The great, Pete Quinones returns for only his second non-Kevin Costner movie and we delve into some vintage James Woods and talk about “Salvador” directed by Oliver Stone.

Salvador was based on an autobiography of an American photojournalist played by James Woods who was on his uppers, he went to El Salvador with his best friend played by Jim Belushi.

We see what happens with an adventurous foreign policy that creates losers and villains on all sides.

Learned effective torture methods at the School of the Americas such as implanting kidney stones. Waterboarding with Coca-Cola Classic is the only known cure.

Pete recommended this one and will have plenty to say.

We’re also proud to announce that our YouTube video for this episode now features actual video footage of the show, check it out here, and be sure to hit that subscribe button!

If you would like to get (occasional) early access to future shows, join us on Patreon and support us at the $3+ per month level at:  http://www.actualanarchy.com/patreon

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Buy the movie:

Google Description for the film

Salvador

Unable to find work in America because of his penchant for booze and drugs, photojournalist Richard Boyle (James Woods) heads to El Salvador with his DJ friend Doctor Rock (James Belushi) to see if he can get a gig covering the country’s ongoing civil war. Boyle decides it’s time to flee the country when the violence escalates to a level that even he is uncomfortable with, but his relationship with an El Salvadorian woman (Elpidia Carrillo) complicates matters.

If you’re in the market for web-hosting (and if you aren’t doing things online to create content or products, we highly suggest it), you can’t go wrong with selecting Blue Host as your provider. We’ll give you a shout-out, backlink, and undying gratitude if you buy your hosting through our link below:

Check out our affiliate link at: https://www.actualanarchy.com/blue

Our Guest:

Our guest is Peter R. Quinones AKA “Mance Rayder” of the Free Man Beyond the Wall Podcast and the Libertarian Institute, among other projects.  The man is a force for liberty and we know we’ll have a great discussion.

Peter R. Quinones is managing editor of the Libertarian Institute and hosts the Free Man Beyond the Wall podcast. He released his first book, Freedom Through Memedom – The 31-day Guide to Waking Up to Liberty in November 2017. It reached #4 in the Libertarian Section on Amazon. He has spoken at Liberty Forum in Manchester, New Hampshire and is currently co-producing a documentary entitled, “The Monopoly on Violence,” which is scheduled for a 2020 release. It will feature the most prominent figures in libertarianism explaining how nation-states came into existence, the atrocities they commit and what a truly open libertarian society would look like.

You can support him directly so that he can increase the production of his podcast, writing, and documentaries at his web page: https://freemanbeyondthewall.com/goal/

Here is the YouTube cut of “The Monopoly on Violence”:

Freedom through Memedom

The Kids Are Not Alright

Recently he was on for another Kevin Costner flick, “A Perfect World” directed by Clint Eastwood:

Episode 229 – A Perfect World (1:18:15)

Before that it was Oliver Stone’s “JFK”:

Episode 208 – JFK (1:33:48)

Before that, he was on for the Humphry Bogart masterpiece, “Casablanca”:

Episode 189 – Casablanca (1:17:11)

Perhaps he is best known on our show as our guest for several other Kevin Costner-epics, “Dances with Wolves“:

Episode 102 – Dances with Wolves (1:11:08)

And for “Waterworld“:

Episode 153 – Waterworld (1:35:48)

He was also on for the Costner movie, “The Postman”:

Episode 203 – The Postman (1:18:41)

Pete’s 500th episode:

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Show Notes:

Oliver Stone and James Woods interview on making Salvador:

Chomsky supporting jabs:

Oliver Stone Snowden:

Iran-Contra Scandal

The Grand Chessboard

“War is a Racket” by General Smedley Butler

School of the Americas:

American Made Episode

Carlos “the Jackal”

JFK Episode

Human feces on the streets of San Francisco

Biden colluding with ex-prez of Afghanistan to PR spin the withdrawal

The 10 Times the Gray Lady Blinked about the New York Times by Rensburg

Arin McIntyre – watched reporters bully the politician into a new position

The Cathedral – Curtis Yarvin

Duranty – I’ve seen the future and it works

The Holodomor:

Dave Smith – Part of the Problem about the 2020 election being Trump vs. the MSM while Biden was hidin in his basement

The “Mr. Jones” movie

The Economic Calculation Problem

Mao the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution

Yuri Bezmenov

G. Edward Griffin videos from the ’50-’60s

Ghost cities of China

Paul Voelker raising interest rates to fight inflation

Daniel Lacalle on China on the Mises website

David Stockman articles on China

“Horse Dewormer” as meme

“How to Lie with Statistics”

Tom Woods episode with Brion McClannahan about secession and the mention of “Quadrillion” as it relates to the US National Debt.

Dr. Evil, that kind of money doesn’t even exist”

Dr. Robert Malone on the Noble Lie:

Trusted News Consortium

The Fatal Conceit (F.A. Hayek Nobel acceptance speech):

Tom Woods on the Old Right

2nd Amendment Meme:

Episodes about people defending their home:

War Machine
The Beast
Godfather II
Havana

Chomsky’s “Turning the Tide”:

“Wall Street”

Libertarian Institute presents the “End of the Empire” livestream on Thursdays at 5 pm PT/8 pm ET

Scott Horton on Dave Smith’s Part of the Problem:

“Enough Already” by Scott Horton

“Fool’s Errand” by Scott Horton

Join us next week as we shift into more family-friendly fare with a review of “Newsies” with Abby Cleckner, who is a friend of frequent guest Dr. Dennis Foster and thus a listener of the show.

——–

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It also has meditations, focus, and concentration music (including binaural beats), nature sounds, and more all designed to help you stress less and sleep more.

——–

Behold the new show artwork with the space theme for the Last Nighters:

You can find the website for the Last Nighters at: www.LastNighters.com

You can find Last Nighters Podcast feed on iTunes here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-last-nighters/id1384886334

And also at Anchor.FM where you can even leave us messages of up to one-minute long that we can plug into the show, and respond to. Give it a try and we’ll see how it works together!

Check out our Patreon page to become a supporting listener and get access to this full recording and the other dozens of shows available: www.patreon.com/ReadRothbard

Check out Robert’s “Trubbster” designs on the Tee Public:

For the history you didn’t learn in school, check out Liberty Classroom:

Get the equivalent of a Ph.D. in libertarian thought and free-market economics online for just 24 cents a day….

Here is the link for the Mises Quotes page on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/MisesQuote/

And here is the Black and [Dot] Gold link chronicling my efforts at being an Entrepreneurial AnCap to earn multiple income streams independent of location:

Black and [Dot} Gold Facebook page

Here is how to get access to the Rothbard Repository:

http://repository.readrothbard.com/

Having an argument on Facebook about economics?

Is someone bashing Uber in favor of the taxi industry?

Which lecture(s) was it where Rothbard discussed taxi medallions and price controls in the taxi industry?

It can be hard to remember.

The Rothbard Repository is a keyword searchable database of Murray Rothbard lectures.

You can quickly find what you are looking for.
This tool will help you find the exact timestamp of when Rothbard talks about a specific topic you searched.

---

Purchase of Liberty Classroom by Tom Woods on our affiliate link (We also include a free basic membership to Readitfor.me).

Support us on Patreon at: https://www.patreon.com/readrothbard

Get your web hosting via our Bluehost affiliate link, and we will also give you a mention on our show and backlink on our website.

Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Actual Anarchy Podcast!

The Actual Anarchy Podcast is all about Maximum Freedom.

Robert and I analyze popular movies from a Rothbardian/Anarcho-Capitalist perspective. If it’s voluntary, we’re cool with it. If it’s not, then it violated the Non-Aggression Principle and Property Rights – the core tenants of Libertarian Theory – and hence – human freedom.

We use movies as a starting point for people who may not be familiar with this way of thinking. Discussion of the plot and decisions that characters make in relation to morality and violations of the non-aggression principle are our bread and butter.

We also will highlight and discuss any themes or lessons from Austrian Economics that we can glean from the film.

The point is to show what anarchy actually is with instances that are presented in film.

We publish new episodes on Sunday just in time for your Monday commute; and occasionally will do specials surrounding holidays or events (elections/olympics).

For our show where we talk about movies from a Rothbardian/Anarcho-Capitalist perspective, we often watch them on our various devices via Netflix, Amazon Prime or on VUDU (which lets you redeem UV content as well). The VUDU one is nice because once it is in there, you know it will still be there a few months later:

ABOUT

Actual Anarchy, an anarchy unlike what the average idiot thinks it would be. Anarchy means no rulers, not no rules. The non-aggression principle and a respect of property rights are what makes it go.

We host a podcast where we take pop culture movies and showcase moments or scenes or themes throughout that are literally actual examples of anarchy.

Any place, around the world, there are always examples of Actual Anarchy all about you. Sometimes you just have to sit back and take a look. It’s easy once they’ve been pointed out a few times.

Actual Anarchy is real-world examples of anarchy in action.

Movies, Shows, Books, News, etc… we host all sorts of content on the site from a bevy of writers enthusiastic for one goal: human freedom

Read Rothbard – Become an Actual Anarchist

PRESENTED BY

Read Rothbard is comprised of a small group of voluntaryists who are fans of Murray N. Rothbard. We curate content at www.ActualAnarchy.com and on the www.ReadRothbard.com site including books, lectures, articles, speeches, and we make a weekly podcast based on his free-market approach to economics. Our focus is on education and how advancement in technology improves the living standards of the average person.

Hit us up on our Tip Jar page to see all the myriad was you can support the show and the site: www.actualanarchy.com/tipjar

Also, be sure to give us your likes, comments, shares, ratings, reviews, and other feedbacks!

Never miss an episode. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts to get new episodes as they become available.

For the history you didn’t learn in school, check out Liberty Classroom:

Get the equivalent of a Ph.D. in libertarian thought and free-market economics online for just 24 cents a day….

The post Episode 250 – Salvador (1:19:38) appeared first on Actual Anarchy.

Mance Rayder of the Free Man Beyond the Wall Podcast joins us for a discussion of one of his favorite movies, Dances with Wolves.

Lieutenant John Dunbar, assigned to a remote western Civil War outpost, befriends wolves and Indians, making him an intolerable aberration in the military.

