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Come Home, Conservatives!—to the Antiwar Conservative Movement
Under Consideration: Bill Kauffman, Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Anti-War Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism, Metropolitan Book (2008), 304 pages.
Winston Churchill once described the Soviet Union as the only country in the world with an unpredictable past. It was an impressive racket, really, in which the official version of history changed in accordance with the political demands of the present. If something in the past discomfited the regime and its propaganda, then it never happened, or happened quite differently.
In our own country, teachers and ordinary citizens alike are expected to conform to the Official Version of our history. Book publishers, to be sure, do not conspire behind closed doors to come up with ways to enslave the American people to their government. But suppose they did, and American history textbooks were written for the express purpose of turning American students into zombies who mindlessly repeated government propaganda and believed the state existed to protect the common good. How would the books be any different?
For a maverick historian, though, an ossified Official History has a silver lining: he can make a career out of exposing and correcting it, or filling in the gaps that court historians choose to ignore. Until Bill Watkins’ 2004 volume Reclaiming the American Revolution, for instance, there had not been a single book on the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 in a hundred years—as scores of studies of every bit of useless trivia lined the shelves.
Bill Kauffman has filled another such gap in delightful and dramatic style with Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Anti-War Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism. Kauffman’s book joins only a handful of titles on this interesting and important subject, including Justin Raimondo’s excellent Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (which is being re-released with additional material this month), Justus Doenecke’s Not to the Swift: The Old Isolationists in the Cold War Era, and Ronald Radosh’s Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism. (Radosh, now a neoconservative, has doubtless repudiated this useful book, which is further indication of its worth.)
The figures and organizations Kauffman profiles do not fit into the received version of American history, in which only “leftists” who “hate America” might object to spending trillions of dollars feeding imperial ambition. The conservative John Randolph of Roanoke, who opposed the War of 1812, and Alexander Stephens, the Confederate vice president who had earlier opposed war with Mexico, are just two of the people discussed in Ain’t My America who refuse to fit themselves into the proper categories.
A strange omission from this book is the War Between the States, for if violently suppressing the peaceful secession of sovereign states does not smack of imperialism—especially in the context of the nation-building nineteenth century—then nothing does. The depiction of that war as glorious and righteous is a central ingredient in the current regime’s flattering portrayal of itself, and in the civic religion taught in the institutions of propaganda to which some still entrust their young. Robert E. Lee made the connection explicit, predicting that the “consolidation of the states into one vast republic” would produce an entity that was “sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home.” This should have been perfect grist for Kauffman’s mill.
The cross-ideological American Anti-Imperialist League, formed in the wake of the American acquisition of (among other territory) the Philippines following the Spanish-American War, is right up Kauffman’s alley. He gives us lively vignettes of its more colorful figures, such as the laissez-faire businessman Edward Atkinson, who asked the War Department for some addresses so he could send his antiwar pamphlets to the troops. Now once in a while the anti-imperialists are taken to task for their alleged lack of racial enlightenment (the pro-war forces, of course, being their usual models of toleration). This description of the anti-imperialists is not even accurate in the first place; Moorfield Storey, a leader of the NAACP, is one of many obvious counter-examples. But Kauffman, who is able to put such matters into perspective, suggests that mass murder may actually be a worse crime than racial insensitivity: “If neither side distinguished itself by the elevated moral standards of the twenty-first century, when all men are brothers and peace rules our planet, at least the anti-imperialists wanted to leave the Filipinos alone rather than conquer and slaughter them.”
Along the same lines Kauffman cites Sen. James K. Vardaman of Mississippi, who like most Americans at the time believed neither in integration nor racial equality but who sacrificed his career for the cause of peace as Woodrow Wilson was pushing his country into the Great War. His friends tried in vain to persuade him to support the president, but he would not budge. Losing his Senate seat was as nothing, he said, compared to the lives and liberties that Americans would lose if the country entered the war. In 1918 he was defeated for re-election by Democrat Pat Harrison—who, by the way, was pro-war and pro-segregation. (Wilson himself was not exactly known as a champion of the oppressed black man, but is still ranked among the “near great” presidents; taking the country to war evidently covers a multitude of sins.)
