Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts
In an article on April 13 ( http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2015/04/13/power-lies/ ) I used the so-called Civil War and the myths with which court historians have encumbered that war to show how history is falsified in order to serve agendas. I pointed out that it was a war of secession, not a civil war as the South was not fighting the North for control of the government in Washington. As for the matter of slavery, all of Lincoln’s statements prove that he was neither for the blacks nor against slavery. Yet he has been turned into a civil rights hero, and a war of northern aggression, whose purpose Lincoln stated over and over was “to preserve the union” (the empire), has been converted into a war to free the slaves.
As for the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln said it was “a practical war measure” that would help in defeating the South and would convince Europe, which was considering recognizing the Confederacy, that Washington was motivated by “something more than ambition.” The proclamation only freed slaves in the Confederacy, not in the Union. As Lincoln’s Secretary of State put it: “we emancipated slaves where we cannot reach them and hold them in bondage where we can set them free.”
A few readers took exception to the truth and misconstrued a statement of historical facts as a racist defense of slavery. In the article below, the well-known African-American, Walter Williams, points out that the war was about money, not slavery. Just as Jews who tell the truth about Israel’s policies are called “self-hating Jews,” will Walter Williams be called a “self-hating black?” Invective is used as a defense against truth.
Racist explanations can be very misleading. For example, it is now a given that the police are racists because they kill without cause black Americans and almost always get away with it. Here is a case of a true fact being dangerously misconstrued. In actual fact, the police kill more whites than blacks, and they get away with these murders also. So how is race the explanation?
The real explanation is that the police have been militarized and trained to view the public as enemy who must first be subdued with force and then questioned. This is the reason that so many innocent people, of every race, are brutalized and killed. No doubt some police are racists, but overall their attitude toward the public is a brutal attitude toward all races, genders, and ages. The police are a danger to everyone, not only to blacks.
We see the same kind of mistake made with the Confederate Battle Flag. Reading some of the accounts of the recent Charleston church shootings, I got the impression that the Confederate Battle Flag, not Dylann Roof, was responsible for the murders. Those declaring the flag to be a “symbol of hate” might be correct. Possibly it is a symbol of their hatred of the “white South,” a hatred that dates from the mischaracterization of what is called the “Civil War.” As one commentator pointed out, if flying over slavery for four years makes the Confederate flag a symbol of hate, what does that make the U.S. flag, which flew over slavery for 88 years?
Flags on a battlefield are information devices to show soldiers where their lines are. In the days of black powder, battles produced enormous clouds of smoke that obscured the line between opposing forces. In the first battle of Bull Run confusion resulted from the similarity of the flags. Thus, the Confederate Battle Flag was born. It had nothing to do with hate.
Americans born into the centralized state are unaware that their forebears regarded themselves principally as residents of states, and not as Americans. Their loyalty was to their state. When Robert E. Lee was offered command in the Union Army, he declined on the grounds that he was a Virginian and could not go to war against his native country of Virginia.
A nonsensical myth has been created that Southerners made blacks into slaves because Southerners are racist. The fact of the matter is that slaves were brought to the new world as a labor force for large scale agriculture. The first slaves were whites sentenced to slavery under European penal codes. Encyclopedia Virginia reports that “convict laborers could be purchased for a lower price than indentured white or enslaved African laborers, and because they already existed outside society’s rules, they could be more easily exploited.”
White slavery also took the form of indentured servants in which whites served under contract as slaves for a limited time. Native Indians were enslaved. But whites and native Indians proved to be unsatisfactory labor forces for large scale agriculture. The whites had no resistance to malaria and yellow fever. It was discovered that some Africans did, and Africans were also accustomed to hot climates. Favored by superior survivability, Africans became the labor force of choice.
Slaves were more prominent in the Southern colonies than in the north, because the land in the South was more suitable for large scale agriculture. By the time of the American Revolution, the South was specialized in agriculture, and slavery was an inherited institution that long pre-dated both the United States and the Confederate States of America. The percentage of slave owners in the population was very small, because slavery was associated with large land holdings that produced export crops.
The motive behind slavery was to have a labor force in order to exploit the land. Those with large land holdings wanted labor and did not care about its color. Trial and error revealed that some Africans had superior survivability to malaria, and thus Africans became the labor force of choice. There was no free labor market. The expanding frontier offered poor whites land of their own, which they preferred to wages as agricultural workers.
A racist explanation of slavery and the Confederacy satisfies some agendas, but it is ahistorical.
Explanations are not justifications. Every institution, every vice, every virtue, and language itself has roots. Every institution and every cause has vested interests defending them. There have been a few efforts, such as the French Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution, to remake the world in a day by casting off all existing institutions, but these attempts came a cropper.
