[OFFLIST] RE: [lbo-talk] Thanksgiving

[Michael Pugliese]

   Re; Lincoln, Thomas di Lorenzo wrote a book laying out the anti-Lincoln 
case from the Right a few yrs. ago.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo47.html
The Political Economy of World Domination
http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo-arch.html
Thomas DiLorenzo: Archives

Past articles by Thomas DiLorenzo on LewRockwell.com

Making Cannon Fodder
A Straussian exposes the Lincolnian big-lie.

The Cheap Lincoln
Tom DiLorenzo's classic The Real Lincoln is out in a handsome paperback, 
complete with a new chapter refuting his hystericon critics.

Pledging Allegiance
To the omnipotent Lincolnian state.

The Republican Moneyed Elite
And why they elected Lincoln.

There's Gambling in Vegas
And fascism in DC.

Dishonest Abe
The Lincolnians were inside traders.

Statism, Imperialism, Hubris
Thomas DiLorenzo on Irving "the Godfather" Kristol's neocon manifesto.

The GOP-Liberian Connection
Lincoln started it, with the plan to deport American blacks to Africa.

Supreme Dictators
Thanks, as a happy Woodrow Wilson explained, to Lincoln.

The Political Economy of World Domination
Thomas DiLorenzo on the neocons and their strange, Eastern European 
philosophy.

Leo Lincoln
No wonder neocons love Abe, says Thomas DiLorenzo.

States Rights vs. Tyranny
And tyrannical central banking.

Six Myths About Lincoln
Thomas DiLorenzo explodes them.

The 'Buy America' Myth
The South, unlike Lincoln and the Buchananites, was right on tariffs, says 
Thomas DiLorenzo.

Northern States Rights
Thomas DiLorenzo on Straussian lies about America.

Lincoln's Spectacular Lie
That the central government created the states.

Protectionism Means Hostilities
As in 1861.

What Lincoln's Army Did to the Indians
No wonder the neocons love General Sherman.

The Lincolnian Graveyard
Neocons are whistling past it, says Thomas J. DiLorenzo.

Lincolnites Love Bush
Uh oh.

Lincoln: Slavery A-OK
Thomas DiLorenzo on the Great Emancipator's real 13th amendment.

Anti-Lincoln Gangs of New York
Some effects of Lincoln's military slavery.

The Evil of Politics
Thomas DiLorenzo was right from the beginning.

States Rights Mean Freedom
Thomas DiLorenzo explains to hyperventilating neocons.

Lincoln's Willing Executioners
Their evil marches on, but not on private property.

Lincoln's 'Second American Revolution'
Thomas DiLorenzo on our first Republican (i.e., statist and bloodthirsty) 
president.

Libelers for Lincoln
Thomas DiLorenzo on court historians.

Financing the Empire
How it all began, with the anti-gold Lincoln and his greenbacks.

The Economics of Slavery
Thomas DiLorenzo on Lincolnian distorters.

Bush Is Lincolnian
This is not praise, says Thomas DiLorenzo.

No Justice, No Peace
Thomas DiLorenzo on the other reparations movement.

John C. Calhoun, Free Trader
America's greatest political thinker was also a free-market sage.

The Unknown Lincoln
Not any longer, thanks to Thomas DiLorenzo.

Abeolony
Thomas DiLorenzo on fake Lincoln quotes.

The Weirdest Defense of Lincoln Yet
Thomas DiLorenzo refutes Jude Wanniski.

Whigged-Out Lincolnites
Thomas DiLorenzo on their flipped-out and fibbing worship.

Confronting the Lincoln Cult
An interview with Thomas DiLorenzo, the man who knocked Abraham-Zeus out of 
his state temple. Read his #1 LRC bestseller.

Is There a Libertarian Case for Lincoln?
Of course not! Thomas DiLorenzo on Machan, secession, and slavery.

Constitutional Con Men
Thomas DiLorenzo on Harry Jaffa and his Lincolnian cabal.

Lincoln's Tariff War
The warmongering, centralizing protectionist invaded the South on a looting 
expedition.

Hitler Was a Lincolnite
Some distortions of Harry Jaffa exposed.

Prevaricating Pentacrat
Now Tom DiLorenzo, author of The Real Lincoln, really knows he's doing 
something right.

Lincoln's War on Northern Liberties
The neocons, note, defend everything the Dictator did.

The Economic Causes of Lincoln's War
The neocons lie about them, of course.

Was Lincoln a Tyrant?
Only neocons would deny it.

Glory, Glory Hallelujah
Abe's evil marches on.

Lying For Lincoln
Thomas DiLorenzo on the neocon smears against his important new Lincoln 
book.

Stop Lying About Lincoln
Thomas DiLorenzo has had it with official prevaricators.

Dislike Aggressive War and National Socialism?
Then you must like slavery. Thomas DiLorenzo on the typical defense of 
Honest Abe.

Lincolnites Can't Stand the Truth
But that's not stopping the truth teller, Thomas DiLorenzo. Read his new 
book, The Real Lincoln.

Happy Dictator Day
Thomas DiLorenzo on Lincoln.

Cornel West, Marxist
No wonder he's an academic "rock star." Article by Thomas DiLorenzo.

Osama Bin Sherman
No wonder George Will likes him, and the feds named a tank in his honor. 
Letter by Thomas J. DiLorenzo.

US Military "Trials"
Here's just one episode, courtesy of the murderous Lincoln.

Targeting Civilians
In the modern era, it all started with Lincoln.

Lincoln's Culture of Death
And those who pretend it's pro-life.

The Banner of Federal Oppression
Thomas DiLorenzo puts Independence Day in perspective.

The Truth About the 14th Amendment
And the Northern origins of Jim Crow.