We get into a lot of rabbit trails in a somewhat longer version of the show as we talk about the horrors of war, clashing of cultures, property rights and cultural appropriation.

Dances with Wolves with special guest, the man who does not kneel, Mance Rayder of the Free Man Beyond the Wall Podcast! Find Mance @mnrothbard on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/mnrothbard

There you can find links to his show and book and also see the excellent meme materials he keeps pumping out.

Never miss an episode. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts to get new episodes as they become available.

Google Description

A Civil War soldier develops a relationship with a band of Lakota Indians. Attracted by the simplicity of their lifestyle, he chooses to leave his former life behind to be with them. Having observed him, they give the name Dances With Wolves. Soon he is a welcomed member of the tribe and falls in love with a white woman who has been raised in the tribe. Tragedy results when Union soldiers arrive with designs on the land.

If you’re in the market for web-hosting (and if you aren’t doing things online to create content or products, we highly suggest it), you can’t go wrong with selecting Blue Host as your providers. We’ll give you a shout-out, backlink, and undying gratitude if you buy your hosting through our link below:

Check out our affiliate link at:  https://www.actualanarchy.com/blue

Amazon Editorial Review

Kevin Costner stars in and directs this triumphant masterpiece written by Michael Blake, based on his novel. This breathtaking Steelbook Collector’s Edition includes the original theatrical cut for the first time on Blu-ray, an extended cut of the film and an entire disc of bonus features. Winner of seven Academy Awards, including Best Director and Best Picture, this modern classic tells the story of Lt. Dunbar (Costner), a Civil War hero who befriends a tribe of Native Americans while stationed at a desolate outpost on the frontier. What follows is a series of unforgettable moments: from Dunbar’s tender scenes with Stands With A Fist (Mary McDonnell), to the thrilling, action-packed buffalo hunt. Experience the excitement, emotion and sweeping beauty of this cinematic treasure as never before!

During the show we talked about Murray Rothbard’s Ethics of Liberty and the Robert LeVevre lecture on the origins of money. Here be the links:

Ethics of Liberty

Robert LeFevre Origin of Money lecture:

“What is Money? Part One”
LeFevre, Freedom School (Circa 1960)
https://mises.org/library/what-money-part-one
https://mises.org/library/what-money-part-two

The bonus content can be accessed via supporting us on Patreon at:  http://www.actualanarchy.com/patreon

Join us next week as we discuss the Tom Cruise flick, American Made.

Speaking of YouTube, be sure to spread some love to our normie-friendly version of the show called “The Last Nighters”, check out the YouTube page here and subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4kl9Q80Yaa6wSTcUM-sfww

You can find the website for the Last Nighters at:  www.LastNighters.com

In fact, we just launched the Last Nighters as a Podcast feed, you can find it on iTunes here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-last-nighters/id1384886334

And also at Anchor.FM where you can even leave us messages of up to one-minute long that we can plug into the show, and respond to. Give it a try and we’ll see how it works together!

Check out our Patreon page to become a supporting listener and get access to this full recording and the other dozens of shows available: www.patreon.com/ReadRothbard

Check out Robert’s “Trubbster” designs on the Tee Public:

For the history you didn’t learn in school, check out Liberty Classroom:

Here is the link for the Mises Quotes page on Facebook:

And here is the Black and [Dot] Gold link chronicling my efforts at being an Entrepreneurial AnCap to earn multiple income streams independent of location:

Having an argument on Facebook about economics?

Is someone bashing Uber in favor of the taxi industry?

Which lecture(s) was it where Rothbard discussed taxi medallions and price controls in the taxi industry?

It can be hard to remember.

The Rothbard Repository is a keyword searchable database of Murray Rothbard lectures.

You can quickly find what you are looking for.

This tool will help you find the exact timestamp of when Rothbard talks about a specific topic you searched.

---

Purchase of Liberty Classroom by Tom Woods on our affiliate link (We also include a free basic membership to Readitfor.me).

Support us on Patreon at: https://www.patreon.com/readrothbard

Get your web hosting via our Bluehost affiliate link, and we will also give you a mention on our show and backlink on our website.

Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Actual Anarchy Podcast!

The Actual Anarchy Podcast is all about Maximum Freedom.

Robert and I analyze popular movies from a Rothbardian/Anarcho-Capitalist perspective. If it’s voluntary, we’re cool with it. If it’s not, then it violated the Non-Aggression Principle and Property Rights – the core tenants of Libertarian Theory – and hence – human freedom.

We use movies as a starting point for people who may not be familiar with this way of thinking. Discussion of the plot and decisions that characters make in relation to morality and violations of the non-aggression principle are our bread and butter.

We also will highlight and discuss any themes or lessons from Austrian Economics that we can glean from the film.

The point is to show what anarchy actually is with instances that are presented in film.

We publish new episodes on Sunday just in time for your Monday commute; and occasionally will do specials surrounding holidays or events (elections/olympics).

For our show where we talk about movies from a Rothbardian/Anarcho-Capitalist perspective, we often watch them on our various devices via Netflix, Amazon Prime or on VUDU (which lets you redeem UV content as well). The VUDU one is nice because once it is in there, you know it will still be there a few months later:

ABOUT

Actual Anarchy, an anarchy unlike what the average idiot thinks it would be. Anarchy means no rulers, not no rules. The non-aggression principle and a respect of property rights are what makes it go.

We host a podcast where we take pop culture movies and showcase moments or scenes or themes throughout that are literally actual examples of anarchy.

Any place, around the world, there are always examples of Actual Anarchy all about you. Sometimes you just have to sit back and take a look. It’s easy once they’ve been pointed out a few times.

Actual Anarchy is real world examples of anarchy in action.

Movies, Shows, Books, News, etc… we host all sorts of content on the site from a bevy of writers enthusiastic for one goal: human freedom

Read Rothbard – Become an Actual Anarchist

PRESENTED BY

Read Rothbard is comprised of a small group of voluntaryists who are fans of Murray N. Rothbard. We curate content at www.ActualAnarchy.com and on the www.ReadRothbard.com site including books, lectures, articles, speeches, and we make a weekly podcast based on his free-market approach to economics. Our focus is on education and how advancement in technology improves the living standards of the average person.

Hit us up on our Tip Jar page to see all the myriad was you can support the show and the site: www.actualanarchy.com/tipjar

Also, be sure to give us your likes, comments, shares, ratings, reviews, and other feedbacks!

Never miss an episode. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts to get new episodes as they become available.

For the history you didn’t learn in school, check out Liberty Classroom:

Get the equivalent of a Ph.D. in libertarian thought and free-market economics online for just 24 cents a day….

The post Episode 102 – Dances with Wolves (1:11:08) appeared first on Actual Anarchy.

It is good that warriors such as us should meet in the struggle for life… Or death. It shall be life on this episode of the show where we discuss the Clint Eastwood movie, the Outlaw Josey Wales. This is a Western movie’s movie with plenty of gun-slinging and vengeance to keep you entertained with a great libertarian subplot.

Josey Wales is a simple farmer in Missouri. When a vicious band of Union Red Legs, led by Terrill, burns his home to the ground, killing his wife and son.

If you’re in the market for web-hosting (and if you aren’t doing things online to create content or products, we highly suggest it), you can’t go wrong with selecting Blue Host as your providers. We’ll give you a shout-out, back link, and undying gratitude if you buy your hosting through our link below:

Check out our affiliate link at:  https://www.actualanarchy.com/blue

The Outlaw Josey Wales is a 1976 American revisionist Western DeLuxe Color and Panavision film set during and after the American Civil War. It was directed by and starred Clint Eastwood (as the eponymous Josey Wales), with Chief Dan George, Sondra Locke, Sam Bottoms, and Geraldine Keams.[3] The film tells the story of Josey Wales, a Missouri farmer whose family is murdered by Union militants during the Civil War. Driven to revenge, Wales joins a Confederate guerrilla band and fights in the Civil War. After the war, all the fighters in Wales’ group except for Wales surrender to Union officers, but they end up being massacred. Wales becomes an outlaw and is pursued by bounty hunters and Union soldiers. – Wikipedia

Here is a link to the ClimateRight Air Conditioner that I ‘brojected’ into my office with two old chairs, 6-4×4’s, an old garden hose, and 5 socks:

It works like a dream and took care of the humidity and heat problem I’ve been fighting in my office.  Highly recommended….also will serve well during the upcoming colder turn in the weather as it is also a very efficient heater!

Here’s a little background article from True West Magazine that I found an interesting read:

Struggling for a Dream

During the episode, we talked about how the concept of the “Western” has penetrated the social psyche and given us all the impression that the wild west was full of gun-slinging violence, vendetta, family feuds, bank and train robberies, and hanging cattle-rustlers.  Well, apparently, the mostly just Hollywood story-telling, check out this book available on Amazon:

There is an article with the basics available at the Mises Institute:  https://mises.org/library/not-so-wild-wild-west

We called an audible this week and switched over to this movie, but we’ll be back next week with a review of Schooling the World with a special guest, Jack V Lloyd of the Voluntaryist Comic series and the Honest Teacher.  I hope you’ll join us!

Speaking of YouTube, be sure to spread some love to our normie-friendly version of the show called “The Last Nighters”, check out the YouTube page here and subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4kl9Q80Yaa6wSTcUM-sfww

You can find the website for the Last Nighters at:  www.LastNighters.com

In fact, we just launched the Last Nighters as a Podcast feed, you can find it on iTunes here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-last-nighters/id1384886334

And also at Anchor.FM where you can even leave us messages of up to one-minute long that we can plug into the show, and respond to. Give it a try and we’ll see how it works together!

Check out our Patreon page to become a supporting listener and get access to this full recording and the other dozens of shows available: www.patreon.com/ReadRothbard

Check out Robert’s “Trubbster” designs on the Tee Public:

For the history you didn’t learn in school, check out Liberty Classroom:

Here is the link for the Mises Quotes page on Facebook:

And here is the Black and [Dot] Gold link chronicling my efforts at being an Entrepreneurial AnCap to earn multiple income streams independent of location:

Having an argument on Facebook about economics?