Constant charges of racism can both create and perpetuate racism, just as the constant propaganda out of Washington is creating Islamophobia and Russophobia in the American population. We should be careful about the words we use and reject agenda-driven explanations.
Readers are forever asking me, “what can we do.” The answer is always the same. We can’t do anything unless we are informed.
From LewRockwell.com
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/07/walter-e-williams/was-1861-a-civil-war/
Mr. Robert’s conclusion, true on its face, is all well and good, but it seems to me that it needs to be carried further. HOW do “we” become informed must then be answered. The answer that springs to mind is to somehow wrest back control of the media and the educational establishment from those who have co-opted them or, failing that, set up a propaganda machine to rival them. Easier said than done, of course, but barring individual initiative to inform oneself and those whom one can then reach, there is no other answer that I can imagine.
Suggestions, please!
along those same lines.
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Our Noble Banner
By Clyde Wilson on Jul 20, 2015
The Confederate battle flag is protean. It is a powerful symbol that has entered the world’s consciousness. “Protean,” going back to the classical Proteus, is defined as “readily taking on varied shapes, forms, or meanings.” And as “having a varied nature or ability to assume different forms.” The flag’s power is very real, but engenders a different feeling according to the beholder. The power was created by and has been evident since the failed War of Southern Independence, the heroism, spirit, honour, and tragedy of which moved much of the civilized world to admiration. Winston Churchill wrote in his history of the English-speaking peoples that the Confederate army was one of the most magnificent in history, while his nemesis Adolf Hitler was writing of his great admiration for Abraham Lincoln.
Add that the flag is also a beautiful object, judged by those who look into such things as one of the most beautiful of all national banners.
Public display of the flag was commonplace throughout the 20th century and not just in the South. I have read recently a number of articles in the British and American press that inform us that the Confederate flag appears in Europe only as the symbol of neo-Nazis. You would never know that it has appeared often as a symbol of liberation, for instance at the fall of the Berlin Wall and the freedom of the Baltic countries. There is no bottom to the combined ignorance and dishonesty of contemporary journalism. A friend in Europe has over the years sent me many examples of the appearance of the flag among Europeans that have no relationship to neo-nazism. He tells me that it has recently been used to protest the European Union. Certain it is that nobody objected to the public appearance of the Confederate emblem in many different forms throughout the world before very recent times. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower did not flee in terror from being photographed with it. The great Toscanini played a rousing version of “Dixie” when he toured the U.S. During World War II and Korea, and I expect Vietnam, the flag appeared in front of Marine tents near the combat front and on fighter planes and was flown at the conquest of Iwo Jima. Before the U.S. armed forces became historically ignorant and gender-neutral institutions.
Love of the flag is authentic, deep-seated, and long lasting. Hatred of the flag is a recently invented political weapon.
Defenders of the flag often speak of “Heritage.” I have always thought this was a bit off the mark. It may be easily answered by “put it in a museum.” By heritage they mean our Confederate ancestors. I understand and share the sentiment. But this does not carry much weight with critics who have no notion of what heritage means and certainly would reject the idea if they did. They are determined that Southerners, and in time the whole of America, be deprived of all heritage, at least all heritage that precedes Ellis Island. That is their goal. It is no accident that the attack on the flag comes at the same time and from the same sources as the sanctification of sodomy.
It seems to me that the flag is primarily and ought to be defended as a representation of the Southern people and their continued distinctiveness from the American norm. This is the way most of the world views it, though without clear articulation. The hysterical campaign to suppress the flag is actually a campaign to extinguish the South. To get rid of people who are more traditional, conservative, and religious than it is now fashionable for Americans to be. I believe Southerners are hated–and yes we are hated, and by people it would never occur to us to interfere with–because we are the last large group of Americans who believe in freedom–who believe that not every sphere of life should be regulated by government. The anti flag campaign is nothing more than ethnic cleansing, which, as we know from history, often becomes oppression and then liquidation. I have in recent days read several screeds about how America would be so much better off without the South. Very certainly, the ethnic cleansing will not be over when the beautiful Confederate banner is suppressed. It will just be getting started. If we are so bad, why have they never been willing to let us go? Because they need their idea of us to keep up their self-esteem in the American nightmare they have created.
