor that Lincoln is anything more than a technically skilled president. Greatness eluded him and I present as proof any number of cemetaries.

And why should I read your post again, Munro? Have you added something meaningful to it?
 
Sorry there, 2nd Amendment, we disagree as to what exactly constitutes reality when it comes to the Civil War. I'd best sign off on this one.
 
The unCivil war is hard to get a take on. Lincoln had to wait 3 weeks until the Congress was no longer in session to declare the Southern states to be officially in rebellion. Why? Because with congress in session they would have most likely have declared it a succession, and that would have been the end of that.
As far as the CSA firing on a federal installation, it was no more an act of treason than JFK demanding that Cuba remove soviet missiles from the hemisphere. Treason is what a citizen of a nation does to his own nation. The Confederate States of America was not a part of the United States of America. It was merely enforcing it's territorial sovereignty and refusing to let a foriegn nation use land that it had not leased legally.
See how this works? We'll never get to the end of it. I believe that if the South had been successful, it would be doing quite well today and we'd have never heard of the ugliness of Jim Crowe, or segregation. I do think that they would have implemented a more workable plan for integration and we'd have never heard of forced busing. Pure speculation though. Any gentleness that could have come from the aftermath was destroyed with Lincolns death and the rise of the "bloody shirt."
 
Then it was 'slavery' what do you call what were doing today.
You know where the largest concentration of 'minorities
is in my fair city, the federal housing projects today.
You know how many firearms are legally owned in these dwellings?
None all federal housing projects are under a gun ban.
Enjoy the 'freedom' the UNion fought for you to attain?
And the control they have over all of us.
To discuss race in detail it seems often only serves to divide us a situtaion most appealing to the liberals.
We must be united to have any chance of surviving much less
changing things for the better.
I have hoped mainly to attack the ways Lincoln championed that further enslaved the entire country whether economically or federally by basically creating a govenrnment where men from washington and or who spend most of their time their can control what happens in the back hills bucksnort,TN (yes their is one).
Its rather likely that Lincoln like most of our presidents was yet another puppet and acted very little of his own innitiative.
Like Bush here claiming to be for Christians and gunowners
yet already we hear more talk of new gunlaws that I beleive only to be the icing on the cake and you will NOT see
Bush stand up to the UN or WTO both of whom christians as a group it seesm rabidly oppose with good reason.
Colin Powelel and Dick Cheney are both members of the
council on foreign relations the think tank behind
the United nations funded by rich men from guess what country....
until we learn to unite as a nation we will continue to divide.Africa practices slavery and cannabalism to this day but itd be a huge waste of my time to make an issue out of
someone I saw choosing to wear a symbol of the country.
Until we learn to recognize the chains being shackled to us
and strongly oppose them our enslavement remains.
 
2nd Amendment,
have you by chance read the novel, If the South Had Won the Civil War, by, I believe, McCanlay Kantor? Imaginative fiction/Alternative history tale. I read it many years ago, I believe in the 1960s. It was predicated on the small variation that Thomas Stonewall Jackson did NOT die from a nervous CSA picket's shot, that Saturday at Chancellorsville.

Then things unrolled in the logical manner--the way they so nearly did anyhow--and the North sued for peace in due course. History progressed in much the way you outlined in your last reply.

One interesting twist in that novel: Texas broke away from the CSA.

Not a very long book, but interesting, and well worth finding in the used book stores. I've often wondered if it might have planted the idea for Harry Turtledove's Guns of the South and sequella.

Best,
Johnny
MOLON LABE!
 
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ALERT FROM JEWS FOR THE PRESERVATION OF FIREARMS OWNERSHIP
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February 14, 2001

ALERT: More About Lincoln

Lincoln
by L. Neil Smith

Very interesting ...

My article "The American Lenin" was originally published in
a large western newspaper a few years ago, and stirred up a
reaction very similar to the one we're seeing presently,
following JPFO's rerelease of it. I stand by the article
now as I did then. In fact I've since learned that I was
unnecessarily _gentle_ with Lincoln, who committed many more
evil and illegal acts than I was aware of at the time I wrote
the article.