Is someone bashing Uber in favor of the taxi industry?

Which lecture(s) was it where Rothbard discussed taxi medallions and price controls in the taxi industry?

It can be hard to remember.

The Rothbard Repository is a keyword searchable database of Murray Rothbard lectures.

You can quickly find what you are looking for.

This tool will help you find the exact timestamp of when Rothbard talks about a specific topic you searched.

---

All this can be yours, via FOUR different access options:

1. For a small monthly fee of $10.95/month by clicking on the “Purchase Access” button on this page.

2. As a bonus for any purchase of Liberty Classroom by Tom Woods on our affiliate link (We also include a free basic membership to Readitfor.me).

3. And a third way of gaining access is to support us on Patreon at the $10.00 per month or higher level at: https://www.patreon.com/readrothbard

4. Get your web hosting via our Bluehost affiliate link, and we will also give you a mention on our show and backlink on our website.

Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Actual Anarchy Podcast!

The Actual Anarchy Podcast is all about Maximum Freedom.

Robert and I analyze popular movies from a Rothbardian/Anarcho-Capitalist perspective. If it’s voluntary, we’re cool with it. If it’s not, then it violated the Non-Aggression Principle and Property Rights – the core tenants of Libertarian Theory – and hence – human freedom.

We use movies as a starting point for people who may not be familiar with this way of thinking. Discussion of the plot and decisions that characters make in relation to morality and violations of the non-aggression principle are our bread and butter.

We also will highlight and discuss any themes or lessons from Austrian Economics that we can glean from the film.

The point is to show what anarchy actually is with instances that are presented in film.

We publish new episodes on Sunday just in time for your Monday commute; and occasionally will do specials surrounding holidays or events (elections/olympics).

For our show where we talk about movies from a Rothbardian/Anarcho-Capitalist perspective, we often watch them on our various devices via Netflix, Amazon Prime or on VUDU (which lets you redeem UV content as well). The VUDU one is nice because once it is in there, you know it will still be there a few months later:

ABOUT

Actual Anarchy, an anarchy unlike what the average idiot thinks it would be. Anarchy means no rulers, not no rules. The non-aggression principle and a respect of property rights are what makes it go.

We host a podcast where we take pop culture movies and showcase moments or scenes or themes throughout that are literally actual examples of anarchy.

Any place, around the world, there are always examples of Actual Anarchy all about you. Sometimes you just have to sit back and take a look. It’s easy once they’ve been pointed out a few times.

Actual Anarchy is real world examples of anarchy in action.

Movies, Shows, Books, News, etc… we host all sorts of content on the site from a bevy of writers enthusiastic for one goal: human freedom

Read Rothbard – Become an Actual Anarchist

PRESENTED BY

Read Rothbard is comprised of a small group of voluntaryists who are fans of Murray N. Rothbard. We curate content at www.ActualAnarchy.com and on the www.ReadRothbard.com site including books, lectures, articles, speeches, and we make a weekly podcast based on his free-market approach to economics. Our focus is on education and how advancement in technology improves the living standards of the average person.

Hit us up on our Tip Jar page to see all the myriad was you can support the show and the site: www.actualanarchy.com/tipjar

Also, be sure to give us your likes, comments, shares, ratings, reviews, and other feedbacks!

Never miss an episode. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts to get new episodes as they become available.

For the history you didn’t learn in school, check out Liberty Classroom:

Get the equivalent of a Ph.D. in libertarian thought and free-market economics online for just 24 cents a day….

The post Episode 91 – The Outlaw Josey Wales (1:03:35) appeared first on Actual Anarchy.

There are 40,000,000 men under arms in the world today, and our statesmen and diplomats have the temerity to say that war is not in the making. Hell’s bells! Are these 40,000,000 men being trained to be dancers?

– General Smedley Butler, War is a Racket (1935)

The second lesson of economics—after scarcity is recognized as the first—is cost. There are costs in relation to everything we do.[1]

For example, if I spend $10 on a new hat, I am giving up everything else I could have purchased: a quality burger and fries, a cheap watch, a CD, two $5 scratch-offs, etc. But considering the first lesson of politics is to ignore the first lesson of economics, it is no surprise that the second lesson of economics is treated as non-existent.[2]

On January 17^th, 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his farewell speech, which was a warning we still ignore to this day:

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peace time, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea. Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United State corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.[3]

General Smedley Butler, who at the time of his death was the most decorated Marine in the military, took part in missions throughout countries such as Cuba, the Philippines, China, Nicaragua, etc. In his 34 years of service not only did he witness massive amounts of waste, but he took note of the deception that arose out of the military-industrial complex. During the early 1930’s Butler gave a speech across the country titled “War is a Racket,” which he later went on to publish as a small book in 1935.

His inferences range from hilarious to completely absurd, yet he recognized that it hadn’t always been this way:

Until 1898 we didn’t own a bit of territory outside the mainland of North America. At that time our national debt was $1,000,000,000. Then, we became “internationally minded.” We forgot, or shunted aside, the advice of the Father of our country. We forgot George Washington’s warning about “entangling alliances.” We went to war. We acquired outside territory. At the end of the World War period, as a direct result of our fiddling in international affairs, our national debt had jumped to over $25,000,000,000. Our total favorable trade balance during the twenty-five-year period was about $24,000,000,000.[4]

But then who profits from war? Only a select few do, and this type of profit is in no way related to the voluntary exchange of goods and services; this money is first seized from the citizens and then wasted by the government. He goes on to name and shame those that were able to pocket the money through this time period:

Take our friends the du Ponts, the powder people . . . the average earnings of the du Ponts for the period 1910 to 1914 were $6,000,000 a year. Now let’s look at their average yearly profit during the war years, 1914 to 1918…fifty-eight million dollars a year profit we find![5]

Take one of our little steel companies…their 1910-1914 yearly earnings average $6,000,000. Then came the war….their 1914-1918 average was $49,000,000 a year![6]

Or, let’s take United States Steel. The normal earnings during the five-year period prior to the war were $105,000,000 a year…the average yearly profit for the period 1914-1918 was $240,000,000. Not bad.[7]

Or Utah Copper. Average of $5,000,000 per year during the 1910-1914 period. Jumped to an average of $21,000,000 yearly profits for the war period.[8]

The three-year period before the war the total profits of Central Leather Company were $3,500,000…in 1916 Central Leather returned a profit of $15,000,000.[9]

His list doesn’t end there, but he goes on to point out the unfathomable amount of waste that occurs:

Take the shoe people…for instance, they sold Uncle Sam 35,000,000 pairs of hobnailed service shoes. There were 4,000,000 soldiers. Eight pairs, and more, to a soldier…but when the war was over Uncle Sam has a matter of 25,000,000 pairs left over. Bought – and paid for. Profits recorded and pocketed.[10]

They sold your Uncle Sam 20,000,000 mosquito nets for the use of the soldiers…not one of these mosquito nets ever got to France!…these thoughtful manufacturers wanted to make sure that no soldier would be without his mosquito net, so 40,000,000 additional yards of mosquito netting were sold to Uncle Sam. [11]

One very versatile patriot sold Uncle Sam twelve dozen 47-inch wrenches. Oh, they were very nice wrenches. The only trouble was that there was only one nut ever made that was large enough for these wrenches. That is the one that holds the turbines at Niagra Falls.[12]

Still another had the brilliant idea that colonels shouldn’t ride in automobiles, nor should they even ride on horseback. One has probably seen a picture of Andy Jackson riding in a buckboard. Well, some 6,000 buckboards were sold to Uncle Sam for the use of colonels…not one of them was used.[13]

And who pays for these costs? We do:

We all pay them – in taxation. We paid the bankers their profits when we bought Liberty Bonds at $100.00 and sold them back at $84 or $86 to the bankers. These bankers collected $100 plus.[14]

The brunt of the cost is paid with just the loss of lives and/or one’s livelihood:

…I have visited eighteen government hospitals for veterans. In them are a total of about 50,000 destroyed men – men who were the pick of the nation eighteen years ago.

…at Milwaukee, where there are 3,800 of the living dead…mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home.[15]

In the government hospital in Marion, Indiana, 1,800 of these boys are in pens! Five hundred of them in a barracks with steel bars and wires all around outside the buildings and on the porches. These already have been mentally destroyed. These boys don’t even look like human beings…mentally they are gone.[16]

And what incentivizes the soldier to carry on in this manner? Things that are completely artificial, to say the least:

Up to and including the Spanish-American War, we had a prize system, and soldiers and sailors fought for money. During the Civil War they were paid bonuses…the government, or states, paid as high as $1,200 for an enlistment. …so by developing the Napoleonic system – the medal business – the government learned it could get soldiers for less money, because the boys liked to be decorated.[17]

In part 2, further costs of war will be examined.

[1] This shouldn’t be confused with the idea of a “zero sum game”. Is it not true that when one person gains wealth, that it is by default at the expense of another (though it can be through coercion/violence).

[2] See Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson, (New York: New Rivers Press, 1979), pp. 15-24., Also see Murray Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State, (Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2011), pp. 17-18.

[3] See here for the full transcript: https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=90&page=transcript

[4] Smedly Butler, War is a Racket (Aristeus Books: 2014), pp. 13-14.

[5] Ibid. pp. 16-17.

[6] Ibid. pp. 17-18.

[7] Ibid. p. 18.

[8] Ibid. p. 18-19.

[9] Ibid. p. 19.

[10] Ibid. pp. 22-23.

[11] Ibid. p. 24.

[12] Ibid. pp. 26-27.

[13] Ibid. p. 27.

[14] Ibid. p. 32., He points out on page 41 that soldiers bought about “$2,000,000,000 worth of these bonds.”

[15] Ibid. p. 32-33.

[16] Ibid. p. 34.

[17] Ibid. p. 36-37.

For the history you didn’t learn in school, check out Liberty Classroom:

The post A Few Costs of War: Part 1 appeared first on Actual Anarchy.

That brings us to the larger issue, the war itself. I contend that there is no moral high ground regarding the War of 1861. As I always told my students, when Lee surrendered to Grant we need to understand both men had freed their slaves long before the war.