Vardaman, says Kauffman, “understood that standing athwart the empire would destroy his career.” How easy it would have been “to trim, to temporize, to dissemble, to quietly slip out of the peace camp and vote for Death. But to his eternal credit, he did not.” As he left the Senate, Vardaman called on the nations of the world to abolish conscription and to establish national referenda to decide on war.
That latter suggestion would reappear in the 1930s in the form of the Ludlow Amendment, a proposed constitutional amendment that would have required just such a referendum in the United States. I once favored that solution as a way to keep the war machine in check, and I suspect Kauffman does as well. I was talked out of it by the argument that if a war should actually be approved by such a vote (and in the weeks leading up to it the machinery of propaganda would whir like never before), the referendum would then become a potent rhetorical weapon in favor of the war. The war would have all the sanction it could need; and we’d never hear the end of all the people-have-spokens. The Ludlow Amendment, I suspect, would have been just another casualty of Donald Livingston’s observation that most efforts to limit the central government’s power usually wind up increasing it.
But if that proposal held more potential peril than promise, opponents of the warfare state in the 1930s possessed equal parts cleverness, cynicism, and dark humor. Kauffman reminds us of the Veterans of Future Wars, a group organized at Princeton University in 1936 that went on to boast 584 chapters around the country. Then there was the Association of Gold Star Mothers of Future Veterans, born at Vassar College, as well as the Foreign Correspondents of Future Wars, established at the City College of New York. This latter group proposed “to establish training courses for members of the association in the writing of atrocity stories and garbled war dispatches for patriotic purposes.” If only our own opposition to war and propaganda could be half as inspired.
Thanks to Ron Paul’s campaign the term “Taft Republican” is being tossed around once again, and Kauffman reintroduces us to the Ohio senator. Taft, known in his day as Mr. Republican, declared on the Senate floor in January 1951 that “the principal purpose of the foreign policy of the United States is to maintain the liberty of our people. … Its purpose is not to reform the entire world or spread sweetness and light and economic prosperity to peoples who have lived and worked out their own salvation for centuries, according to their customs, and to the best of their abilities.” Taft identified the second goal of American foreign policy as peace. Writes Kauffman: “Liberty and peace; with those two words, [Taft] had placed himself as far outside postwar discourse as one could reasonably stand.”
We are also treated to a sympathetic account of the anti-militarist side of Russell Kirk, whose seminal work The Conservative Mind became a revered text in the conservative canon. Among other things, Kirk was a staunch opponent of the first Persian Gulf War, writing privately to a friend that George H.W. Bush should be strung up on the White House lawn for war crimes. His lectures at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s decrying war and militarism were allowed, no doubt, only because the aging Kirk was considered too iconic not to be granted respect. Those speeches would never be permitted today, it hardly need be said, with war and bankruptcy now the most urgent conservative goals.
Kirk, who had earlier dismissed libertarians as “chirping sectaries,” praised them in the 1990s for having an “understanding of foreign policy that the elder Robert Taft represented.” That was a position he had long respected. In his 1951 biography of Randolph of Roanoke, Kirk spoke sympathetically of his subject’s aversion to war and expansionism, for men of “sturdy conservative convictions…were naturally lovers of tranquility and foes of aggression.” Skepticism of global intervention can also be found in 1954’s A Program for Conservatives, a fact the conservative establishment does not typically go out of its way to point out.
For whatever reason, Ron Paul barely registers in Ain’t My America—perhaps because, compared to the others featured here, he is already relatively well known. Kauffman instead interviews Congressman Jimmy Duncan (R-TN), who agrees with the Texas congressman that there was nothing conservative about the Iraq war. Duncan also has the crazy idea that the U.S. government might engage in too much military spending: “My goodness, we’re spending as much as all other countries of the world combined on defense spending—and they always want more.” This alone makes Duncan a “liberal,” according to the automatons.