And now they want to dig up General Forrest and his wife. Americans’ self-righteous ignorance and falsification of their own history is of staggering proportions. At the start of the War for Independence Forrest took with him 50 black men as support troops, promising freedom for faithful service. In the desperate third year of the war he took time to execute manumission papers for all but one of these men. It is a fact that hundreds of black people attended to pay their respects at Forrest’s funeral. The Republican city fathers of Springfield, Illinois, made sure that there were no blacks or Jews at Lincoln’s burial. The Memphis paper’s report of the current atrocity says that Forrest was notorious for his “brutal warfare” against Northern soldiers. This exhibits the mental level of most American journalists today, and, alas, also, I fear, the mental level of most “scholars.” I suppose Union soldiers were exemplars of non-brutal warfare. Actually Forrest fought rather chivalrously against people who invaded his state and looted, imprisoned, and killed civilians. And he had positive relations with many black people that they valued, which cannot be said of any Unionist, from A. Lincoln on down.
Perhaps the most important thing that a genuine historian would say about Forrest is that he is one of the greatest soldiers of all time. Robert E. Lee said so. So did that famous non-brutal warrior William T. Sherman. Certainly he was the most important citizen of Memphis ever. (Elvis was famous but not historical.) And one might mention that Forrest’s grandson of the same name was killed in action defending the United States in World War II. I wonder where Hillary Clinton’s, Mitt Romney’s and Nikki Haley’s forebears were at that time?
Anyway, it is just as well that the flag has been removed from the South Carolina capitol grounds. It is far too noble a thing to be in the vicinity where politicians go about their dirty business of deal-making and self-aggrandizement.
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Clyde Wilson is a distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the University of South Carolina where he was the editor of the multivolume The Papers of John C. Calhoun. He is the M.E. Bradford Distinguished Chair at the Abbeville Institute. He is the author or editor of over thirty books and published over 600 articles, essays and reviews. More from Clyde Wilson
http://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/our-noble-banner/
A fairly long-winded way of saying people believe what they want to believe, and facts are for pussies.
There is no “We.”
There is only the hive.
The hive is 90% herd animals (yes, I’m mixing metaphors–sue me.)
9.7% of the total is made up of sociopaths (and psychopaths) whose main interest is ruling over the herd animals, and the herd animals CLAMOR to be so managed and ruled.
0.3% (or so) of the hive desires neither to be ruled over, or be a ruler.
This is why “libertarian utopia” is a total oxymoron. If a free society ever arose, the 90% herd animals would find 9.7% sociopaths volunteer to “run things” and “make things better.”
We are ruled by demons. Always have been, always will be.
What, then, should “we” do?
Move through our own little OODA loop faster than others, see to our families, and largely ignore the cacophony of irrelevant information in which we must otherwise exist.
@DC: “What, then, should “we” do?
Move through our own little OODA loop faster than others, see to our families, and largely ignore the cacophony of irrelevant information in which we must otherwise exist.”
I’d like to believe I chose to do just that. I wish I didn’t believe your cogent analysis was correct, but I do believe your are correct, more’s the pity. But there’s something in me that says we can’t stop trying to cull that herd a bit.
“It’s as if we have fallen asleep on a nuclear reactor and all we are now is meat with eyes”
-Lewis Black
PCR, Walter Wiliams, and flash….thanks
DC- We are ruled by demons. Always have been, always will be.
most certainly…The only hope for the fallen can only come in the form of divine intervention..or not at all.
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Sofia Loren waving the flag! Bringhs tears to my eyes and a lump to my….oh well.
Mr. Rogers is absolutely correct in what he says, of course. I am sick to death a certain kind of Northerner, brain-washed victims of the public school system and the mass media, who squeal about SLAVERY every time the South, blacks or any other subject under the sun is mentioned. (As for Southerners who behave this way, we simply tie them in chains and throw them in the swamp for the gators to feast on).
Get this. The entire Western Hemisphere was built on slavery and forced labor, black, white and Indian. Everybody was guilty: English, Dutch, Jews, New Englanders, Southerners, Portuguese, Spanish, French, the Swedes and Danes for God´s sake! New England thrived distilling rum from slave-grown sugar and exported salt fish and wood to the islands. New England slavers were the best in the trade, and among the most greedy. Knock off the moral superiority crap. Nobody has a claim to it. And stop this silly “racism” nonsense. When the sh__hits the fan in this country before too long everybody will be a “racist”. It is an utterly meaningless word useful only for abusing people you don´t happen to like. If you are called a racist, laugh in your accuser´s face, or punch him.
As for the Confederate flag, to the vast majority of Southerners it simply represents our people and our history. And don´t give me any of this, “Not all Southerners supported the Confederacy, some fought for the Union and what about the blacks…….”, and so on.
NO SOUTHERNERS FOUGHT FOR THE UNION, WHITE OR BLACK. By fighting for the Lincoln government – a government filled with people seething with hatred for the South and Southerners – they were explicitly denying a Southern identity, to say nothing of a Southern nationalism. They may have been very good citizens of the United States and sincere in their patriotism, but they were not and did not want to be identified as Southerners. The same goes today. Are there black Southerners? Of course, but most blacks despise the very idea of the South. Ditto for the scalawags like Al Gore and Lindsey Graham.
