Category Archives: Racism

UPDATED: Spielberg’s ‘Pleasant Fiction’ About Abe

Film, Founding Fathers, History, Hollywood, Propaganda, Racism

Tom DiLorenzo says that “Spielberg’s Lincoln movie is just another left-wing Hollywood fantasy.” Lincoln didn’t use his political heft to push for the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. He did, however, push for an earlier iteration, the “Corwin Amendment.” It “would have prohibited the federal government from ever interfering with Southern slavery”:

Steven Spielberg’s new movie, Lincoln, is said to be based on several chapters of the book Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns-Goodwin, who was a consultant to Spielberg. The main theme of the movie is how clever, manipulative, conniving, scheming, lying, and underhanded Lincoln supposedly was in using his “political skills” to get the Thirteenth Amendment that legally ended slavery through the U.S. House of Representatives in the last months of his life. This entire story is what Lerone Bennett, Jr. the longtime executive editor of Ebony magazine and author of Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, calls a “pleasant fiction.” It never happened.
It never happened according to the foremost authority on Lincoln among mainstream Lincoln scholars, Harvard University Professor David H. Donald, the recipient of several Pulitzer prizes for his historical writings, including a biography of Lincoln.

MORE.

UPDATE (Nov. 30): Writes Myron Pauli:

“I would like to correct one thing. The Congress that passed the Corwin 13th Amendment was not overwhelmingly Republican. There was a small House Republican majority but the (lame duck) Senate was Democratic (and only barely Republican if you count 14 Senators walking out) and a 2/3 majority is needed for an Amendment.

http://lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo245.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_elections,_1858

Nevertheless, Lincoln did almost nothing (and impeded efforts) to stop the impending Civil War during the nearly 10 months from his election to the Battle of First Manassas. A professor of history from LSU (whose name I regrettably forgot) went over all the proposed compromises and Lincoln’s opposition/inaction to preventing war.

Ironically, the Crittenden and Peace Conference Plan compromises would have confined the extension of slavery into Arizona and New Mexico – regions so barren that they did not become states for another 40 years – and not conducive to plantation slavery whatsoever! To keep slavery out of Arizona (!!), over 600,000 people died, a region got impoverished, with more wounded and PTSD and
drug addicted, the income tax imposed, etc.

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/peace.asp

Lincoln, of course, blamed the War on the South (or God – 2nd inaugural).”

UPDATED: Secession: Trust Texas To Reject Untrammeled Federal Tyranny (The GOP Beast)

Political Philosophy, Private Property, Racism, Republicans, States' Rights, The State

The pathology of an overreaching federal government is fueling the fever of freedom, and all hail to that. And to the Lone Star State.

Glenn Beck has been scathing about the fact that, as the Daily Caller has it, “By 6:00 a.m. EST Wednesday, more than 675,000 digital signatures appeared on 69 separate secession petitions covering all 50 states, according to [an] … analysis of requests lodged with the White House’s ‘We the People’ online petition system.”

Sean Hannity is more patient. He interviewed “the president of the Texas Nationalist Movement, Daniel Miller, who [brilliantly] explained their cause — and just why they feel Texas needs [its] independence”:

“The fact of the matter is, that there cannot be a union between those that esteem the principles of Karl Marx over the principles of Thomas Jefferson. Here in Texas, we esteem those principles of Thomas Jefferson — that all political power’s inherent in the people. What we have seen given on Tuesday was that a majority of the people in the United States, and the states in which they reside, esteem the principles of Karl Marx over those principles.”

You’d think that as the party that professes freedom, Republicans would have embraced the peaceful political divorce that is secession as the quintessentially American response to untrammeled tyranny.

But no. The truth is that Republicans are vested in Abe Lincoln’s legacy of brute, centralized power. Falling back on the Party of Lincoln bona fides (and on the “glory” of Reconstruction) serves as a political buffer against the racism libel.

That’s the mundane, garden-variety argument advanced in Ann Coulter’s new book, to counter the perennial Democrat accusations of racism. After all, what other argument can one muster if you consider Barry Goldwater’s defense of private property an extreme libertarian aberration, as Ms. Coulter does?