Kauffman’s writing style is a perfect medium for transmitting the flavor of these times and the character of these men. The old republic practically courses through his veins, and the words flow effortlessly from his pen—even if they happen to be words like amaranthine, mephitic, esurient, and nepenthe. At times an understandable exasperation comes through. Thus: “War effaces and perverts everything that traditionalist conservatives profess. Every damn thing, from motherhood to the country church. And yet postwar conservatives, and especially the scowling ninnies of the Bush Right, revere war above all other values. It trumps the First Amendment; it razes the home; it decks the decalogue. And they don’t care.”
Nor do most Americans, if their voting patterns and apathy are any indication. “The American Century, alas, did not belong to the likes of Moorfield Storey, Murray Rothbard, or Russell Kirk,” Kauffman laments. “But the American soul does.”
I agree, or at least I want to. Ours is a great anti-colonial tradition, and our founders cautioned us about the perils of war and entangling alliances. Charles Pinckney warned his countrymen that global ambition was incompatible with republicanism. And the feisty individualism, the aversion to propaganda, and the plain-speaking common sense of the conservatives who populate Bill Kauffman’s book have a distinctly American flavor.
Yet one nagging argument just won’t go away: if this truly is the American soul, someone must have forgotten to tell the American people. William James, aghast at the colonial occupation of the Philippines that followed the Spanish-American War, declared that the U.S. had “puked up its ancient soul…in five minutes.” That soul, such as it is, has been sold time and again. And not to particularly high bidders, either: what people possessed of an antiwar, anti-imperial soul, that wishes only to do justice and pursue the ordinary things of life, could have been led into an immoral absurdity like the Iraq war?
With very rare exceptions, Kauffman observes, the American people have never really been presented with a choice for or against the empire. All too true – but are the people really blameless here? Some of their stupid electoral decisions may be the result of an ignorance for which they are not entirely responsible, but what remotely educated or even half-conscious living being could consider John McCain a fit candidate for anything?
I’m not entirely sure why the old America is so unpopular, though part of the reason is that few Americans have been allowed to discover it. When they do, many want to recover it. That’s why, if I were looking to transform a neoconservative into a normal human being, Ain’t My America would be one of the first books I’d hand him in my proselytizing mission.
Thomas E. Woods, Jr., is the New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including 33 Questions About American History You’re Not Supposed to Ask and, most recently, Sacred Then and Sacred Now: The Return of the Old Latin Mass.
Comments
I received the book just a week or so ago but haven’t gotten around to reading it. It’s interesting to note, however, that both Ron Paul and George McGovern’s praise can be found on the back of the cover, so you know it has to be good!
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Libertarians are still “chirping sectaries” but are right on foreign policy, on occasion as Kirk pointed out.
I just got the Kauffman book. Just hard to make room on the bookshelf, with all the excellent books by Tom Woods.
Thanks for the review. And thanks to Bill for the book.
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Once again it is the “paleolibertarians” of the Austrian School—such as Thomas DiLorenzo Thomas Woods—and traditional Catholics-- Woods again and Dr. Zmirak—who are doing the best thinking on this website, not the “paleoconservatives”. For the Austrian Schoolmen and Christdemokraten know that Judeophobia, racialism, Fascism, and nationalism are both odious lies and also anti-conservative; know that the See of St. Peter has not been vacant since 1958; know that the Blood Libel is not Catholic teaching; know that protectionism means high prices; and know that the Sun does not revolve around the Earth.
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Thomas take aim with a good parting shot about the popularity of the warfare state with the American people.
Perhaps here Adam Smith has something to tell us about the Fox News generation. In “Wealth of Nations” he says:
“In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.”