Slavery was a fact of life in the western world until the 19^th century. The best way to approach the discussion is to set aside the issue of slavery, not because it is unimportant, but because it existed on all sides.

First, southerners should recognize that slavery was an issue in the conflict, to deny that is to deny history. If we read Kenneth Stampp’s, Causes of the Civil War, slavery is one of the issues that led to the war. Is it the issue? For some it was, we cannot argue otherwise. But, was it the issue for the common soldier, absolutely not. When less than 4% of a population engages in an activity, it is hard to motivate folks who don’t have skin in the game to fight for it.

Unionists should accept the fact that no matter what they were taught in school, the north did not wage war to free the slaves. The north waged the war for economic reasons, simply put:

the south disproportionately provided the tax revenue that the union relied on.

Slavery was a symbol of southern agrarian culture, its spread west was concerning to northern states because many felt that the south had undue influence in Congress. While independence and self-determination was fine for New Englanders, southerners were not going to be allowed to go their own way and take their money with them.

Is there evidence to support my position?

One, Lincoln supported the Corwin Amendment. The Corwin Amendment would have Constitutionally protected slavery forever. Enshrining slavery as a Constitutionally protected institution is not a way to free slaves.

Two, had the north truly been concerned with freeing the slaves, they would have allowed the south to secede. Once that happened they would not have had to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act and the north would have become a refuge for escaped slaves. The entire institution would have collapsed without violence in less than a decade.

Three, the union states had slaves and had no reservations about using them for military purposes. If “contraband” slaves did not join their efforts, they were oftentimes murdered. One of the hidden truths that union apologists do not discuss is the large numbers of slaves that were killed during Sherman’s bloody march.

Sherman’s goal was to economically decimate the south through total war, and he did so. There is no way any apologist can say that the war was an effort to “preserve the union” in light of Sherman’s (and other northern military leaders, there was more than one march of destruction) March, it was a war to subjugate the southern people. For more information see Jeff Hummell’s, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men.

On the other hand, southerners cannot argue that the Confederate government gave a hoot for “state’s rights.” Income taxes, the first American draft, the forced compliance of the war effort, and the way internal “rebellion” was put down with prejudice in the Confederacy, compounded with the forced enslavement of free blacks that were captured in union states show a complete disregard for individual freedom and self-determination by CSA leaders.

In the end, whether we like it or not, the war was about whether southerners would be ruled by oligarchs in Richmond, VA or Washington, DC (for a more in depth treatment on this subject listen to the Dangerous History Podcast).

Do not mistake me, nullification and secession are powers that all states have and had. The Union efforts to suppress secession destroyed the American republic.

Lincoln was an evil man who had no respect for natural or Constitutional rights and powers. He ordered the destruction of printing presses owned by newspapers who did not support him, he arrested and held political opponents in prison who did not support his actions, he was a vehement racist, and he led an effort that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians who were mostly women, children, free blacks, and slaves (see The Real Lincoln, Thomas DiLorenzo).

Arguing that Lincoln was justified in his efforts is arguing that a man who CHAINS his wife in the basement after she tells him she is leaving is justified.

People on both sides to recognize that the lost cause was not as noble as some like to think. Union apologists should understand that when they argue for what happened, they are arguing for an evil effort that was not motivated by anything more than the subjugation of their fellow Americans.

No matter what side you fall on, your side sucks.

The post The Uncivil War: Your side sucks!!! appeared first on Actual Anarchy.

The road to Civil War must be divided into two parts:

1.  the causes of the controversy over slavery leading to secession, and
2.  the immediate causes of the war itself.

The reason for such split is that secession need not have led to Civil War, despite the assumption to the contrary by most historians.

The basic root of the controversy over slavery to secession, in my opinion, was the aggressive, expansionist aims of the Southern “slavocracy.” Very few Northerners proposed to abolish slavery in the Southern states by aggressive war; the objection – and certainly a proper one – was to the attempt of the Southern slavocracy to extend the slave system to the Western territories. The apologia that the Southerners feared that eventually they might be outnumbered and that federal abolition might ensue is no excuse; it is the age-old alibi for “preventive war.” Not only did the expansionist aim of the slavocracy to protect slavery by federal fiat in the territories as “property” aim to foist the immoral system of slavery on Western territories; it even violated the principles of states’ rights to which the South was supposedly devoted – and which would logically have led to a “popular sovereignty” doctrine.

Actually, with Texas in the Union, there was no hope of gaining substantial support for slavery in any of the territories except Kansas, and this had supposedly been settled by the Missouri Compromise. “Free-Soil” principles for the Western territories could therefore have been easily established without disruption of existing affairs, if not for the continual aggressive push and trouble making of the South.

If Van Buren had been president, he might have been able to drive through Congress the free-soil principles of the Wilmot Proviso, and that would have been that. As it was, President Taylor’s bill would have settled the Western territory problem by simply adopting “popular sovereignty” principles in New Mexico, Utah, Oregon, and California territories – admitting them all eventually as free states. Instead, the unfortunate death of President Taylor, and the accession of Fillmore, ended this simple and straightforward solution, and brought forth the pernicious so-called “Compromise” of 1850, which exacerbated rather than reduced interstate tensions by adding to the essential Taylor program provisions for stricter enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law. Since the Fugitive Slave Law not only forced the Northern people to collaborate in what they considered – correctly – to be moral crime, but also violated Northern state rights, the strict Fugitive Slave Law was a constant irritant to the North.

The shift from free-soil principles in the Democratic Party and toward the Compromise of 1850 wrecked the old Jacksonian Democracy. The open break became apparent in Van Buren and the Free Soil candidacy of 1848; the failure of the Democratic Party to take an antislavery stand pushed the old libertarians into Free Soil or other alliances, even into the new Republican Party eventually: this tragic split in the Democratic Party lost it its libertarian conscience and drive.

Pro-southern domination of the Democratic Party in the 1850s, with Pierce and Buchanan, the opening up of the Kansas territory to slave expansion (or potential slave expansion) in 1854, led to the creation of the antislavery Republican Party. One tragedy here is that the surrender of the Democrat and Whig parties to the spirit of the Compromise of 1850 forced the free-soilers into a new party that was not only free soil, but showed dangerous signs (in Seward and others) of ultimately preparing for an abolitionist war against the South. Thus, Southern trouble making shifted Northern sentiment into potentially dangerous channels. Not only that: it also welded in the Republican Party a vehicle dedicated, multifold, to old Federalist-Whig principles: to high tariffs, to internal improvements and government subsidies, to paper money and government banking, etc. Libertarian principles were now split between the two parties.

The fantastic Dred Scott decision changed the political scene completely: for in it the Supreme Court had apparently outlawed free-soil principles, even including the Missouri Compromise. There was now only one course left to the lovers of freedom short of open rebellion against the Court, or Garrison’s secession by the North from a Constitution that had indeed become a “compact with Hell”; and that escape hatch was Stephen Douglas’s popular sovereignty doctrine, in its “Freeport” corollary: i.e., in quiet, local nullification of the Dred Scott decision.

At this critical juncture, the South continued on its suicidal course by breaking with Douglas, insistent on the full Dred Scott principle, and leading to the victory of their enemy Lincoln. Here again, secession was only “preventive,” as Lincoln had given no indication of moving to repress slavery in the South.

It is here that we must split our analysis of the “causes of the Civil War”; for, while this analysis leads, in my view, to a “pro-Northern” position in the slavery-in-the-territories struggles of the 1850s, it leads, paradoxically, to a “pro-Southern” position in the Civil War itself. For secession need not, and should not, have been combated by the North; and so we must pin the blame on the North for aggressive war against the seceding South. The war was launched in the shift from the original Northern position (by Garrison included) to “let our erring sisters depart in peace” to the determination to crush the South to save that mythical abstraction known as the “Union” – and in this shift, we must put a large portion of the blame upon the maneuvering of Lincoln to induce the Southerners to fire the first shot on Fort Sumter – after which point, flag-waving could and did take over.

The War Against the South and Its Consequences

The Civil War was one of the most momentous events in American history, not only for its inherent drama and destruction, but because of the fateful consequences for America that flowed from it.

We have said above that the War of 1812 had devastating consequences for the libertarian movement; indeed, it might be said that it took twenty years of devotion and hard work for the Jacksonian movement to undo the étatist consequences of that utter failure of a war. It is the measure of the statist consequences of the Civil War that America never recovered from it: never again was the libertarian movement to have a party of its own, or as close a chance at success. Hamiltonian neo-Federalism beyond the wildest dreams of even a J.Q. Adams had either been foisted permanently on America, or had been inaugurated, to be later fulfilled.

Let us trace the leading consequences of the War Against the South: there is, first, the enormous toll of death, injury, and destruction. There is the complete setting aside of the civilized “rules of war” that Western civilization had laboriously been erecting for centuries: instead, a total war against the civilian population was launched against the South. The symbol of this barbaric and savage oppression was, of course, Sherman’s march through Georgia and the rest of the South, the burning of Atlanta, etc. (For the military significance of this reversion to barbarism, see F.J.P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism). Another consequence, of course, was the ending of effective states’ rights, and of the perfectly logical and reasonable right of secession – or, for that matter, nullification. From now on, the Union was a strictly compulsory entity.

Further, the Civil War foisted upon the country the elimination of Jacksonian hard money: the greenbacks established government fiat paper, which it took 14 long years to tame; and the National Bank Act ended the separation of government from banking, effectively quasi-nationalizing and regulating the banking system, and creating an engine of governmentally sponsored inflation.

So ruthlessly did the Lincoln administration overturn the old banking system (including the effective outlawing of state bank notes) that it became almost impossible to achieve a return – impossible that is, without a radical and almost revolutionary will for hard money, which did not exist. On the tariff, the virtual destruction of the Democratic Party led to the foisting of a high, protective tariff to remain for a generation – indeed, permanently, for the old prewar low tariff was never to return. It was behind this wall of tariff-subsidy that the “trusts” were able to form. Further, the administration embarked on a vast program of subsidies to favored businesses: land grants to railroads, etc. The Post Office was later monopolized and private postal services outlawed. The national debt skyrocketed, the budget increased greatly and permanently, and taxes increased greatly – including the first permanent foisting on America of excise taxation, especially on whiskey and tobacco.

