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| State Terrorism: Sherman's Army of the West burns Atlanta. |
"The Vendee is no more, my republican comrades.... The streets are littered with corpses which sometimes are stacked in pyramids. Mass shootings are taking place in Savenay because there brigands keep turning up to surrender.... [P]ity is incompatible with the spirit of revolution."
-- General Fracois-Joseph Westermann, commander of the "infernal column" that slaughtered tens of thousands of Vendean secessionists during the French Revolution
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| Westermann: Butcher of La Vendee. |
"[F]or five days, ten thousand of our men worked hard and with a will, in that work of destruction, with axes, sledges, crowbars, clawbars, and with fire.... Meridian no longer exists."
-- Union General William T. Sherman, reporting on the federal destruction of Meridian, Mississippi in 1862
"We must kill three hundred thousand [as] I have told you so often, and the further they run the harder for us to get them...."
"I was satisfied, and have been all the time, that the problem of war consists in the awful fact that the present class of men who rule the South must be killed outright rather than in the conquest of territory...."
-- William T. Sherman, the Union Army's General Westermann, in separate letters to his wife Ellen and to General Philip Sheridan, as quoted in The Soul of Battle by Victor Davis Hanson
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| Sherman: America's first "civil rights" crusader. |
William Sherman's march to the sea, writes Victor Davis Hanson approvingly, was a war of "terror" intended to destroy an aristocratic Southern culture he hated because of its impudence in resisting the central government's authority.
Although rarely acknowledged as such, Sherman could be considered America's first "civil rights" crusader. This isn't an endorsement of Sherman; it's an indictment of contemporary "civil rights" ideology.
While it's true that Sherman never descended to the depths of mass-murdering depravity plumbed by Westermann and his army of berserkers, he was prepared, by his own repeated admissions, to annihilate civilians by the hundreds of thousands in order to vindicate Washington's supposed authority.
Although rarely acknowledged as such, Sherman could be considered America's first "civil rights" crusader. This isn't an endorsement of Sherman; it's an indictment of contemporary "civil rights" ideology.
While it's true that Sherman never descended to the depths of mass-murdering depravity plumbed by Westermann and his army of berserkers, he was prepared, by his own repeated admissions, to annihilate civilians by the hundreds of thousands in order to vindicate Washington's supposed authority.
Those who didn't render immediate and unqualified submission, he warned, would be "crushed like flies on a wheel."
Following Appomattox, Sherman's genocidal skill-set proved useful to the corporatist federal railroad combine, which required the removal of the Plains Indians from land that it coveted but couldn't be troubled to purchase on honest terms. In carrying out that task Sherman abandoned what little restraint he had exercised in dealing with white southerners. In the meantime, the war of federal consolidation and cultural liquidation against the South continued by way of what was euphemistically called "Reconstruction."
In theory, "Reconstruction" was the process of re-integrating the rebellious states into the One Holy Eternal Union. In practice, it was a reign of terror and plunder swaddled in the rhetoric of righteousness and carried out through the apparatus of military dictatorship.
"After the Civil War, radical Republicans sought to drastically alter the social and political structures of the states of the former Confederacy," notes historian Benjamin Ginsberg of Johns Hopkins University in his book The Fatal Embrace. "The sought to establish a regime that would break the political power of the planter class that had ruled the region prior to the war."
In theory, "Reconstruction" was the process of re-integrating the rebellious states into the One Holy Eternal Union. In practice, it was a reign of terror and plunder swaddled in the rhetoric of righteousness and carried out through the apparatus of military dictatorship.
"After the Civil War, radical Republicans sought to drastically alter the social and political structures of the states of the former Confederacy," notes historian Benjamin Ginsberg of Johns Hopkins University in his book The Fatal Embrace. "The sought to establish a regime that would break the political power of the planter class that had ruled the region prior to the war."
The "radical Republicans" to whom Ginsberg refers were Jacobins, not Jeffersonians. The most powerful figure in that cohort was the detestable Thaddeus Stevens, a Pennsylvania Congressman who, the words of historian Paul Leland Haworth, "possessed much of the sternness of the old Puritans, without their morality."
Rep. Stevens hated the pre-Lincoln Constitution with a passion eclipsed only by that he nurtured toward the South; the document produced by the 1787 Philadelphia Convention, Stevens once told an associate, was nothing but "a worthless bit of old parchment."
As co-chairman, with Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, of the Joint Committee for Reconstruction, Stevens adapted Cromwell's schematic for military dictatorship in England for use in administering the conquered Confederacy.
"Where Cromwell had divided England up into eleven military districts, each governed by a major general with wide-ranging powers, [Stevens and the radical Republicans] divided the South into five districts, each ruled by a military governor under the overall direction of General Grant," explains Daniel Lazare in his book The Frozen Republic:
"The military authorities banned veterans' organizations and other groups deemed threatening to the new order, fired thousands of local officials and half a dozen governors, and purged state legislatures of pro-Confederate elements as well. A twenty-thousand-strong army of occupation, aided by a black militia, enforced order.... Political rights were withdrawn from thousands of Confederates who had been granted executive clemency by the President, and all told some one hundred thousand white voters were stricken from the rolls."