UPDATE: Wonderful analysis of the nature of the GOP beast by Dr. Clyde Wilson (via Facebook Friend and pal Jerry Lynn Ward): “The American Revolution was a revolt of the country against the court. Jeffersonians understood that every political system divides between the great mass of unorganized folks who mind their own business — that, is, the country party — and the minority who hang around the court to manipulate the government finances and engineer government favours. It is much easier and quicker to get rich by finding a way into the treasury than by hard work. That is mostly what politics is about. Of course, schemes to plunder society through the government must never be seen as such. They must be powdered and perfumed to look like a public good.”

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UPDATED: Mindless Response To Mine Massacre (In South Africa)

Crime, Democracy, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Race, Racism, South-Africa, The West

“Mindless Response To Mine Massacre” in South Africa is the current column, now on RT. Here’s an excerpt:

“… You’d have had to experience the onrush of a riled-up African crowd to comprehend the terror among these frightened, likely incompetent, cops entrusted with defending mine operators and other staff still at the site. The last would have endured hours, if not days, of menacing chanting, singing, stomping, all amplified through loudspeakers.

Likewise, the besieged police at Sharpeville [in 1960] would have been petrified, as the ‘unarmed’ mob brandishing pangas, spears and sticks, advanced on their isolated outpost and breached the station’s fence, at the eponymous African township.

In both instances, the cops—white and black, then and now, right or wrong—fought to stay alive.

The media mob has already cut some slack to the black cops who were assailed at Marikana by 3000 miners. The frightened, outnumbered fellows at Sharpeville, who confronted 5,000 to 7,000 frenzied protesters: They’ve been condemned for eternity.

Sharpeville’s ‘villains’ had also attempted to control the crowds with tear gas and batons before that fateful shooting.

Why not ask 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis what a tribe armed with indigenous weapons is capable of doing to a despised, helpless ‘Other’?

Ask the same of some 4000 white South Africans farmers, who once helped feed the continent.

Or, closer to home, let an all-American lass, Amy Elizabeth Biehl, tell you how furious her white skin and good intentions made an ‘unarmed’ crowd, back in Cape Town of 1993.

Silly me. Question those Tutsis—whose blood turned the Kigara River red—all you like, but they will not reply. For they were torn asunder or macheteed by their longtime Hutu neighbors.

Ask the late Ms. Biehl about her ordeal, but she too has been silenced—stabbed and stoned, by an ‘unarmed’ mob with murder on its mind.

As to the 4000 (and counting) Boers—they’re dead and buried too. Interred in the land they had farmed for centuries; culled like springbok on a hunting safari by the same, disarming, inadvertent enemies of peace and prosperity.

In a world awash in floating fiat currency, demand for platinum will remain consistent and predictably high, even as production plummets in one of platinum’s prime producers, South Africa.

That’s guaranteed.

The miners of Marikana told Time magazine that they would not return to work until their wages were doubled (poor productivity be damned). Any scab who stepped in to do ‘their’ jobs would be eliminated. Or so they promised.

And that’s one other thing you can take to the bank. …”

Read the rest of “Mindless Response To Mine Massacre.” It’s now on RT.

Also available from WND or from Amazon is the prophetic “Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid.”

Read the editorial reviews.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

JOIN THE DISCUSSION, AND DO BATTLE FOR LIBERTY:

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UPDATE (9/1/012): JD Hicks@Jdhickspi encapsulates the realities to which my column speaks (on Twitter):

“@IlanaMercer @RT_com Great perspective.most people have never experienced the existential,visceral threat of an agitated hostile mob.”

UPDATED: The Cannibal & Its Cause On News24.com. (Climbing)

Ilana Mercer, Racism, South-Africa

Claudia Meads’ “Three reasons South Africa will fail,” in which she cites my book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa,” is featured today on South Africa’s largest news site, News24.com. South Africa seems to allow greater diversity of opinion than the US.

“…As a classical liberal writer, Ilana Mercer has written one of the greatest- and probably most complete dissertation on post-Apartheid South Africa – in many ways, of Apartheid South Africa. Her book ‘Into the Cannibal’s Pot: South Africa’ is a script that is a minimum requirement for ANYBODY who values a future in South Africa (and for that matter the USA) – notably for their children- and theirs. Read it – I urge you. …” [Claudia Meads]

Claudia Meads has courage.

MORE.

UPDATE (Aug. 13): The Cannibal Still Climbing.

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