Thus, on every point of the old Federalist-Whig vs. Democrat-Republican controversy, the Civil War and the Lincoln administration achieved a neo-Federalist triumph that was complete right down the line. And the crushing of the South, the military Reconstruction period, etc. assured that the Democratic Party would not rise again to challenge this settlement for at least a generation. And when it did rise, it would have a much tougher row to hoe than did Van Buren and Co. in an era much more disposed to laissez-faire.

But this was not all: for the Civil War saw also the inauguration of despotic and dictatorial methods beyond the dreams of the so-called “despots of ’98.” Militarism ran rampant, with the arrogant suspension of habeas corpus, the crushing and mass arrests in Maryland, Kentucky, etc.; the suppression of civil liberties and opposition against the war, among the propeace “Copperheads” – the persecution of Vallandigham, etc.; and the institution of conscription. Also introduced on the American scene at this time was the income tax, reluctantly abandoned later, but to reappear. Federal aid to education began in earnest and permanently with federal land grants for state agricultural colleges. There was no longer any talk, of course, about abolition of the standing army or the navy. Almost everything, in short, that is currently evil on the American political scene, had its roots and its beginnings in the Civil War.

Because of the slavery controversy of the 1850s, there was no longer a single libertarian party in America, as the Democratic had been. Now the free-soilers had left the Democrat ranks. But, especially after Dred Scott had pushed the Douglas “Freeport Doctrine” to the fore as libertarian policy, there was hope for a reunited Democracy, especially since the Democrat party was still very good on all questions except slavery. But the Civil War wrecked all that, and monolithic Republican rule could impress its neo-Federalist program on America to such an extent as to make it extremely difficult to uproot.

[This article by Murray N. Rothbard is excerpted from a 30,000-word report to the Volker Fund, written in September 1961, giving a very detailed description of everything wrong with A History of the American Republic by George B. DeHuszar. The full memo will be included in the forthcoming collection Renaissance Man, edited by David Gordon.]

Source:  https://mises.org/blog/road-civil-war

The post The Road to Civil War appeared first on Actual Anarchy.

By Murray N. Rothbard

[Given Donald Trump’s recent comments regarding Andrew Jackson and the Civil War, it is a good time point out the historical context and the justifications as presented in the modern classroom vs. a more informed interpretation.  It is our view that Donald Trump was making a point that the Civil War and its attendant horrors were avoidable and the absolution of slavery still possible had a tyrant such as Lincoln not been in the dictatorial seat of power.]

My own view of war can be put simply: a just war exists when a people tries to ward off the threat of coercive domination by another people, or to overthrow an already-existing domination. A war is unjust, on the other hand, when a people try to impose domination on another people, or try to retain an already existing coercive rule over them.

During my lifetime, my ideological and political activism has focused on opposition to America’s wars, first because I have believed our waging them to be unjust, and, second, because war, in the penetrating phrase of the libertarian Randolph Bourne in World War I, has always been “the health of the State,” an instrument for the aggrandizement of State power over the health, the lives, and the prosperity, of their subject citizens and social institutions. Even a just war cannot be entered into lightly; an unjust one must therefore be anathema.

There have been only two wars in American history that were, in my view, assuredly and unquestionably proper and just; not only that, the opposing side waged a war that was clearly and notably unjust. Why? Because we did not have to question whether a threat against our liberty and property was clear or present; in both of these wars, Americans were trying to rid themselves of an unwanted domination by another people. And in both cases, the other side ferociously tried to maintain their coercive rule over Americans. In each case, one side — “our side” if you will — was notably just, the other side — “their side” — unjust.

To be specific, the two just wars in American history were the American Revolution and the War for Southern Independence.

I would like to mention a few vital features of the treatment of war by the classical international natural lawyers, and to contrast this great tradition with the very different “international law” that has been dominant since 1914, by the dominant partisans of the League of Nations and the United Nations.

The classical international lawyers from the 16th through the 19th centuries were trying to cope with the implications of the rise and dominance of the modern nation-state. They did not seek to “abolish war,” the very notion of which they would have considered absurd and utopian. Wars will always exist among groups, peoples, nations; the desideratum, in addition to trying to persuade them to stay within the compass of “just wars,” was to curb and limit the impact of existing wars as much as possible. Not to try to “abolish war,” but to constrain war with limitations imposed by civilization.

Specifically, the classical international lawyers developed two ideas, which they were broadly successful in getting nations to adopt:

1. Above all, don’t target civilians. If you must fight, let the rulers and their loyal or hired retainers slug it out, but keep civilians on both sides out of it, as much as possible. The growth of democracy, the identification of citizens with the State, conscription, and the idea of a “nation in arms,” all whittled away this excellent tenet of international law.
2. Preserve the rights of neutral states and nations. In the modern corruption of international law that has prevailed since 1914, “neutrality” has been treated as somehow deeply immoral. Nowadays, if countries A and B get into a fight, it becomes every nation’s moral obligation to figure out, quickly, which country is the “bad guy,” and then if, say, A is condemned as the bad guy, to rush in and pummel A in defense of the alleged good guy B.

Classical international law, which should be brought back as quickly as possible, was virtually the opposite. In a theory which tried to limit war, neutrality was considered not only justifiable but a positive virtue. In the old days, “he kept us out of war” was high tribute to a president or political leader; but now, all the pundits and professors condemn any president who “stands idly by” while “people are being killed” in Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, or the hot spot of the day. In the old days, “standing idly by” was considered a mark of high statesmanship. Not only that: neutral states had “rights” which were mainly upheld, since every warring country knew that someday it too would be neutral. A warring state could not interfere with neutral shipping to an enemy state; neutrals could ship to such an enemy with impunity all goods except “contraband,” which was strictly defined as arms and ammunition, period. Wars were kept limited in those days, and neutrality was extolled.

In modern international law, where “bad-guy” nations must be identified quickly and then fought by all, there are two rationales for such worldwide action, both developed by Woodrow Wilson, whose foreign policy and vision of international affairs has been adopted by every president since. The first is “collective security against aggression.” The notion is that every war, no matter what, must have one “aggressor” and one or more “victims,” so that naming the aggressor becomes a prelude to a defense of “heroic little” victims. The analogy is with the cop-on-the-corner. A policeman sees A mugging B; he rushes after the aggressor, and the rest of the citizens join in the pursuit. In the same way, supposedly, nations, as they band together in “collective security” arrangements, whether they be the League, the United Nations, or NATO, identify the “aggressor” nation and then join together as an “international police force,” like the cop-on-the-corner, to zap the criminal.

In real life, however, it’s not so easy to identify one warring “aggressor.” Causes become tangled, and history intervenes. Above all, a nation’s current border cannot be considered as evidently just as a person’s life and property. Therein lies the problem. How about the very different borders 10 years, 20 years, or even centuries ago? How about wars where claims of all sides are plausible? But any complication of this sort messes up the plans of our professional war crowd. To get Americans stirred up about intervening in a war thousands of miles away about which they know nothing and care less, one side must be depicted as the clear-cut bad guy, and the other side pure and good; otherwise, Americans will not be moved to intervene in a war that is really none of their business. Thus, feverish attempts by American pundits and alleged foreign-policy “experts” to get us to intervene against the demonized Serbs ran aground when the public began to realize that all three sides in the Bosnian war were engaging in “ethnic cleansing” whenever they got the chance. This is even forgetting the fatuity of the propaganda about the “territorial integrity” of a so-called Bosnian state which has never existed even formally until a year or two ago, and of course in actuality does not exist at all.

If classical international law limited and checked warfare, and kept it from spreading, modern international law, in an attempt to stamp out “aggression” and to abolish war, only insures, as the great historian Charles Beard put it, a futile policy of “perpetual war for perpetual peace.”

The second Wilsonian excuse for perpetual war, particularly relevant to the “Civil War,” is even more utopian: the idea that it is the moral obligation of America and of all other nations to impose “democracy” and “human rights” throughout the globe. In short, in a world where “democracy” is generally meaningless, and “human rights” of any genuine sort virtually nonexistent, that we are obligated to take up the sword and wage a perpetual war to force topia on the entire world by guns, tanks, and bombs.

The Somalian intervention was a perfect case study in the workings of this Wilsonian dream. We began the intervention by extolling a “new kind of army” (a new model army if you will) engaged in a new kind of high moral intervention: the US soldier with a CARE package in one hand, and a gun in the other. The new “humanitarian” army, bringing food, peace, democracy, and human rights to the benighted peoples of Somalia, and doing it all the more nobly and altruistically because there was not a scrap of national interest in it for Americans. It was this prospect of a purely altruistic intervention — of universal love imposed by the bayonet — that swung almost the entire “antiwar” Left into the military intervention camp. Well, it did not take long for our actions to have consequences, and the end of the brief Somalian intervention provided a great lesson if we only heed it: the objects of our “humanitarianism” being shot down by American guns, and striking back by highly effective guerrilla war against American troops, culminating in savaging the bodies of American soldiers. So much for “humanitarianism,” for a war to impose democracy and human rights; so much for the new model army.

In both of these cases, the modern interventionists have won by seizing the moral high ground; theirs is the cosmic “humanitarian” path of moral principle; those of us who favor American neutrality are now derided as “selfish,” “narrow,” and “immoral.” In the old days, however, interventionists were more correctly considered propagandists for despotism, mass murder, and perpetual war, if not spokesmen for special interest groups, or agents of the “merchants of death.” Scarcely a high ground.

The cause of “human rights” is precisely the critical argument by which, in retrospect, Abraham Lincoln’s War of Northern Aggression against the South is justified and even glorified. The “humanitarian” goes forth and rights the wrong of slavery, doing so through mass murder, the destruction of institutions and property, and the wreaking of havoc which has still not disappeared.