As Dr. Haworth observed in his 1912 study Reconstruction and Union, military governors on the occupied South "proceeded to create a new electorate and through it new civil governments." Those "civil governments," predictably, used patronage and officially sanctioned plunder to entrench themselves.
When federal subsidies and confiscation of private wealth proved inadequate, the Reconstruction governments turned to deficit financing, driving the states they misruled into even deeper economic misery.
The Reconstruction regime, writes Haworth, was built on a "sinister alliance" between military governors, their political satraps, and state-allied secret societies within the "Union League" (also known as the "Loyalty League"). Those criminal cabals were used to enforce political discipline and carry out covert acts of terrorism against dissenters. For example, notes Haworth, League members "resorted to whipping or otherwise maltreating Negroes who became Democrats."
In South Carolina governor Franklin Moses, a "scalawag" (that is, southern Quisling) sold tens of millions of dollars' worth of junk state securities while he and his cronies pilfered everything of value.
Moses, who became known as the "Robber Governor," enforced his will through a 14,000-man militia "composed mainly of black troops ... led by white officers," recounts Dr. Ginsberg. That Praetorian Guard protected Moses against enforcement of legal judgments and was deployed to harass, intimidate, and threaten potential political rivals in the 1870 election.
Similar conditions prevailed elsewhere in the prostrate South. In Louisiana, for instance, "wholesale corruption, intimidation of new voters by the thousands and tens of thousands, political assassinations, riots, revolutions -- all of these were the order of the day," records Dr. Haworth.
State-sponsored terrorism in the occupied South precipitated the creation of the Ku Klux Klan -- a development that could be considered the first recorded example of "blowback."
In both its ritualized, oath-bound organizational structure and the terrorist tactics it employed, the KKK was morally indistinguishable from the terrorists whose depredations inspired the Klan's creation. Unlike the Union League-aligned terrorists, however, the Klan operated without federal sanction. Thus in 1870 and 1871, Congress passed two Enforcement Acts (the second commonly called the "Ku Klux Klan Act") under which President Grant deployed troops to suppress "rebellion" in the occupied South.
The use of active-duty federal troops as a post-war domestic "peacekeeping" force "represented, from a military standpoint, the darkest days in the history of the Army," writes Professor James J. Schneider of the Army Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth. "The Reconstruction activities of Army units were unprecedented in their time, and they sound remarkably familiar today."
The occupied South was where Washington field-tested methods later used to "liberate" and "pacify" the Philippines, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries through mass slaughter and military dictatorship.
By January 1877, embattled southerners had managed to gain sufficient political traction to extract an end to the military occupation as the price of supporting a compromise awarding Rutherford B. Hayes the electoral votes he needed to prevail over Samuel Tilden (whose popular vote tally exceeded that of Hayes by roughly 164,000 votes).
Two months after Hayes was inaugurated, federal troops were withdrawn, and the Reconstruction plunderbund dissolved. A little more than a year later, Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act forbidding the use of the Army as a domestic law enforcement body.
Jim Crow could be considered --at least to some extent -- another example of "blowback" from Reconstruction, which did much more to exacerbate than alleviate racial hostilities in the South. Like all measures intended to restrain the Regime's powers, the Posse Comitatus measure is ignored at the whim of our rulers. Thus on more than one occasion since 1878, troops have been deployed to the South to enforce federal decrees intended to break down systems of government-imposed segregation at the state and local level.
Although the post-war military dictatorship in the South ended in 1877, the 1964 "civil rights" act is a continuation -- and expansion -- of Reconstruction. That act was designed and intended to make every private institution, transaction, and relationship subject to federal scrutiny in the name of abolishing "discrimination."
In principle, and sometimes in practice, the federal "civil rights" apparatus is literally making war upon Americans whose hiring policies, business practices, and private associations don't find favor with the exalted beings who have made themselves the arbiters of acceptable attitudes and social outcomes.
Those numinous creatures -- as wise as the overseers of Plato's ideal Republic, as omniscient as the Guardians of Oa -- are somehow exempt from the prejudices and unworthy passions to which we lesser beings are heir. They are thus suited to the task of micro-managing social affairs and compelling the rest of us to live according to their decrees, lest we be crushed "like flies on a wheel," as their predecessor "Uncle Billy" Sherman put it.
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| Pitiless, power-mad, vindictive: Thaddeus Stevens |
Rep. Stevens hated the pre-Lincoln Constitution with a passion eclipsed only by that he nurtured toward the South; the document produced by the 1787 Philadelphia Convention, Stevens once told an associate, was nothing but "a worthless bit of old parchment."
As co-chairman, with Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, of the Joint Committee for Reconstruction, Stevens adapted Cromwell's schematic for military dictatorship in England for use in administering the conquered Confederacy.
"Where Cromwell had divided England up into eleven military districts, each governed by a major general with wide-ranging powers, [Stevens and the radical Republicans] divided the South into five districts, each ruled by a military governor under the overall direction of General Grant," explains Daniel Lazare in his book The Frozen Republic:
"The military authorities banned veterans' organizations and other groups deemed threatening to the new order, fired thousands of local officials and half a dozen governors, and purged state legislatures of pro-Confederate elements as well. A twenty-thousand-strong army of occupation, aided by a black militia, enforced order.... Political rights were withdrawn from thousands of Confederates who had been granted executive clemency by the President, and all told some one hundred thousand white voters were stricken from the rolls."