It is fortunate that thanks to the ham-fisted, idiotic Fascist attempts to ban the Confederate flag, it will now become the flag of every American -indeed, every human being – who rejects what this country and the modern world is becoming. We all fly and revere our flag, but every transgendered freak, every FSA parasite, every Zionist stooge, every Progressive traitor, can fly the Stars and Stripes as well. The Cross and Stars only belongs to the rest of us, Yankee, redneck, cowboy, Spic, Wop, Kike and Eskimo.
The GOP 1861– 2015 154 years and still eats shit.
Power Vs. Powerless: Trump Attacks McCain, McCain Attacks Everyday Americans
The whole world is upside down, especially in the Republican Party. When a powerful United States Senator faces no Party repercussions after smearing everyday Americans, there is something horribly, terribly, and self-destructively wrong with the GOP.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/07/22/power-vs-powerless-trump-attacks-mccain-mccain-attacks-everyday-americans/
The Union went to war with the South over loss of their pork barrel welfare sow and in the ensuing economic destruction inflicted on the South , they came to create one of the largest welfare regions in the world, mostly subsidized by Northern industry…talk about poetic justice.
Are you Confederate but don’t know it?
Published June 24, 2001
Most of the political problems in this country won’t be settled until more folks realize the South was right.
I know that goes against the P.C. edicts, but the fact is that on the subject of the constitutional republic, the Confederate leaders were right and the Northern Republicans were wrong.
Many people today even argue the Confederate positions without realizing it.
For example, if you argue for strict construction of the Constitution, you are arguing the Confederate position; when you oppose pork-barrel spending, you are arguing the Confederate position; and when you oppose protective tariffs, you are arguing the Confederate position. But that’s not all.
When you argue for the Bill of Rights, you are arguing the Confederate position, and when you argue that the Constitution limits the power and jurisdiction of the federal government, you are arguing the Confederate position.
One of the things that gets lost when you adopt the politically correct oversimplification that the War Between the States was a Civil War all about slavery is a whole treasure load of American political history.
It was not a civil war. A civil war is when two or more factions contend for control of one government. At no time did the South intend or attempt to overthrow the government of the United States. The Southern states simply withdrew from what they correctly viewed as a voluntary union. They formed their own union and adopted their own constitution.
The U.S. government remained intact. There were just fewer states, but everything else remained as exactly as it was. You can be sure that, with as much bitterness and hatred of the South that there was in the North, the Northerners would have tried Confederates for treason if there had been any grounds. There weren’t, and the South’s worst enemy knew that.
Abraham Lincoln’s invasion of the South was entirely without any constitutional authority. And it’s as plain as an elephant in a tea party that Lincoln did not seek to preserve the Union to end slavery. All you have to do is read his first inaugural address. What Lincoln didn’t want to lose was tax revenue generated by the South.
As Northern states gained a majority in both houses, they began to use the South as a cash cow. Here’s how it worked: Most Southerners who exported cotton bartered the cotton in Europe for goods. When the protective tariffs were imposed, that meant Southerners had to pay them. To make matters worse, the North would then use the revenue for pork-barrel projects in its states. The South was faced with either paying high tariffs and receiving no benefits from the revenue or buying artificially high-priced Northern goods.
Southerners opposed pork-barrel spending. Their correct view was that, because the federal government was merely the agent of all the states, whatever money it spent should be of equal benefit. Their position on public lands was that they belonged to all the people and the federal government had no authority to give the lands away to private interests.
Northerners had announced they would not be bound by the Constitution. What you had was the rise of modern nationalism fighting the original republic founded by the American Revolution.
So, regardless of where you were born, you may be a Southerner philosophically.
Copyright © 2001, Orlando Sentinel
Shit, they’ve invented ‘trans-history’ – history is whatever you pretend to believe it is, if it gets you what you want.
We’ll need a new term to brand trans-history heretics with, how about ‘factualist’?
@ southern sage exactly on the everyone tho you missed the Africans responsibility for selling tribal conquest Africans into slavery ?They were involved also and I refuse to leave them out . hell I think they invented slavery if im reading the broad band of history correctly . you throw out a good bit of races but I think you missed this one . also exactly why the fuck am I responsible for something centuries ago ? I had a black employee ask me my opinion of reparations , I told him sure as long as we start at the source . why do white americans have to pay such high costs forsomething started so long ago by others ? I think sun Tzu said we will wage war by deception ? whose hidden hand is on this distraction of slavery that does not wish the scrutiny of the knowledge of their active participation? it answers many things