Isabel Paterson, in The God of the Machine, one of the great books on political philosophy of this century, zeroed in on what she aptly called “the humanitarian with the guillotine.” “The humanitarian,” Mrs. Paterson wrote, “wishes to be a prime mover in the lives of others. He cannot admit either the divine or the natural order, by which men have the power to help themselves. The humanitarian puts himself in the place of God.” But Mrs. Paterson notes, the humanitarian is “confronted by two awkward facts: first that the competent do not need his assistance; and second, that the majority of people, if unperverted, positively do not want to be ‘done good’ by the humanitarian.” Having considered what the “good” of others might be, and who is to decide on the good and on what to do about it, Mrs. Paterson points out, “Of course what the humanitarian actually proposes is that he shall do what he thinks is good for everybody. It is at this point that the humanitarian sets up the guillotine.” Hence, she concludes, “the humanitarian in theory is the terrorist in action.”

There is an important point about old-fashioned, or classical, international law which applies to any sort of war, even a just one:

Even if country A is waging a clearly just war against country B, and B’s cause is unjust, this fact by no means imposes any sort of moral obligation on any other nation, including those who wish to abide by just policies, to intervene in that war. On the contrary, in the old days neutrality was always considered a more noble course, if a nation had no overriding interest of its own in the fray, there was no moral obligation whatever to intervene. A nation’s highest and most moral course was to remain neutral; its citizens might cheer in their heart for A’s just cause, or, if someone were overcome by passion for A’s cause he could rush off on his own to the front to fight, but generally citizens of nation C were expected to cleave to their own nation’s interests over the cause of a more abstract justice. Certainly, they were expected not to form a propaganda pressure group to try to bulldoze their nation into intervening; if champions of country A were sufficiently ardent, they could go off on their own to fight, but they could not commit their fellow countrymen to do the same.

Many of my friends and colleagues are hesitant to concede the existence of universal natural rights, lest they find themselves forced to support American, or worldwide intervention, to try to enforce them. But for classical natural-law international jurists, that consequence did not follow at all. If, for example, Tutsis are slaughtering Hutus in Rwanda or Burundi, or vice versa, these natural lawyers would indeed consider such acts as violations of the natural rights of the slaughtered; but that fact in no way implies any moral or natural-law obligation for any other people in the world to rush in to try to enforce such rights. We might encapsulate this position into a slogan: “Rights may be universal, but their enforcement must be local,” or, to adopt the motto of the Irish rebels: Sinn Fein, “ourselves alone.” A group of people may have rights, but it is their responsibility, and theirs alone, to defend or safeguard such rights.

To put it another way, I have always believed that when the Left claims that all sorts of entities — animals, alligators, trees, plants, rocks, beaches, the earth, or “the ecology” — have “rights,” the proper response is this: when those entities act like the Americans who set forth their declaration of rights, when they speak for themselves and take up arms to enforce them, then and only then can we take such claims seriously.

I want to now return to America’s two just wars. It is plainly evident that the American Revolution, using my definition, was a just war, a war of peoples forming an independent nation and casting off the bonds of another people insisting on perpetuating their rule over them. Obviously, the Americans, while welcoming French or other support, were prepared to take on the daunting task of overthrowing the rule of the most powerful empire on earth, and to do it alone if necessary.

What I want to focus on here is not the grievances that led the American rebels to the view that it had become “necessary for One People to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another.” What I want to stress here is the ground on which the Americans stood for this solemn and fateful act of separation. The Americans were steeped in the natural-law philosophy of John Locke and the Scholastics, and in the classical republicanism of Greece and Rome. There were two major political theories in Britain and in Europe during this time. One was the older, but by this time obsolete, absolutist view: the king was the father of his nation, and absolute obedience was owed to the king by the lesser orders; any rebellion against the king was equivalent to Satan’s rebellion against God.

The other, natural-law, view countered that sovereignty originated not in the king but in the people, but that the people had delegated their powers and rights to the king. Hugo Grotius and conservative natural lawyers believed that the delegation of sovereignty, once transferred, was irrevocable, so that sovereignty must reside permanently in the king. The more radical libertarian theorists, such as Father Mariana, and John Locke and his followers, believed, quite sensibly, that since the original delegation was voluntary and contractual, the people had the right to take back that sovereignty should the king grossly violate his trust.

The American revolutionaries, in separating themselves from Great Britain and forming their new nation, adopted the Lockean doctrine. In fact, if they hadn’t done so, they would not have been able to form their new nation. It is well known that the biggest moral and psychological problem the Americans had, and could only bring themselves to overcome after a full year of bloody war, was to violate their oaths of allegiance to the British king. Breaking with the British Parliament, their de facto ruler, posed no problem; Parliament they didn’t care about. But the king was their inherited sovereign lord, the person to whom they had all sworn fealty. It was the king to whom they owed allegiance; thus, the list of grievances in the Declaration of Independence mentioned only the king, even though Parliament was in reality the major culprit.

Hence, the crucial psychological importance, to the American revolutionaries, of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, which not only adopted the Lockean view of a justified reclaiming of sovereignty by the American people but also particularly zeroed in on the office of the king. In the words of the New Left, Paine delegitimized and desanctified the king in American eyes. The king of Great Britain, Paine wrote, is only the descendent of “nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang; whose savage manner or preeminence in subtlety obtained him the title of chief among plunderers.” And now the kings, including the “Royal Brute of Great Britain,” are but “crowned ruffians.”

In making their revolution, then, the Americans cast their lot, permanently, with a contractual theory or justification for government. Government is not something imposed from above, by some divine act of conferring sovereignty; but contractual, from below, by “consent of the governed.” That means that American polities inevitably become republics, not monarchies. What happened, in fact, is that the American Revolution resulted in something new on earth. The people of each of the 13 colonies formed new, separate, contractual, republican governments. Based on libertarian doctrines and on republican models, the people of the 13 colonies each set up independent sovereign states: with powers of each government strictly limited, with most rights and powers reserved to the people, and with checks, balances, and written constitutions severely limiting state power.

These 13 separate republics, in order to wage their common war against the British Empire, each sent representatives to the Continental Congress, and then later formed a Confederation, again with severely limited central powers, to help fight the British. The hotly contested decision to scrap the Articles of Confederation and to craft a new Constitution demonstrates conclusively that the central government was not supposed to be perpetual, not to be the sort of permanent one-way trap that Grotius had claimed turned popular sovereignty over to the king forevermore. In fact, it would be very peculiar to hold that the American Revolutionaries had repudiated the idea that a pledge of allegiance to the king was contractual and revocable, and break their vows to the king, only to turn around a few short years later to enter a compact that turned out to be an irrevocable one-way ticket for a permanent central government power. Revocable and contractual to a king, but irrevocable to some piece of paper!

And finally, does anyone seriously believe for one minute that any of the 13 states would have ratified the Constitution had they believed that it was a perpetual one-way Venus fly trap — a one-way ticket to sovereign suicide? The Constitution was barely ratified as it is!

So, if the Articles of Confederation could be treated as a scrap of paper, if delegation to the confederate government in the 1780s was revocable, how could the central government set up under the Constitution, less than a decade later, claim that its powers were permanent and irrevocable? Sheer logic insists that: if a state could enter a confederation it could later withdraw from it; the same must be true for a state adopting the Constitution.

And yet of course, that monstrous illogic is precisely the doctrine proclaimed by the North, by the Union, during the War Between the States.

In 1861, the Southern states, believing correctly that their cherished institutions were under grave threat and assault from the federal government, decided to exercise their natural, contractual, and constitutional right to withdraw, to “secede” from that Union. The separate Southern states then exercised their contractual right as sovereign republics to come together in another confederation, the Confederate States of America. If the American Revolutionary War was just, then it follows as the night the day that the Southern cause, the War for Southern Independence, was just, and for the same reason: casting off the “political bonds” that connected the two peoples. In neither case was this decision made for “light or transient causes.” And in both cases, the courageous seceders pledged to each other “their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.”

What of the grievances of the two sets of seceders? Were they comparable? The central grievance of the American rebels was the taxing power: the systematic plunder of their property by the British government. Whether it was the tax on stamps, or the tax on imports, or finally the tax on imported tea, taxation was central. The slogan “no taxation without representation” was misleading; in the last analysis, we didn’t want “representation” in Parliament; we wanted not to be taxed by Great Britain. The other grievances, such as opposition to general search warrants, or to overriding of the ancient Anglo-Saxon principle of trial by jury, were critical because they involved the power to search merchants’ properties for goods that had avoided payment of the customs taxes, that is for “smuggled” goods, and trial by jury was vital because no American jury would ever convict such smugglers.

One of the central grievances of the South, too, was the tariff that Northerners imposed on Southerners whose major income came from exporting cotton abroad. The tariff at one and the same time drove up prices of manufactured goods, forced Southerners and other Americans to pay more for such goods, and threatened to cut down Southern exports. The first great constitutional crisis with the South came when South Carolina battled against the well named Tariff of Abomination of 1828. As a result of South Carolina’s resistance, the North was forced to reduce the tariff, and finally, the Polk administration adopted a two-decade long policy of virtual free trade.

John C. Calhoun, the great intellectual leader of South Carolina, and indeed of the entire South, pointed out the importance of a very low level of taxation. All taxes, by their very nature, are paid, on net, by one set of people, the “taxpayers,” and the proceeds go to another set of people, what Calhoun justly called the “tax-consumers.” Among the net tax-consumers, of course, are the politicians and bureaucrats who live full-time off the proceeds. The higher the level of taxation, the higher the percentage which the country’s producers have to give the parasitic ruling class that enforces and lives off of taxes. In zeroing in on the tariff, Calhoun pointed out that “the North has adopted a system of revenue and disbursements, in which an undue proportion of the burden of taxation has been imposed on the South, and an undue proportion appropriated to the North, and for the monopolization of Northern industry.”

What of the opposition to these two just wars? Both were unjust since in both the case of the British and of the North, they were waging fierce war to maintain their coercive and unwanted rule over another people. But if the British wanted to hold on and expand their empire, what were the motivations of the North? Why, in the famous words of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, at least early in the struggle, didn’t the North “let their erring sisters go in peace?”

The North, in particular the North’s driving force, the “Yankees” — that ethnocultural group who either lived in New England or migrated from there to upstate New York, northern and eastern Ohio, northern Indiana, and northern Illinois — had been swept by a new form of Protestantism. This was a fanatical and emotional neo-Puritanism driven by a fervent “postmillenialism” which held that as a precondition for the Second Advent of Jesus Christ, man must set up a thousand-year Kingdom of God on Earth.