As Dr. Haworth observed in his 1912 study Reconstruction and Union, military governors on the occupied South "proceeded to create a new electorate and through it new civil governments." Those "civil governments," predictably, used patronage and officially sanctioned plunder to entrench themselves.
When federal subsidies and confiscation of private wealth proved inadequate, the Reconstruction governments turned to deficit financing, driving the states they misruled into even deeper economic misery.
The Reconstruction regime, writes Haworth, was built on a "sinister alliance" between military governors, their political satraps, and state-allied secret societies within the "Union League" (also known as the "Loyalty League"). Those criminal cabals were used to enforce political discipline and carry out covert acts of terrorism against dissenters. For example, notes Haworth, League members "resorted to whipping or otherwise maltreating Negroes who became Democrats."
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| Robber Oligarch: Reconstruction-era Governor Franklin Moses |
Moses, who became known as the "Robber Governor," enforced his will through a 14,000-man militia "composed mainly of black troops ... led by white officers," recounts Dr. Ginsberg. That Praetorian Guard protected Moses against enforcement of legal judgments and was deployed to harass, intimidate, and threaten potential political rivals in the 1870 election.
Similar conditions prevailed elsewhere in the prostrate South. In Louisiana, for instance, "wholesale corruption, intimidation of new voters by the thousands and tens of thousands, political assassinations, riots, revolutions -- all of these were the order of the day," records Dr. Haworth.
State-sponsored terrorism in the occupied South precipitated the creation of the Ku Klux Klan -- a development that could be considered the first recorded example of "blowback."
In both its ritualized, oath-bound organizational structure and the terrorist tactics it employed, the KKK was morally indistinguishable from the terrorists whose depredations inspired the Klan's creation. Unlike the Union League-aligned terrorists, however, the Klan operated without federal sanction. Thus in 1870 and 1871, Congress passed two Enforcement Acts (the second commonly called the "Ku Klux Klan Act") under which President Grant deployed troops to suppress "rebellion" in the occupied South.
The use of active-duty federal troops as a post-war domestic "peacekeeping" force "represented, from a military standpoint, the darkest days in the history of the Army," writes Professor James J. Schneider of the Army Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth. "The Reconstruction activities of Army units were unprecedented in their time, and they sound remarkably familiar today."
The occupied South was where Washington field-tested methods later used to "liberate" and "pacify" the Philippines, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries through mass slaughter and military dictatorship.
By January 1877, embattled southerners had managed to gain sufficient political traction to extract an end to the military occupation as the price of supporting a compromise awarding Rutherford B. Hayes the electoral votes he needed to prevail over Samuel Tilden (whose popular vote tally exceeded that of Hayes by roughly 164,000 votes).
Two months after Hayes was inaugurated, federal troops were withdrawn, and the Reconstruction plunderbund dissolved. A little more than a year later, Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act forbidding the use of the Army as a domestic law enforcement body.
Jim Crow could be considered --at least to some extent -- another example of "blowback" from Reconstruction, which did much more to exacerbate than alleviate racial hostilities in the South. Like all measures intended to restrain the Regime's powers, the Posse Comitatus measure is ignored at the whim of our rulers. Thus on more than one occasion since 1878, troops have been deployed to the South to enforce federal decrees intended to break down systems of government-imposed segregation at the state and local level.
Although the post-war military dictatorship in the South ended in 1877, the 1964 "civil rights" act is a continuation -- and expansion -- of Reconstruction. That act was designed and intended to make every private institution, transaction, and relationship subject to federal scrutiny in the name of abolishing "discrimination."
In principle, and sometimes in practice, the federal "civil rights" apparatus is literally making war upon Americans whose hiring policies, business practices, and private associations don't find favor with the exalted beings who have made themselves the arbiters of acceptable attitudes and social outcomes.
Those numinous creatures -- as wise as the overseers of Plato's ideal Republic, as omniscient as the Guardians of Oa -- are somehow exempt from the prejudices and unworthy passions to which we lesser beings are heir. They are thus suited to the task of micro-managing social affairs and compelling the rest of us to live according to their decrees, lest we be crushed "like flies on a wheel," as their predecessor "Uncle Billy" Sherman put it.
The most candid and compelling summary of this perspective doesn't come from a right-wing revisionist, but rather from Columbia Law School Professor George P. Fletcher, an establishment academic of an unabashedly Marxist bent.
In his valuable book The Secret Constitution, Fletcher acknowledges that the war waged by Abraham the Annihilator was not an effort to "preserve the Union," much less to restore the pre-war constitutional order. Instead, that war was intended to consolidate the united States into a unitary state governed by what Fletcher calls a "New Constitutional Order." In the New Order, writes Fletcher, the founding premise is that "the federal government, victorious in warfare, must continue its aggressive intervention in the lives of its citizens."(Emphasis added.)
There is nothing hypothetical about the federal aggression Fletcher correctly identifies as the central feature of the post-Lincoln Soyuz (the term "union" is inapposite here). Since, from the perspective Fletcher represents, Lincoln's war supposedly settled the question of the central government's "authority" to kill Americans in any quantity necessary to reconfigure society, there are no limits to what it can do in the interest of establishing "social justice."