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Geez Sid. I thought you were leaving us and taking your bag of pearls (of wisdom) with you. Glad to have you back. I would miss the hilarity of linking libertarians and traditional Catholics, two classic arch-enemies straight from central casting. (Ever read Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum on the rights of labor? Not exactly libertarian stuff.) Your syncretism fits well with the other various romanticists on this site who are busy building castles in the air, instead of reading real history. As for Wood’s hatred of the American people, that will garner as many votes as Sid’s plan to mix Southern agrarianism, laissez-faire, and pre-Vatican II. A dog’s breakfast, anyone?
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Did anyone else reading my piece get the sense that I “hated” the American people?
Since I’m not running for office, I don’t need to flatter them at every turn—a good thing, you might think, for a site one assumes is visited by intellectuals. Maybe a politician is straitjacketed by p.c. platitudes, but why should the intellectuals be, especially when the offending passage is the obviously mild one above?
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“Judeophobia, racialism, Fascism, and nationalism are both odious lies and also anti-conservative”
Flag for dead horse beating and hobby horse riding. :-)
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Three powerful constituencies within the conservative Republican establishment make it extremely difficult for an effective antiwar movement from taking hold: the Christian Zionists, the neoconservatives, and the military-industrial complex.
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Articles and commentaries like this is why Takimag is the first source
I go to on the internet each morning. You can’t get better discussion between
intelligent observers of the current scene than here. Once again Dr. Woods has
shown himself to be one of the clearest writers and thinkers that we have on the Right
today.
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Dear Dr. Wood:
Perhaps I was hasty in “attributing” hatred of the American people to your piece. It’s just that we ordinary Americans do not control FOX News, CNN, or the brain of Rupert Murdoch. Are we really to blame for the Iraq War, which was decided in a climate of fear after 9-11? (I recall that Ron Paul attacked Huckabee for claiming that Americans had “supported” the Iraq War and thus had a duty to continue it.) If Americans cannot control the powers that be, how are they blameworthy? (I guess I am a Catholic Rousseauvian at the end of the day: the people can never err, though they can be led astray.)
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Marie Claire, I understand and sympathize with your position, especially since in my days as a professor I encountered lots of people who were immediately attracted to our point of view but had simply never been exposed to it before.
I happen to think the Iraq War was so ridiculous and unjustified that this isn’t a good enough excuse. You’re about to kill a great many people and you don’t bother to listen to what every expert in the world is telling you? Enough dissent crept through that the absurdity of the war should have been clear.
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@ Mr. Tom Woods,
“Did anyone else reading my piece get the sense that I “hated” the American people?”
Yes, your words reek of Obama-esque elitism and of anti-American rhetoric lifted from the sermons of Jeremiah Wright. I am, of course, kidding.
I have often pondered why such a large number of Americans are content to wallow in their vulgar ignorance. Of course the corporate media and state-controlled educational system play a large roll, but ultimately people have personal responsibility and have easy excess to the truth. The Western tradition of intellectual dissent and quest for the truth that we received from great men like Socrates, Jesus, and Thomas Jefferson has been abandoned in our modern times for intellectual laziness, moral bankruptcy, and every specie of selfish indulgence.
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Until, Miss Marie, the Ball-Adriana blog, with your servant am Flugel, gets going, All’y’all will, on occasion, still have me to kick around.
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In the inverted world inhabited by batty Sid Cundiff, telling the truth about blacks and neocon zionists is an “odious lie.”
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Perhaps it is possible to hate the ignorance, but love the ignorant?
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Mr. Woods,
I’ll get the book.
The question of the American soul is the most interesting: Are we virtuous enough to be republican? De Tocqueville says, “The chief defect of American democracy is inattention,” since Americans are absorbed in gain-getting and the pursuit of wealth. And this inattention has been aggravated by television culture and mass entertainment.
Perhaps we are due for a salutary contrapasso of dire impoverishment and a horse doctor’s dose of humility. Voegelin says that the horror of modern war and politics are accurate reflections of individual souls.