Libertarians Should Love the Confederate Flag
But the Beltway versions are allied with the NAACP and the SPLC in hating 
it. What gives?

Deconstructing the 'War Street Journal'
Tom DiLorenzo, proud "denizen" of LRC, refutes the attack.

Tyranny Personified
Tom DiLorenzo examines Teddy Kennedy (while wearing rubber gloves).

Secession and Liberty
Thomas J. DiLorenzo on how to make concrete use of the election returns.

Loot Seekers Attack Microsoft
Including the bought-and-paid-for Robert Bork, says Thomas DiLor
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/Chronicles/January2001/0101LivingstonPaleo.html
> From the January 2001 issue of Chronicles:

The Litmus Test for American Conservatism
by Donald W. Livingston

Abraham Lincoln is thought of by many as not only the greatest American 
statesman but as a great conservative.  He was neither.  Understanding this 
is a necessary condition for any genuinely American conservatism.  When 
Lincoln took office, the American polity was regarded as a compact between 
sovereign states which had created a central government as their agent, 
hedging it in by a doctrine of enumerated powers.  Since the compact 
between the states was voluntary, secession was considered an option by 
public leaders in every section of the Union during the antebellum period.  
Given this tradition—deeply rooted in the Declaration of Independence—a 
great statesman in 1860 would have negotiated a settlement with the 
disaffected states, even if it meant the withdrawal of some from the Union. 
 But Lincoln refused even to accept Confederate commissioners, much less 
negotiate with them.  Most of the Union could have been kept together.  
Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas voted to remain in the 
Union even after the Confederacy was formed; they reversed themselves only 
when Lincoln decided on a war of coercion.  A great statesman does not 
seduce his people into a needless war; he keeps them out of it.

When the Soviet Union dissolved by peaceful secession, it was only 70 years 
old—the same age as the United States when it dissolved in 1860.  Did 
Gorbachev fail as a statesman because he negotiated a peaceful dissolution 
of the U.S.S.R.?  Likewise, if all states west of the Mississippi were to 
secede tomorrow, would we praise, as a great statesman, a president who 
refused to negotiate and launched total war against the civilian population 
merely to preserve the Union?  The number of Southerners who died as a 
result of Lincoln’s invasion was greater than the total of all Americans 
killed by Hitler and Tojo.  By the end of the war, nearly one half of the 
white male population of military age was either dead or mutilated.  No 
country in World War II suffered casualties of that magnitude.

Not only would Lincoln not receive Confederate commissioners, he refused, 
for three crucial months, to call Congress.  Alone, he illegally raised 
money, illegally raised troops, and started the war.  To crush Northern 
opposition, he suspended the writ of habeas corpus for the duration of the 
war and rounded up some 20,000 political prisoners.  (Mussolini arrested 
some 12,000 but convicted only 1,624.)  When the chief justice of the 
Supreme Court declared the suspension blatantly unconstitutional and 
ordered the prisoners released, Lincoln ordered his arrest.  This American 
Caesar shut down over 300 newspapers, arrested editors, and smashed 
presses.  He broke up state legislatures; arrested Democratic candidates 
who urged an armistice; and used the military to elect Republicans 
(including himself, in 1864, by a margin of around 38,000 popular votes).  
He illegally created a “state” in West Virginia and imported a large army 
of foreign mercenaries.  B.H. Liddell Hart traces the origin of modern 
total war to Lincoln’s decision to direct war against the civilian 
population.  Sherman acknowledged that, by the rules of war taught at West 
Point, he was guilty of war crimes punishable by death.  But who was to 
enforce those rules?

These actions are justified by nationalist historians as the energetic and 
extraordinary efforts of a great helmsman rising to the painful duty of 
preserving an indivisible Union.  But Lincoln had inherited no such Union 
from the Framers.  Rather, like Bismarck, he created one with a policy of 
blood and iron.  What we call the “Civil War” was in fact America’s French 
Revolution, and Lincoln was the first Jacobin president.  He claimed 
legitimacy for his actions with a “conservative” rhetoric, rooted in an 
historically false theory of the Constitution which held that the states 
had never been sovereign.  The Union created the states, he said, not the 
states the Union.  In time, this corrupt and corrupting doctrine would suck 
nearly every reserved power of the states into the central government.  
Lincoln seared into the American mind an ideological style of politics 
which, through a sort of alchemy, transmuted a federative “union” of states 
into a French revolutionary “nation” launched on an unending global mission 
of achieving equality.  Lincoln’s corrupt constitutionalism and his 
ideological style of politics have, over time, led to the hollowing out of 
traditional American society and the obscene concentration of power in the 
central government that the Constitution was explicitly designed to 
prevent.

A genuinely American conservatism, then, must adopt the project of 
preserving and restoring the decentralized federative polity of the Framers 
rooted in state and local sovereignty.  The central government has no 
constitutional authority to do most of what it does today.  The first 
question posed by an authentic American conservative politics is not 
whether a policy is good or bad, but what agency (the states or the central 
government—if either) has the authority to enact it.  This is the principle 
of subsidiarity: that as much as possible should be done by the smallest 
political unit.

The Democratic and Republican parties are Lincolnian parties.  Neither 
honestly questions the limits of federal authority to do this or that.  In 
1861, the central government broke free from what Jefferson called “the 
chains of the Constitution,” and we have, consequently, inherited a 
fractured historical memory.  There are now two Americanisms: pre- 
Lincolnian and post-Lincolnian.  The latter is Jacobinism by other means.  
Only the former can lay claim to being the primordial American 
conservatism.

David W. Livingston is a professor of philosophy at Emory University and 
the author of Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium (University of Chicago 
Press).