There is nothing hypothetical about the federal aggression Fletcher correctly identifies as the central feature of the post-Lincoln Soyuz (the term "union" is inapposite here). Since, from the perspective Fletcher represents, Lincoln's war supposedly settled the question of the central government's "authority" to kill Americans in any quantity necessary to reconfigure society, there are no limits to what it can do in the interest of establishing "social justice."
"Civil rights," as the term is used today, has nothing to do with the rights of individuals apart from the role played by some members of designated classes as a pretext for federal violations of the property rights of others not granted such protected status. Melissa Harris-Lacewell, an associate professor at Princeton and self-appointed watchdog of the "radical right," makes that point with the eager earnestness of someone who assumes that her political opponents aren't listening.
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| Our Enemy, the State in action. |
Because of southern resistance to Washington's demands, the "legitimacy of the central state was challenged," she writes in The Nation. "[This] is why the Civil Rights Movement was so powerful. The overt abuse of state power evidenced by the violence of Southern police called into question their foundational legitimacy. The federal government had to act or risk losing its authority as a state altogether."
This is to say that the chief accomplishment of the civil rights movement was not the validation of the individual rights of those victimized by government-imposed discrimination, but rather the validation and enhancement of federal power.
For Harris-Lacewell and other acolytes of the unitary totalitarian state, Reconstruction continues to this day. The genuine outrage is not that the South was ruled for a decade by a military kleptocracy, but rather that the military dictatorship was brought to an end through what she calls "the unholy Hayes-Tilden compromise of 1877." And the chief task for the forces of "tolerance" today, she insists, is to "guard against the end of our new Reconstruction" -- a system Ronn Neff perceptively describes as "polite totalitarianism," in which the 1964 Civil Rights Act is an indispensable pillar.
That measure, it should be remembered, was enacted by a government that was in the early stages of its war of aggression against Vietnam -- a conflict in which, as Stokely Carmichael aptly put it, "white people [drafted] black people to make war on yellow people [supposedly] to defend land stolen from red people." The government in charge of enforcing that Act today is slaughtering "people of color" in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and (lest we forget) Detroit, and looking for an excuse to inflict its lethal humanitarianism on Iran and North Korea.
And yet, as we see in the contrived controversy over Rand Paul's views of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, it is a grave civic blasphemy even to suggest that the Regime responsible for such murder and mayhem shouldn't have the power to scrutinize and regulate every aspect of private life.
Thank you ...
... for the kind and generous help you have sent over the past several days. It's not an exaggeration to say that your donations are what keeps Pro Libertate up and running. Thanks again, and God bless you.
Dum spiro, pugno!
39 comments:
With some minor changes I could adapt Sherman's comment to a contemporary usable form:
"I am satisfied, and have been all the time, that the problem of war consists in the awful fact that the present class of men who rule amerika must be killed outright as they will not peaceably cede power they have gained illegitimately . . ."
Thomas DiLorenzo's book, "The Real Lincoln" really opened my eyes to the reality of the civil war and that Lincoln may well be considered amerika's first dictator.
I imagine my son's teachers are pretty flabbergasted when they hear I find Lincoln to have been one of the worst presidents contrary to what they teach the kids.
In Male Fide
Sic Semper Tyrannis
Sir,
You have misread Hanson's "The Soul of Battle". Far from hating the aristocratic Southern culture, Sherman thought of himself as an immigrant member of it. At the time war broke out he was the superintendent of what is now LSU, and he very emotionally regretted that his duty (he felt, as a West Point graduate) lay in fighting for the Union. In fact, in a letter to his dear friend David Boyd, a Confederate supporter, Sherman explains - again, quite emotionally - that though he, Sherman, deeply treasures his Southern friendships and his Southern life (he was building a home in Louisiana and planned to move his entire family there), he knows that secession is doomed to failure due to the overwhelming might of the Northern military industrial complex. Sherman accepted a commission in the Union Army not because he supported the Union, but because he believed the South was doomed anyways and that were the Union to win quickly it might spare much loss of life.
Sherman's own writings during the war and the remarks of his men and of his enemies, indicate that while he willingly fulfilled what he believed to be his duty as a military commander, he despised the war and everything about it. In his march through Georgia Sherman harshly forbade his subordinates from any mistreatment of the Southern non-combatants, restricting them only to destruction of property. In this we may see that he behaved quite differently than many other Union leaders. Militarily, Sherman's march to the sea was not at all meant to destroy the culture which he in fact loved so very much. The purpose of a march was to send a message to the wealthy Southern landowners and politicians who were financing the badly outgunned Confederate Army. The march to the sea was meant to accomplish a present end to the war by illustrating to the Confederacy - thus far removed from the front and with very little communication - that its Confederate Army despite, perhaps, its military vigor, was badly losing the war, and that prudence dictated that the South accept the reality of defeat. In this Sherman seems to have been quite successful.
It may be that the reports of his subordinates, his superiors, his companions, his honorable enemies, and his own letters to his wife Eleanor, were all lies and misrepresentations, and Sherman was the somewhat bloodthirsty hate-filled tyrant you describe.