I think we ought to reflect and examine how the American soul has become a neocon soul and how this differs from that of “a normal human being.”
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Richard Early wrote:
“The joys and duty of serving in World War II eluded Murray Rothbard”
To think that serving in WWII provides joy and was righteous duty is evidence of delusion.
One might suppose duty, if they had a distorted sense of history, but to entertain that the experience should titillate joyful experience is evidence of absolute evil psychosis.
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“...Catholic Rousseauvian...”
Which one of these opposites are you ?
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To Chuck:
I admire the Savoyard Vicar; if you know Rousseau, you’ll grasp what I mean by this.
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Ah, Sid, this one’s for you, then:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zQDMOskewM
Coming up next, Fr. Giulio Maria Tam (ex-SSPX).
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To Colin C:
Can you kindly explain why you assert that the sense of duty which WW2 soldiers had was based on a poor sense of history (unless of course you mean the SS and Wehrmacht?) Surely you don’t mean the men of Omaha Beach?
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Marie,
I wonder how you would react to David Gordon’s analysis of Rousseau here:
http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/Gordon2007/Gordon6.mp3
I had the impression that he was one of the most destructive fools in the history of ideas.
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Marie Claire,
I admire the Savoyard Count. In any case, I also admire the Index Prohibitorvm and the words of all the Popes against popular sovereignty. I admire those who spilt their blood for God and King against Rousseau’s satanic ideological children.
By the way, my name is Charles.
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@ Mr Colenso,
Your impression matches reality.
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To Charles and & Colin:
Well, it’s best to read Rousseau first instead of Gordon. R is a complex thinker, sometimes conservative and other times radical. He doesn’t neatly fit into a Jacobin box. Oh, and he liked the Savoyard Vicar too!
It’s also best to read “all the Popes.” His Holiness today is certainly not against “popular sovereignty.” Egad, Charles, Catholic nations have supported all kinds of sovereignty when it suited their interests. Still, please don’t bring back the Index; I want us all to have the right to blog on takimag.
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Marie,
Most Americans were against involvement in WWII, especially pre the much hoped for attack which eventually occurred at Pearl Harbor). Factions of the right wing were amongst the most enthusiastic opponents of WWII involvement at the time.
Those schooled by post-war government propaganda and without an understanding of the various interests that pushed the US into WWII assume going to war was a righteous duty, while many independent intellectuals at the time saw little benefit and great risk.
It was propaganda, fervor, revenge , glory and excitement, (when not conscripted slavery) rather than great sympathies for any Europeans or realistic concerns about US safety that swayed the public into war. Hardly the motivations to which ‘duty’ ought to be assigned.
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Well, I agree with John Zmirak that it was a good thing the US entered WW 2 (just as it was a bad thing that we entered WW 2). With all due respect to Pat Buchanan, sooner or later the Nazis would have been a threat to the US. Or, the Reds would have gobbled up all of Europe if not for the US intervention in the West.
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Correction: I agree with Zmirak that it was a good thing we entered WW 2 but a bad thing that we entered WW ONE.
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Marie,
It would seem the height of arrogance for any of us to claim what might have happened if the US had not got involved in WWII. But it is opinions on such things, when accumulated popularly, that formulate policy, so we ought to have an opinion on such crucial matters.
That said, I don’t think things would have panned out as you suggest. One argument for this is that the Reds failed due to the nature of their militaristic, centralized states, which as Mises predicted, failed under their own weight of inefficiency, not due to the actions of the US military.
On Rousseau: I also would be skeptical of the opinion of one who bases their thoughts on a few negative reviews and references. However, it is clear to me that Rousseau made some ridiculous statements which have negatively impacted the fields of economics and political philosophy.
Perhaps their is some gold amongst his work. However, for the mean time, I’m likely to do more digging amongst those writers whose ideas seem logical.
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Perhaps your future as a shill is not assured?
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The above comment was in reply to Richard.