After the controversy following the original publication,
a retired professor of history from that state's university
wrote to the newspaper to say that I was correct in everything
I said about Lincoln and the War between the States.
Unfortunately, the editors of the paper apparently felt the
flap had gone on long enough, and they didn't print the letter.

The simple fact is that if Lincoln had done what he did in any
other country, we would _all_ regard him as a psychopath and
mass-murderer. The only reason he killed fewer of his fellow
Americans than Hitler, Stalin. Mao, or Pol Pot is that he
didn't have the technology they did. Absolutely _nothing_ can
justify his crimes. Nothing.

Lincoln apologists have to get one simple (if painful and
inconvenient) fact through their heads: the War between the
States had absolutely nothing to do with slavery until Lincoln
and his political handlers decided to use that issue for
propaganda purposes. The war was about northern industrialists
not wanting to pay market prices for southern raw materials --
northern industrialists who sometimes owned slaves, themselves.

To respond directly to one individual who has been especially
deceived by history-written-by the-victor, Lincoln libertated
_nobody_. His empty "Emancipation Proclamation" decreed freedom
_only_ for slaves in territories Lincoln didn't control, It
didn't emancipate any slaves in the north -- that would have
offended the millionaire backers who put him in the White
House in the first place. I repeat: Lincoln freed _nobody_.

The same fellow wishes to impose a new political correctness
on libertarians, and decrees that they should all be pro-
Lincoln. I see ... we should whoop it up for the benefactor
who brought income taxation, conscription, and the midnight
knock on the door to America. We should celebrate the
statesman who imprisoned 15,000 _northerners_ who publicly
disagreed with him, and sent troops to smash the presses of
newspapers that did the same.

I wonder what kind of libertarian this person really is, if
he can blithely approve such massive, wholesale violation of
the Non-Aggression Principle. Not one I'd willingly turn my
back on.

Somebody else wrote to a list to assail me for doubting
Lincoln's wise and beneficial economic policies -- which
consisted of trying to print enought paper trash to finance
his evil war. (By the way, the alleged fact that he got
caught at it and stopped does not reduce his guilt.) I've
seldom seen more twisted "logic", and rather than argue
against it, I'll just point out that these wise and
beneficial policies plunged the country into a postwar
depression -- and refer these correspondents to the works
of the late Murray N. Rothbard.

Others accuse me, in their liberaloid way, of being pro-
Confederacy or even pro-slavery. But like Lysander Spooner,
who lived through that war, I wouldn't have taken either side
in it, and I choose to expose Lincoln because I hate, loathe,
and despise slavery in any form it takes, including those he
invented and imposed on his fellow Americans.

People frequently ask me about my sources, or berate me for
not offering them in the first place. Few writers of 800-1000
word columns do footnotes at the bottoms, that's not in the
nature of the task. I've always seen my job (as a journalist)
as taking facts "everybody knows" and showing how they mean
something other than what everybody thought they meant.

In this particular case, my sources are practically any book
ever written about Lincoln, _especially_ those intended to be
favorable to him, written by otherwise intelligent and scholarly
individuals who have regrettably become Lincoln cultists and
made a demigod of him.

For my part, Lincoln's worst atrocity is that he undid the
American Revolution, violated and destroyed its every principle,
and left us with the police state that we must struggle against
and abolish today. Of those cowards who fear that my article
might harm the public's opinion of JPFO or the libertarian
movement, I ask, since when did a baldfaced lie -- the image
of Lincoln as the martyred "American Christ" -- ever help
anyone?

I stand for the truth. Would you have me do otherwise?

L. Neil Smith
lneil@ezlink.com
http://www.webleyweb.com/lneil/

[For additional reading about Lincoln, see the list of books
and articles on http://www.jpfo.org/alert20010212.htm#reading ]

================================================================
Original Material in JPFO ALERTS is Copyright 2001 JPFO, Inc.
Permission is granted to reproduce this alert in full, so long
as the following JPFO contact information is included:

Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership
PO Box 270143
Hartford, Wisconsin 53027

Phone: 1-262-673-9745
Orders only: 1-800-869-1884 (toll-free!)
Fax: 1-262-673-9746
Web: http://www.jpfo.org/
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