However - you did not read that in Hanson's book.
I have no information regarding Sherman's later dealings with railroads or the native tribes; however, it puzzles me to think that a man who shared the name of the great Shawnee chief Tecumseh, would not have dealt honorably with native peoples. I believe, Sir, that you may be confusing the fulfillment of a military duty for a personal vendetta. It is all well and good to say "He shouldn't have followed those orders," but we do have many examples of nations in which the military leaders do not follow orders of the legitimate government. They tend to experience bloody coups every dozen years or so.
Other than the above misinterpretation of "The Soul of Battle" (and again, I am not saying you are inaccurate - only that you will not find it in Hanson's book) I greatly enjoyed reading this post and found it quite filled with meaning and importance. I greatly enjoy reading your blog and look forward to continuing to do so.
Respectfully Yours,
Prudence, unfortunately, forbids me from signing my name, due to some of the things you boldly (and rightly, I believe) discuss on this blog. I wish it were not so and that citizens like myself did not feel it necessary to censor our honest speech for fear of adverse repercussions. I am, however, an admiring reader.
@Anon 8:01
"In his march through Georgia Sherman harshly forbade his subordinates from any mistreatment of the Southern non-combatants, restricting them only to destruction of property."
This is a logically inconsistent statement as destruction of property is in fact a form of mistreatment of non-combatants. The destruction of property - homes, crops, livestock - is in fact an attack on non-combatants.
As I recall from DiLorenzo's work (its been awhile since I read it) most of Europe was appalled at his tactics as it was a clear breach of what was at the time generally acceptable rules of engagement.
In Male Fide
Sic Semper Tyrannis
"This is to say that the chief accomplishment of the civil rights movement was not the validation of the individual rights of those victimized by government-imposed discrimination, but rather the validation and enhancement of federal power."
Um, what about the "validation of the individual rights of those victimized by PRIVATELY imposed discrimination?" I thought that was the main thrust of the civil rights movement? You do accept that people can be victimized by non-state actors, and that blacks in the South largely had to worry about non-state lynch mobs and non-state job discrimination in their daily lives?
You do realize that slavery was largely a PRIVATELY run institution? Although many do, not all evils come from the government, you know. PRIVATE associations of individuals can be quite evil too.
And I think John Brown preceded Sherman by a good number of years.
There is an unqualified right to private discrimination. People can engage in commerce, or decline to do so, as they see fit. The same holds true for private associations of any kind.
Sure, private institutions can be evil, but government's legitimate mandate doesn't extend to the abolition of all evils. To the extent government has any legitimate function it is to protect individuals from aggression through force (such as murder via lynching or other means)or fraud. Someone who refuses to rent or sell to me, or employ me, is not committing aggression, and unless he takes something I own through deception he's not engaged in fraud.
It's impossible to describe chattel slavery as a "private" concern when it was buttressed by federal law (the odious Fugitive Slave Act). There is also the matter that slavery used the power of government to institutionalize the denial of the most fundamental property right -- self-ownership.
Sherman reminds me of bone-headed Christians who mistakenly believe they're doing "Gods will" by engaging in war and murder. Notice how he, his family and associates piggy-up to the public trough throughout their wretched lives? Somehow its the other guys who cross some seemingly invisible line who are evil and not they themselves. They always wrap themselves in an oversize flag and carry a neon cross. Those "colored" folk weren't on the same level much less the same planet in the eyes of Tecumseh, Lincoln, and a host of contemporaries on either side of the North/South debacle. Is it any different today? I dare say that it's worse because we should know better, have more information at our disposal, and still can tune out the cries of truth.
Probably the saddest part is that the Government had few problems, excluding the draft riots, in recruiting citizens that would carry out such orders.
Superb article - excellent insights.
And although musing over what might have been is a futile exercise, still, one cannot but wonder what fortunes might have befallen the invading armies of the North, had a few hundred more snipers been active on the side of the South.
As for Sherman, no matter how much BS may be spread about his hatred for war, benevolence toward civilians and so on, I call it all Bravo Sierra since some of my forebears were in Atlanta and were in fact trying to remove sacred objects from a Presbyterian church as Sherman himself had his men burning it. That has been passed down through the generations from father to son in our family. Sherman was a cowardly bastard, as were many of the Union officers.
In the years before his death, General Lee said that had he known the barbarity and treachery of the occupying forces, he would have never surrendered but fought to the last man.
May our own resolve be so firm when it is time to free ourselves again, as our forefathers did over 200 years ago.
Semper Fi.
You may not be aware of the fact, but today in amerika, you cannot obtain lodging without STATE issued "I.D.".
This policy of the lodging industry has the same effect on a tired traveler as did the policy of segregated lodging.
Public accommodations and conveniences are not private. Inns and carriers and any other activity which opens its doors to any member of the public owes an equal duty to every member of the public, in a civilized country.
Sadly, amerika is not a civilized country observant of a rule of law to secure individual rights equally. The civil rights acts to secure unsecured individual rights were a step forward. Or at least part of a step. The requirement to produce STATE issued papers to obtain lodging is going backward. Federal collectivist totalitarianism took property rights to bound servants, without compensation, and imposed politically based bondage.