The Kingdom is to be a perfect society. In order to be perfect, of course, this Kingdom must be free of sin; sin, therefore, must be stamped out, and as quickly as possible. Moreover, if you didn’t try your darndest to stamp out sin by force you yourself would not be saved. It was very clear to these neo-Puritans that in order to stamp out sin, government, in the service of the saints, is the essential coercive instrument to perform this purgative task. As historians have summed up the views of all the most prominent of these millennialists, “government is God’s major instrument of salvation.”

Sin was very broadly defined by the Yankee neo-Puritans as anything which might interfere with a person’s free will to embrace salvation, anything which, in the words of the old Shadow radio serial, could “cloud men’s minds.” The particular cloud-forming occasions of sin, for these millennialists, were liquor (“demon rum”), any activity on the Sabbath except reading the Bible and going to church, slavery, and the Roman Catholic Church.

If antislavery, prohibitionism, and anti-Catholicism were grounded in fanatical postmillennial Protestantism, the paternalistic big government required for this social program on the state and local levels led logically to a big-government paternalism in national economic affairs. Whereas the Democratic Party in the 19th century was known as the “party of personal liberty,” of states’ rights, of minimal government, of free markets and free trade, the Republican Party was known as the “party of great moral ideas,” which amounted to the stamping-out of sin. On the economic level, the Republicans adopted the Whig program of statism and big government: protective tariffs, subsidies to big business, strong central government, large-scale public works, and cheap credit spurred by government.

The Northern war against slavery partook of fanatical millennialist fervor, of a cheerful willingness to uproot institutions, to commit mayhem and mass murder, to plunder and loot and destroy, all in the name of high moral principle and the birth of a perfect world. The Yankee fanatics were veritable Patersonian humanitarians with the guillotine: the Anabaptists, the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks of their era. This fanatical spirit of Northern aggression for an allegedly redeeming cause is summed up in the pseudo-Biblical and truly blasphemous verses of that quintessential Yankee Julia Ward Howe, in her so-called “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Modern left-liberal historians of course put this case in a slightly different way. Take for example, the eminent abolitionist historian of the Civil War James McPherson. Here’s the way McPherson revealingly puts it: “Negative liberty [he means “liberty”] was the dominant theme in early American history — freedom from constraints on individual rights imposed by a powerful state.” “The Bill of Rights,” McPherson goes on, “is the classic expression of negative liberty, or Jeffersonian humanistic liberalism. These first ten amendments to the Constitution protect individual liberties by placing a straitjacket of ‘shall not’ on the federal government.” “In 1861,” McPherson continues, “Southern states invoked the negative liberties of state sovereignty and individual rights of property [i.e., slaves] to break up the United States.”

What was McPherson’s hero Abraham Lincoln’s response? Lincoln, he writes, “thereby gained an opportunity to invoke the positive liberty [he means “statist tyranny”] of reform liberalism, exercised through the power of the army and the state, to overthrow the negative liberties of disunion and ownership of slaves.” Another New Model Army at work! McPherson calls for a “blend” of positive and negative liberties, but as we have seen, any such “blend” is nonsense, for statism and liberty are always at odds. The more that “reform liberalism” “empowers” one set of people, the less “negative liberty” there is for everyone else. It should be mentioned that the southern United States was the only place in the 19th century where slavery was abolished by fire and by “terrible swift sword.” In every other part of the New World, slavery was peacefully bought out by agreement with the slaveholders. But in these other countries, in the West Indies or Brazil, for example, there were no Puritan millennialists to do their bloody work, armed with gun in one hand and hymn book in the other.

In the Republican Party, the “party of great moral ideas,” different men and different factions emphasized different aspects of this integrated despotic world-outlook. In the fateful Republican convention of 1860, the major candidates for president were two veteran abolitionists: William Seward, of New York, and Salmon P. Chase of Ohio. Seward, however, was distrusted by the anti-Catholic hotheads because he somehow did not care about the alleged Catholic menace; on the other hand, while Chase was happy to play along with the former Know-Nothings, who stressed the anti-Catholic pant of the coalition, he was distrusted by Sewardites and others who were indifferent to the Catholic question. Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was a dark horse who was able to successfully finesse the Catholic question. His major emphasis was on Whig economic statism: high tariffs, huge subsidies to railroads, public works. As one of the nation’s leading lawyers for Illinois Central and other big railroads, indeed, Lincoln was virtually the candidate from Illinois Central and the other large railroads.

One reason for Lincoln’s victory at the convention was that Iowa railroad entrepreneur Grenville M. Dodge helped swing the Iowa delegation to Lincoln. In return, early in the Civil War, Lincoln appointed Dodge to army general. Dodge’s task was to clear the Indians from the designated path of the country’s first heavily subsidized federally chartered transcontinental railroad, the Union Pacific. In this way, conscripted Union troops and hapless taxpayers were coerced into socializing the costs on constructing and operating the Union Pacific. This sort of action is now called euphemistically “the cooperation of government and industry.”

But Lincoln’s major focus was on raising taxes, in particular raising and enforcing the tariff. His convention victory was particularly made possible by support from the Pennsylvania delegation. Pennsylvania had long been the home and the political focus of the nation’s iron and steel industry which, ever since its inception during the War of 1812, had been chronically inefficient, and had therefore constantly been bawling for high tariffs and, later, import quotas. Virtually the first act of the Lincoln administration was to pass the Morrill protective tariff act, doubling existing tariff rates, and creating the highest tariff rates in American history.

In his first inaugural address, Lincoln was conciliatory about maintaining slavery; what he was hard-line about toward the South was insistence on collecting all the customs tariffs in that region. As Lincoln put it, the federal government would “collect the duties and imposts, but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against … people anywhere.” The significance of the federal forts is that they provided the soldiers to enforce the customs tariffs; thus, Fort Sumter was at the entrance to Charleston Harbor, the major port, apart from New Orleans, in the entire South. The federal troops at Sumter were needed to enforce the tariffs that were supposed to be levied at Charleston Harbor.

Of course, Abraham Lincoln’s conciliatory words on slavery cannot be taken at face value. Lincoln was a master politician, which means that he was a consummate conniver, manipulator, and liar. The federal forts were the key to his successful prosecution of the war. Lying to South Carolina, Abraham Lincoln managed to do what Franklin D. Roosevelt and Henry Stimson did at Pearl Harbor 80 years later — maneuvered the Southerners into firing the first shot. In this way, by manipulating the South into firing first against a federal fort, Lincoln made the South appear to be “aggressors” in the eyes of the numerous waverers and moderates in the North.

Outside of New England and territories populated by transplanted New Englanders, the idea of forcing the South to stay in the Union was highly unpopular. In many middle-tier states, including Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, there was a considerable sentiment to mimic the South by forming a middle Confederacy to isolate the pesky and fanatical Yankees. Even after the war began, the mayor of New York City and many other dignitaries of the city proposed that the city secede from the Union and make peace and engage in free trade with the South. Indeed, Jefferson Davis’s lawyer after the war was what we would now call the “paleo-libertarian” leader of the New York City bar, Irish-Catholic Charles O’Conor, who ran for president in 1878 on the Straight Democrat ticket, in protest that his beloved Democratic Party’s nominee for president was the abolitionist, protectionist, socialist, and fool Horace Greeley.

The Lincoln administration and the Republican Party took advantage of the overwhelmingly Republican Congress after the secession of the South to push through almost the entire Whig economic program. Lincoln signed no less than ten tariff-raising bills during his administration. Heavy “sin” taxes were levied on alcohol and tobacco, the income tax was levied for the first time in American history, huge land grants and monetary subsidies were handed out to transcontinental railroads (accompanied by a vast amount of attendant corruption), and the government went off the gold standard and virtually nationalized the banking system to establish a machine for printing new money and to provide cheap credit for the business elite. And furthermore, the New Model Army and the war effort rested on a vast and unprecedented amount of federal coercion against Northerners as well as the South; a huge army was conscripted, dissenters and advocates of a negotiated peace with the South were jailed, and the precious Anglo-Saxon right of habeas corpus was abolished for the duration.

While it is true that Lincoln himself was not particularly religious, that did not really matter because he adopted all the attitudes and temperament of his evangelical allies. He was stern and sober, he was personally opposed to alcohol and tobacco, and he was opposed to the private carrying of guns. An ambitious seeker of the main chance from early adulthood, Lincoln acted viciously toward his own humble frontier family in Kentucky. He abandoned his fiancée in order to marry a wealthier Mary Todd, whose family were friends of the eminent Henry Clay, he repudiated his brother, and he refused to attend his dying father or his father’s funeral, monstrously declaring that such an experience “would be more painful than pleasant.” No doubt!

Lincoln, too, was a typical example of a humanitarian with the guillotine in another dimension: a familiar modern “reform liberal” type whose heart bleeds for and yearns to “uplift” remote mankind, while he lies to and treats abominably actual people whom he knew. And so Abraham Lincoln, in a phrase prefiguring our own beloved Mario Cuomo, declared that the Union was really “a family, bound indissolubly together by the most intimate organic bonds.” Kick your own family, and then transmute familial spiritual feelings toward a hypostatized and mythical entity, “The Union,” which then must be kept intact regardless of concrete human cost or sacrifice.

Indeed, there is a vital critical difference between the two unjust causes we have described: the British and the North. The British, at least, were fighting on behalf of a cause which, even if wrong and unjust, was coherent and intelligible: that is, the sovereignty of a hereditary monarch. What was the North’s excuse for their monstrous war of plunder and mass murder against their fellow Americans? Not allegiance to an actual, real person, the king, but allegiance to a nonexistent, mystical, quasi-divine alleged entity, “the Union.” The King was at least a real person, and the merits or demerits of a particular king or the monarchy in general can be argued. But where is “the Union” located? How are we to gauge the Union’s deeds? To whom is this Union accountable?