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To Colin:
I agree with you that it is the ‘height of arrogance’ to make predictions about what might have happened if the US had not entered WW 2 (at last some humility on takimag). Pat Buchanan seems to lack this requisite humility.
You’re probably right that the Red regimes would have imploded economically in W Europe too, but this took a long time to happen in E Europe. It’s unlikely that the Allies ever could’ve liberated E Europe from the USSR, but at least they spared W Europe the agony of Soviet (and Nazi) tyranny. That’s no small achievement. Plus, it helped the US economy to recycle all those Marshall Plan dollars back to our shores.
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Alexander Stephens was an anti-expansionist Whig (as was his admirer and fellow Whig Lincoln). The Democrats were the party of expansion and empire throughout American history (including Jefferson and his famous purchase).
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Jefferson will be considered infamous by posterity for three reasons: The Jeffersonian Bible, his support for the Terror, and the statements he made about his own character in going forth with the Louisiana Purchase.
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To Marie:
I think interference from abroad escalates more often than it solves problems. Much like sticking one’s head over a neighbor’s fence to take sides in a fight. Essentially, I think God, or whatever intelligence rules the world, pretty much sorts things out and rewards or punishes the people in proportion to their actions.
On the Marshall Plan as an investment in the US economy via recycling; this is just an old fallacy recycled again and again as an excuse for government increasing its power by confiscating tax-payer’s hard earned money.
Economics in One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt, free online, will blow apart such economic canards.
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I’m not entirely sure why the old America is so unpopular, though part of the reason is that few Americans have been allowed to discover it. When they do, many want to recover it.
An equally interesting question is why the people who actually lived in the “old America”, and certainly knew what it was about, so blithely abandoned it. The answer to this question--a historical question, so it should be right up Mr. Woods’s alley--might shed some light on the question he posed.
His partial answer--and it’s quite to Mr. Woods’s credit that he recognizes it as such--is very partial indeed. It’s also dangerous because it echoes the self-flattering answer given by prophetic and revolutionary movements throughout the ages: “If only people could actually hear the Truth, they would certainly join our side!”
I suggest that the “many” people Mr. Woods knows who were converted to the cause are a biased sample. Does he also meet those who heard at least something about the “old America”, but were not impressed by what they heard?
We have to face reality. Very few people today agree with the world-view expressed on this site, or would agree with it even if they knew and truly understood it. That’s the point from which we have to start.
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I’m just in awe of the complete victory handed to the warmongers by constant use of their carefully crafted vocabulary of death. To wit, we did not “enter” any war, ever: we invaded, we sent our young to kill and be killed, we bombed, we bombarded, we burnt, destroyed and devastated abroad, and we became despots at home.
Please, if you’re intellectuals, act like it, and speak like it.
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There is no anti-war right constituency. Those who identify as “conservatives” or Republicans are all for the war in Iraq, greater wars throughout the Middle East, and have no quibble with the security state measures enacted after September 11th. Anti-war Conservatives are basically nothing more than a few egg head intellectual types who enjoy reading the works of forgotten conservative thinkers. But it isn’t a demographic that has any power or significance in American politics.
The Neocons did not emerge into power until after 9/11. During the 1990s they were lost in the wilderness, desperately clinging to anyone (even Clinton) who would re-ignite a great civilizational struggle with the United States. The shadow of 9/11 will linger for generations, maybe a century, and until it passes Neocons will continue to receive the fortunes of the Heavens.
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A fine review, Dr. Woods. Your thoughts on the American soul provoke a necessary discussion of the “What’s the Matter With Kansas” debate, or the mystery that so many Americans of the heartland willingly vote for policies antithetical to their interests. The Burnham-Gottfried-Francis analysis of the managerial state is, in my judgment, so far the best answer to that question.
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It’s only arrogance if Buchanan claimed to know definitively what would have happened had America not entered WWII. There’s no crime or shame in considering counterfactual situations. Coaches, businessmen, and scientists do it all the time, and we profit by it.