If only the freedom of those bound had been purchased by honest men using honest money.
Will,
You never cease to amaze me in your dedication to Liberty, as in your response to anon 9:48. You are truly a principled man and one to be admired.
In Male Fide
Sic Semper Tyrannis
Sic Semper -- You're very kind; thank you so much!
Anon 8:01
Robert E Lee was also a West Point grad, and was offered the position of commander of the Union army in early 1861. When Virginia withdrew from the union, Lee's loyalties were with his country of Virginia, not to the federal government, a creation of the sovereign states to perform a short list of benefits on behalf of the states. R.E. Lee was first in his class, and during those four years he did not accrue a single demerit.
My husband is an Air Force Academy grad (long since retired), but his loyalty lies with the people and his state, not with the feds. He would never take up federal arms against his own people like Sherman did, and especially like Sherman did.
For an understanding of Lee's character may I recommend the book The Sterling Nobility of Robert E Lee, by Steven Wilkins.
As much as I admire the steadfast loyalty of Southern generals to their respective states, and the citizens and neighbors who lived there, I'm still reminded of the fact that these people held no qualms about putting Indians or Mexicans to the sword when it served the empires purposes. They willingly entered into the empires military indoctrination centers and willingly carried out the empires edicts through the blade or the musket. That they might, and that is a tall order, in the waning years of mortal life, have found a conscience and the luxury of penning it down, it is simply a case of too little too late. The blood soaked world we have was aided along with their own hands at the plow and they have no excuse.
Sherman was a criminal and a tyrant of the highest order! May God curse his soul for eternity.
Well, Will, I see you've made the headlines:
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/US/05/27/christians.unplugged/index.html?hpt=C1
This publicity should increase site traffic, at least temporarily. Most of the comments following the article are negative, as you'd expect.
Dale
Re: recruiting citizens to carry out order
Yes, where do those humanoids come from ? what gene-pool do they belong ?
Has anyone ever examinded that blood-lust and government-worship might be part of Scotch and English genetic makeup ? --they used the same method in Ireland, against the Americans during the war for independence, in South Africa during the Boer war
What sort of bi-pedals join SWAT teams ? and this expedicionary armed force that invades Iraq and Afganistan ?
(and Lincoln had no problem calling a national day of fast and pray to ask a god to bless and support his endeavour)
Excellent article.
Please give me your recommendations for a young black southern man's civil war reading list. Thanks for taking the time to respond!
i really enjoy your blog, you always seem to have such timely and relative eloquently written information.
I really appreciate your work
terrorists
The comments made me think about how guys I know don't tell their wives accurate tales if it paints them in a bad light. I imagine the same was true of Sherman and those like him today.
It's interesting to see that revisionist history is alive and well. What's next Walter? Are you going to post a review of "Birth of a Nation" and what a great film it was? The KKK was set up by the same new world order that you claim to be against. High level mason Albert Pike wrote both the rituals for the KKK and the Scottish Rite Freemasons. (I never thought I'd find myself attacking the klan by referencing the Masons, but we live in strange times). It's also laughable that you quote Stokely Carmichael, one of the more radical elements of the civil rights movement, in your attack on the movement as a whole.
Do you realize that both Ron and Rand have publicly supported federal intervention in civil rights? Yes Rand had a problem with title 2 of the civil rights act and Ron criticized the act as a whole, but the both have endorsed Brown v. Board of education, which gave power to the "evil central federal government" to stop states from taking tax money from everyone and providing "separate but equal" (what a joke) facilities.
What you and others who are so eager to assert a "right to discriminate" miss is the broader constitutional question. Rand hinted at it in his comments to Rachel Maddow. It's a supreme court doctrine that (illegally) gives the federal government the power to even tell farmers how much grain they can grow and it predates the civil rights act by over 2 decades. That's where the battleground should be. Not whether the KKK was a "blowback" terrorist organization.
NakedTruth, who's Walter?
I've got a feeling you're confusing Mr. WILL Griggs with Walter Williams, another black libertarian. There are more than just 2, you know, right?
Great piece, Mr. Griggs. I learned of you via Lew Rockwell.
To Dave Lincoln -
I have no intention of embarrassing you (and I know Will wouldn't make an issue of either of these), but just so you know, it's Grigg, not Griggs, and Will is not black - he's Mexican/Irish. Blarney con carne as I think he once said. :-)
Welcome.
Mister Spock. Thanks. I always thought a picture was worth a thousand words. The avatar picture sure had me fooled, but I'll take your word, or Mr. Grigg's.
I'm not too concerned about the race of the writer here, as anyone who understands freedom like this guy is one in 100,000.
I still don't know who Walter is, though, in that case. ;-)
Mr. Lincoln, you're very kind. Thanks!
I'm chuckling while typing these words because the subject of my ethnicity comes up at least two or three times a week -- and a lot of people assume that I have African ancestry.
I was adopted at six weeks of age by my incomparably generous parents, and I was probably about four years old when I noticed that I didn't resemble them. This led to my demand that they show me the adoption papers in order to prove that I hadn't been abducted ("Oh, sure -- they seem nice, but it could all be an elaborate ruse," I thought, or words to that effect.) My siblings all have blond or sandy hair and blue or hazel eyes.