The Union was taken, by its Northern worshipers, from a contractual institution that can either be cleaved to or scrapped, and turned into a divinized entity, which must be worshipped, and which must be permanent, unquestioned, all-powerful. There is no heresy greater, nor political theory more pernicious, than sacralizing the secular. But this monstrous process is precisely what happened when Abraham Lincoln and his northern colleagues made a god out of the Union. If the British forces fought for bad King George, the Union armies pillaged and murdered on behalf of this pagan idol, this “Union,” this Moloch that demanded terrible human sacrifice to sustain its power and its glory.

For in this War Between the States, the South may have fought for its sacred honor, but the Northern war was the very opposite of honorable. We remember the care with which the civilized nations had developed classical international law. Above all, civilians must not be targeted; wars must be limited. But the North insisted on creating a conscript army, a nation in arms, and broke the 19th-century rules of war by specifically plundering and slaughtering civilians, by destroying civilian life and institutions so as to reduce the South to submission. Sherman’s infamous March through Georgia was one of the great war crimes, and crimes against humanity, of the past century-and-a-half. Because by targeting and butchering civilians, Lincoln and Grant and Sherman paved the way for all the genocidal honors of the monstrous 20th century. There has been a lot of talk in recent years about memory, about never forgetting about history as retroactive punishment for crimes of war and mass murder. As Lord Acton, the great libertarian historian, put it, the historian, in the last analysis, must be a moral judge. The muse of the historian, he wrote, is not Clio, but Rhadamanthus, the legendary avenger of innocent blood. In that spirit, we must always remember, we must never forget, we must put in the dock and hang higher than Haman, those who, in modern times, opened the Pandora’s Box of genocide and the extermination of civilians: Sherman, Grant, and Lincoln.

Perhaps, some day, their statues, like Lenin’s in Russia, will be toppled and melted down; their insignias and battle flags will be desecrated, their war songs tossed into the fire. And then Davis and Lee and Jackson and Forrest, and all the heroes of the South, “Dixie” and the Stars and Bars, will once again be truly honored and remembered. The classic comment on that meretricious TV series The Civil War was made by that marvelous and feisty Southern writer Florence King. Asked her views on the series, she replied, “I didn’t have time to watch The Civil War. I’m too busy getting ready for the next one.” In that spirit, I am sure that one day, aided and abetted by Northerners like myself in the glorious “copperhead” tradition, the South shall rise again.

The post Just War appeared first on Actual Anarchy.

The grand cobblestone street is also adorned with statues of generals J.E.B. Stuart and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, and Confederate president Jefferson Davis. But Richmond isn’t a blip in antebellum history or a relic of “Lost Cause” mythology; hers is a rich, complex, and illustrious history from the earliest days. One we should know and study. Not shun or shame.

Under the guidance of Captain Christopher Newport, New World colonialists traveled to Richmond from Jamestown, living and settling among the Powhatan in the 1600s. It was the home of Pocahontas and one of America’s earliest successful white-European communities.

It was in Richmond’s St. John’s Church that Patrick Henry gave his “Give me liberty, or give me death!” speech. It was here, in the heart of the Old Dominion, that Thomas Jefferson passed his Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. Famous past residents include Chief Justice John Marshal, poet Edgar Allan Poe, and tennis great Arthur Ashe.

Virginia’s Capitol was designed by Jefferson, making Richmond home to the oldest legislature continuously operating in the Western Hemisphere. And it was in this very building that on April 23, 1862, Robert E. Lee stood when he accepted command of the military forces of his beloved Virginia during the “Civil War.”

Like so many native Richmonders and Southerners beyond the shores of the mighty James River, we call this bloody conflict that took the lives of an estimated 700,000 people anything but “civil.” In fact, the true definition of “civil war” is “a war between citizens of the same country.”

Yet, the South had already seceded before war broke out. By doing so, those states set up their own independent confederation – an alliance comprised of 11 strong sovereigns guided by the principles of a newly written Confederate Constitution.

This more-Jeffersonian coalition of subsidiarity also included amicable treaties with the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole Indians. The CSA was about bucking central authority, increasing autonomy, and letting each state chart out its own path.

That’s why Dixie chicks like me call the struggle the War for Southern Independence, hearkening back to its similarity of the American colonies’ secession from Britain. Some firebrands, of which the South proudly is in no short supply, even refer to it as the War of Northern Aggression.

Interestingly, Mr. Lincoln never recognized the CSA as a legitimate government. Thus, in his eyes, that would have made North and South part of the same country. So why then didn’t he get the approval of each of the governors and/or their state legislatures before sending in the U.S. military to quell “the rebellion”? That would’ve been the constitutional, legal, and moral thing to do.

Of course, because the war wasn’t about saving the Union or freeing the slaves or promoting the will of the people. It was about economics, resources, power, and revenge – always the real causes for all good protectionist wars, don’t ya know? It was an invasion of a foreign entity, not a civil war amongst fellow countrymen.

Surprisingly, during my time in Richmond’s public schools in the 1970s and 1980s, students were taught the unvarnished history of this pivotal period. Quite amazing considering the 100-plus-year Reconstruction revisionism that had been seeping its way into textbooks and curriculum a la Northern publishers and educrats.

Back then, I was encouraged to study the South, her people and their rightful places in the story of America (and the world) through the lens of history, not modernity and all of its misperceived perfections and moralisms. It’s called context, y’all.

In fact, I attended Douglas Southall Freeman High School, an institution named after the Pulitzer-Prize winning author, who won the honor in 1935 for his four-volume biography on Robert E. Lee. Our yearbook was called “The Historian” in Freeman’s honor.

Our team mascot was the Rebels, whose symbol was a gray-uniformed soldier holding a gun in one hand and a Confederate Battle Flag in the other. The marching band played “Dixie” at football games, as boosters donned Rebel Man pendants and fans waved the Battle Flag.

Today, the school remains DSF and its teams are still the Rebels, but gone are the pre-political-correctness images of a gun-toting Confederate hero. Screw history, even if you’re an institution named after a famous historian: all must bow down to the gods of progressivism and sacrifice nuance, objectivity, and truth on the altar of sensitivity to the uninformed, miseducated, and/or malicious. Just pay your penance and move on, say the useful idiots to we backwards-ass crackers.

Actually, the Cultural Marxists are smart enough to have initially taken aim on 1861-1865. They are a duplicitous bunch, and started small by challenging school mascots and Boy Scouts troop names. Get the low-hanging fruit before you tear the whole tree out by its roots, Jefferson, Washington, Madison and all. They were just a bunch of rich white slave-owners after all. Nothing to be learned here, people. Move along.

Having knocked down the first dominoes, progressives have become increasingly emboldened in their anti-Southern efforts. It may start with Ole Miss banning “Dixie;” Georgia changing its state flag’s 1956-2001 design to be without the Battle flag; the University of Texas removing its Jefferson Davis memorial statue; and South Carolina removing the flag from state grounds. (Have I ever expressed just how much I disdain turncoat Nikki Haley? Ugh.)

Next thing you know, Washington and Lee University has removed its flag display that adorns the Lee monument in Lee Chapel, under which the Confederate general is buried; Charlottesville city council has voted to remove a Lee statue and rename Lee Park; the Southern Baptist Convention has banned the flag (why don’t they just get rid of the word “Southern” while they’re at it?); the National Cathedral has removed flags from its stained-glass windows; and New Orleans is this very day in the throes of a violent cultural clash over removing four monuments, only one of which has actually come down.

Now, as a libertarian, I don’t even believe in public property, which is where these statues are/were erected, nor do I believe in tax-payer-funded schooling, like these ahistorical institutions of “higher learning.” (See, if everything was held in private, this nonsense wouldn’t even be an issue. When “everybody” owns a space, nobody really owns it, right? An argument for another day perhaps.) But a Richmond rebel girl’s gotta take a stand.

Interesting, too, that one of the rationalizations heard from leftist municipal leaders, anti-Southern zealots, and miseducated tyrants is that the monuments and flags must be moved to a museum, you know, put in their “proper place.” You racists can display your “symbols of hate” or whistle “Dixie” at home in private, away from the eyes, ears, and closed minds of totalitarians. Protect the public sphere, they say. It’s for the children. It’s for unity. Gag.

Man, what a carpet-bagger con. What the Cultural Marxists really desire is fully remaking the South in their own image – a progressive product void of all of its unique Southernness, a valuable resource forced to become a mirror image of their disillusioned puritanical paradise. Don’t be fooled by this social-justice scam.

Leftists, of course, possess all the post-modern tools needed to engage in this war of expunging Southern heritage and antiquity: the mainstream-media cabal, the white-guilt-ridden American church, the indoctrination centers of K-12, the university re-education camps, the entertainment biz, and statism – an institution that is always happy to do the bidding of totalitarians who want to force their ideas on the masses.

Because of the influence and power of these apparatchiks, they come, they see, and they eventually conquer, and then they ratchet it up. This is always the modus operandi of progressivism, so the cultural home-wreckers will never cease in their efforts to knock down the whole domino set … but that’s only if no one gives voice to the voiceless: the Southern tradition.

I, for one, will fight against this ongoing Reconstruction of the South. She is a cause worth fighting for. It’s time for all you good Southerners to reject this destruction of her important history and her symbols. Embrace your heritage of stubbornness, anti-authoritarianism, hard-working grit, and self-determination.

Be that rebel you were born to be. Be the real resistance. Be bully proof. And just as our Confederate ancestors did, defend your home. It’s time to push back against this cultural genocide of Dixie.

This is the first in a series about the progressive war on Southern tradition. Be sure to check out my next blog, which will defend my use of the term “cultural genocide,” and then a third post, which will explore practical and effective ways we rebels can remain unReconstructed.

Source: Dissident Mama – Rebel with a cause

The post Rebel with a cause appeared first on Actual Anarchy.

Also on this date, in 1861, the US Civil War began with shots fired on Ft. Sumter. 

And on this day, in 1914, the first movie palace opened–the Mark Strand Theatre in NYC. 

Also on this day, in 1945, FDR died. 

And also on this day, in 1954, Bill Haley & the Comets recorded “Rock Around the Clock”. 

And today, in 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space. 

Also today, in 1981, the first space shuttle, Columbia, took its first test flight. 

And also today, in 1999, an Arkansas judge found President Clinton in contempt of court for lying about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

The post On This Date, April 12th appeared first on Actual Anarchy.