Kauffman’s latest book takes pride of place on my bookshelf next to his other works, and Dr. Woods’s too. What a bracing review of what was, and is now ignored! One could weep to see how things have changed.
There’s something invariably in humans that comes forth when they have enough power. As soon as America was too big for its britches it was on the march to empire. I can’t think of an example contrary to this. Humility, then strength, then conqueror--always and everywhere.
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‘Humility, then strength, then conqueror...’
-- then decline.
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“I’m not entirely sure why the old America is so unpopular...” My wife says it is because if we elect a Ron Paul, people will have to put down 20% of the purchase price to get a mortgage, take responsibility for their own healthcare, and save for their own retirement. You do the math.
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“An equally interesting question is why the people who actually lived in the “old America”, and certainly knew what it was about, so blithely abandoned it.”
They didn’t know that they lived in a golden age.
But did they actually live in such a halcyon era?
And do we live in such a wretched one?
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According to Elan Pappe - The Ethnic Cleansing of Israel - writing fiction in lieu of history is exactly what the Israelis have been doing from the beginning.
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What are the odds that nation-state as powerful and interventionist as the United States
would only engage in just war? A cursory examination of American history will indict several
presidents as ruthless warmongers who cared little for the young men they were sending
off to die.
‘’Wars are not made by common folk, scratching for living in the heat of the day; but by demagogues infesting palaces.” H. L. Mencken
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“A strange omission from this book is
the War Between the States, for if
violently suppressing the peaceful secession
of sovereign states .....” Where would we be
without the ritual horsewhipping reserved for
Lincoln and the Union. I’m sorry but I feel no
sympathy for a bunch of feudalistic plutocrats
gamely fighting for their right to buy & sell
people like cattle. If you feel the war was immoral or
unneccesary, OK. But at least confront slavery
as an issue.
We should have let Hitler and Stalin alone to
battle each other to exhaustion during WWII. Neither
would be in any shape to dominate anyone, whoever the
winner, as they were about evenly matched. A possible problem
was the fantastic technology developed by the Germans which could
have been used to threaten anyone including the
USA.
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No serious historian will claim Lincoln went to war to end slavery. Indeed, just prior
to his inauguration, Lincoln offered support to the proposed Corwin Amendment, the original
13th amendment that would have prevented Congress from ever messing with slavery. And
as Jeff Rogers Hummel points out his in book ‘Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men’, it was
the federal union that protected slavery and secession of the deep south states would
have resulted in its rapid decline. It was Lincoln’s illegal order to invade the South which led
drove Virginia, North Carolina, and Arkansas to secede and tank arms with Gulf State
Confederacy. Why did the aboliton of slavery in the United States require a war that took the
lives of over 620,000 men when every other Western nation was able to end it peacefully? The
answer is, of course, it didn’t. Lincoln went to war to preserve his lousy tariff.
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I suppose the Northern industrial interests who demanded protectionist tariffs
to safeguard their ill-gotten profits don’t count as plutocrats.
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Anyone who tries to characterize World War Two as crusade against evil must contend
with the fact the United States allied itself with Stalin, a dictator whose government
was as bloodstained as Hitler’s. Who speaks for Stalin’s victims? And FDR’s
policy of ‘unconditional surrender’ guaranteed Soviet communism would be carried
into the heart of Europe. The Soviet Union emerged from the war a much greater threat to
America’s security than the Third Reich ever was. Nazi Germany was never close to developing
a nuclear bomb. Only the United States possessed the technology and the industrial resources
to develop such a weapon. This was especially true in the middle of a world war which was
consuming all of Germany’s resources. Germany made astounding progress in the development of
synthetic fuels and conventional weapons (V rockets, jets, etc.) The United States got the
nuclear ball rolling and it soon fell out of her hands. The Manhattan Project was so riddled
with spies that it could be accurately be described as a research and development program for
Stalin.
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