As an athlete in Jr. High and High School, I constantly ran into confusion over my background: When I played basketball, everybody thought I was black; in football, people were positive I was Tongan or Samoan.
Things are going to be even more confusing for our kids, since three of them resemble Korrin (fair-skinned, blond/sandy hair, blue or hazel eyes) and three look like me. We're an "Oreo" family -- our oldest and youngest look like me, and three in the middle look like Korrin. We had a visitor yesterday who assume that some of our children were adopted.
This makes things complicated when bureaucracies make impertinent demands for information about the "racial" background of our children. I just stopped answering official questions of that kind.
Very interesting, Mr. Grigg. BTW, I have read your commentary (this blog and on others) sporadically for a year or two now. I wouldn't give you that compliment if I didn't mean it.
I remember your describing your feelings at traffic stops and also something about some government ("for the children") people coming to your house one time, and you high-tailed it, as I recall. Great stuff. Not many people really put their money and especially actions where their mouths are.
(Yeah, a lot of people read, but don't necessarily write much back.)
Please don't blow off Mr. Naked's comments. He makes some good points about the klan birthing from the NWO jackal, not really as blowback from the mess the feds made of the conquered lands and people. From what I've studied, this is true. And the point about illegal Supreme Court doctrines is beyond question and utterly true.
His reference to Will as "Walter" was probably just a slip, one I've made more than once on blog comments myself.
My only confusion, nakedtruth, is that you seem to be on the attack when you seem to be on the same side, except maybe you make an exception to the NWO's tactics when it comes to the Civil Rights Act, which is really part and parcel of the same game plan, don't you think? If the feds can tell you what you can and cannot plant, they can also tell you with whom you can or must associate; whether you can travel or not; whether you can be imprisoned for not wearing a prescribed safety device while travelling; whether you can use the water that falls out of the sky on "your" land, etcetera ad nauseum.
Maybe you could clarify your points for us. Thanks.
Have You Had Enough Yet? (Google now prevents me from signing in the old way. What's up with that?)
A very powerful article. George W. Bush imitated all this with his Emancipation program for Iraq, Operation Iraqi Freedom, where the atrocities of America upon Fallujah and thousands of Iraqis mirrored that of Sherman's "scorched earth" policy and was done under the guise of "civil rights" (including for women) and "liberation". Ironically, the siege was led by the Carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. This is what Democracy is really all about, "making the world safe for democracy" (e.g. WWI, WWII, Wilson, FDR), through wars of "regime change". The "Civil War" was the beginning of this terrorism war policy.
Also, you stated that Burning Sherman could be called the first civil rights leader. I would like to suggest that point be amended to accommodate America's first terrorist and civil rights leader, of radical Abolitionism, i.e. John Brown. Read "What John Brown did in Kansas". The difference was that Sherman did it under the auspices of a government "legalized" war.
Ironically, John Brown was tried and hung for treason (which was attended by both Lee and Stonewall Jackson) in Harpers Ferry, in a foreshadowing of things to come.
And behind John Brown was the (Jacobin) Secret Six. He may have been the first prophet also of what could be called "Liberation Theology", which was also employed by M.L. King.
Of course Abolitionism paved way for Feminism, another false "liberation" and "civil rights" movement, which has destroyed families and society as well. Next is the radical homosexual agenda employing the same revolutionary methodology.
Society can be "burned down" and "murdered" without the shedding of blood too, by social revolutions and radical legislation that are destructive. THE RECONSTRUCTION MOVEMENT HAS NEVER CEASED!
Par for the course, Will. Another excellent article!
A fascinating article.
I don't know about your "war of aggression against Vietnam" and whatever Carmichael said about Vietnam, it sure as heck wasn't "apt." Blacks, whites, and yellows have a very real -- and shared -- interest in fighting totalitarianism. The real struggle turns out to have been defeating socialism and those who subvert the Constitution at home and in that Carmichael was useless, if not an aider and abettor. Nor was the Rev. King at all allergic to associating with communists in his career.
Nor is the U.S. "slaughtering 'people of color'" in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan but rather, I fervently pray, slaughtering no small number of its enemies.
Slaughtering people of color in Detroit? You detract from the excellence of your analysis with such reckless statements. GMAB.
And its not "lethal humanitarianism" we're inflicting on Iran and North Korea. It's groveling appeasement. Would that U.S. policy were "lethal" in ANY respect.
Nws, I shall have to put your blog on my "must read" list.
Col. Bunny, thanks for your comments.
Carmichael's statement is one I file under the heading "Things that are true in spite of their source."
I don't see how any honest person can describe the Vietnam War as anything other than a campaign of criminal aggression.
It grew out of a deliberate deception; it was conducted without the proper constitutional authority; it did nothing to arrest or reverse the gains made by totalitarian socialism; it devoured millions of Vietnamese lives, tens of thousands of American lives, and continues to blight the lives of survivors to this day.
It was waging that war, not losing it, that abetted the growth of total government here at home.
In like manner, Washington's criminal occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and its aggression against Pakistan and Yemen, are doing much more to create enemies than to destroy them. You may not regard Washington's foreign policy as "lethal," but you should discuss the matter with the families of the two million or so Iraqis who have been killed by the U.S. since 1991.
