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The American Lenin?
by L. Neil Smith
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 an export 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.
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
Author: The Probability Broach, The Crystal Empire, The Lando Calrissian
Adventures, Henry Martyn, and Pallas
Founder: Libertarian Second Amendment Caucus
Secretary & Legislative Director: Weld County Fish & Wildlife Association
NRA Life Member
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