We are not threatened in any conceivable way by the maniacs who rule Iran, North Korea, or any other foreign state. They have neither the means to impose upon me or my family, or the arrogant ambition necessary to attempt to do so. We have much more to fear from domestic enemies and terrorist cliques like the IRS or your not-so-friendly local SWAT team.
You may not regard Washington's foreign policy as "lethal," but you should discuss the matter with the families of the two million or so Iraqis who have been killed by the U.S. since 1991.
But Will, you don't understand: them Iraqis are Ay-rabs who don't talk Merkin English, don't love Jesus, don't drink beer, and don't love baseball, football, and NASCAR. 'sides, they have all that OIL that they don't deserve and don't know what to do with, oil that God meant for US MERKINS to have. You really don't think that human decency, mercy, and justice are meant for THOSE PEOPLE too, do you*? What are you, some kinda liberal Merkin-hater?
(*Yeah, yeah, I know, Jesus told us to love our enemies, but don't tell me you really think He meant THOSE PEOPLE too when He said that!)
Sorry, if forgot add [SARCASM] [/SARCASM] tags around my last post.
I unfortunately found myself in an argument recently with a Republican; who advised me that we needed to get back to a Constitutional government. Those Democrats were way off track. I replied that I agreed, the Constitution did not cover all the programs that the Republicans and Democrats were putting forth, including occupying 106 countries and having active troops in at least two countries when the Constitution stated that we were only to have a army to repel invaders or put down insurrection. "Well, there's some things that aren't right about the Constitution." Yep, the same attitude Lincoln had is still in the elephant's memory.
"It was waging that war, not losing it, that abetted the growth of total government here at home"...WNG
And therein is the crux of the matter. "Winning" is not the objective. Playing the game and acquiring all those golden goodies, through theft, from those you dupe, and ultimately enslave, into believing that the game has some sort of meaning. This is its one and only reason for being. Winston found this out in 1984.
What Bobert discovered, as I'm sure he's found out more than once, is there are folks who really just don't think about what they're saying. I've been there and done that so I understand their position though I no longer respect it since it's all built on a funeral pyre of lies.
Can you please write an article on how government caused and/or made worse Jim Crowe Laws and racism post-civil war?
Mr. Grigg, we'll have to disagree on the criminality of the Vietnam war. I see it as an all-too-feeble push back against communism that was a deadly threat to the West. N. Vietnam wasted no time herding its foes into concentration camps after 1975, like every -- repeat every -- other commie government under the sun. LBJ was unnecessarily duplicitous in the manner of getting us into VN and our entire approach underscored Maxwell Taylor's concerns about the uncertain trumpet. The war was, however, a military victory for the U.S. and the S. Vietnamese Army thrown away by the treasonous Democrats in 1974. See Snepp's "Decent Interval" and other works.
You are wrong that the war did not arrest totalitarian socialism. It very much succeeded in buying time for Indonesia and Thailand and it certainly exhausted the NVA much more than it did us. The VC was, of course, decimated. What irritated me over there and since then is that I and my comrades were put at risk by bombing halts and other artificial operational restrictions that put as at greater risk of death or injury. And threatened the success of the whole enterprise. After the Christmas bombing of Hanoi the North was about ready to throw in the towel. What the heck kind of war is THAT? Ans: a half-hearted one.
I absolutely agree that that war -- and all others in our history, WWI and the War of N. Aggression, esp. -- handed power to the central government. A host of domestic peace time measures have done the same thing. The problem is a complacent, uninformed populace that's semi brain dead from the schools and cable drivel on the TV.
The over arming of police forces and crazy antics of some officers is another problem and you properly focus on it. We have all GOT to get a handle on the runaway, out-of-control feral government.
I think your civilian casualty figures for Iraq are wildly inflated. You assume a U.S. military indifference toward civilian casualties that I did not see in my time in VN and that I do not think any of my comrades would countenance at ANY time.
We'll see about Iran and N. Korea. The post-WWII paradigm of American invulnerability allowed for complacency, esp. since so much of the rest of the world was shattered or still technically backward. Howeverrr, the seas no longer protect us as they did, nukes are man-portable, our military is oddly involved in active operations on the other side of the world leaving our border undefended (as per the last 30 years), and people who hate us are technically savvy.
We could pull back to CONUS and send billets doux to every imam on the planet but the Muslims will hate us still. It's not what we do, it's what Islam is -- an evil, aggressive, retrograde, obscurantist, science-killing political doctrine of conquest, pillage, murder, and degradation of infidels who are, according to the shia, najis. And that's not good.
After 9/11 it was important to do SOMEthing and what we did do sent a lot of shivers up many a Muslim spine. We screwed up, however, by making both Afghanistan and Iraq into nation-building exercises which is the very height of stupidity, though even that dumb goal has had an incidental benefit of allowing us to kill of a lot of Muslim @#$%s. God bless, W for that, at least. As for his being in the pocket of the Saudis like every other American federal official, well . . . that's another story. I kid you not.
PS -- I think you're way off on the Israeli blockade but that's more than I want to get into.
Thanks for your reply.
@ Mr. Grigg...
hammer
nail
hit directly on head!
every time!
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