Category Archives: War

UPDATE II (9/6/017): The Radical Republicans: The Antifa Of 1865

History, Republicans, States' Rights, The State, War

THE NEW COLUMN IS “The Radical Republicans: The Antifa Of 1865.” It’s currently on WND.com. An excerpt:

“Anybody who would trash Lee and laud Lincoln is either stupid as a post or just plain evil,” said a sage reader. This applies in spades to anyone who would laud the Radical Republicans of 1865, as one TV GOP blonde has recently, and asininely, done.

The Radical Republicans, if you can believe it, considered Abraham Lincoln a moderate (a bad thing, in their book). Lincoln successor Andrew Johnson these fanatics branded a reactionary (punishable by obstruction and impeachment).

Praised these days by the blonde-ambition faction of the Republican Party, the Radicals were stars of America’s own Reign of Terror over the South, at the end of the War Between the States.

If the French Reign of Terror was led by the terrifying Robespierre and his Jacobins; its American equivalent was infused with the spirit of lunatics like John Brown. (His abolitionist activists snatched five pro-slavery settlers near Pottawatomie Creek, in 1856, and split the captives’ skulls with broadswords, in an act of biblical retribution gone mad.)

Thaddeus Stevens was another of their “inspirational” madmen, lauded in the annals of the Party of Reconstruction. In his biography of Stevens, Thaddeus Stevens: Nineteenth Century Egalitarian, historian Hans Trefousse even makes a brief reference to the Jacobin Club, a term reserved for the most extreme Republicans in Congress (p. 168). Other club members: Henry Winter Davis, Benjamin Butler, Charles Sumner, Benjamin Wade, Zachariah Chandler.

Although Republicans shared “the drive toward revolution and national unification” (the words of historian Clyde Wilson, in The Yankee Problem, 2016), the Radicals distinguished themselves in their support for sadistic military occupation of the vanquished Rebel States, following the War Between the States.

While assorted GOP teletarts may find the rhetoric of Radical Republicans sexy; overall, these characters are villains of history, for helping to sunder the federal scheme bequeathed by the Founding Fathers. In their fanatical fealty to an almighty central government, Radical Republicans were as alien to the Jeffersonian tradition of self-government as it gets.

Today’s Republicans should know that the Radical Republicans were hardly heartbroken about the assassination of Lincoln, on April 14, 1865.

A mere month earlier (March 4, 1865)—and much to the chagrin of the Radicals—Lincoln had noodled, in his billowing prose, about the need to “bind up the nation’s wounds and proceed with “malice toward none … and charity for all.”

Radical Republicans were having none of that charity stuff. They promptly placed their evil aspirations in Andrew Johnson. A President Johnson, they had hoped, would be a suitable sockpuppet in socking it to the South some more.

Alas, Johnson, a poor, white tailor from North Carolina, turned out, in today’s political nomenclature, to be something of a populist. In going against the Radical Republicans, the 17th president of the United States was the Trump of his time, up against the Rubio-McCain-Graham Radical Republicans. (Marco Rubio, incidentally, has gone as far as to rationalize the Antifa ruffians’ violence, tweeting: “When [an] entire movement [is] built on anger and hatred towards people different than [sic] you, it justifies and ultimately leads to violence against them.”)

When Johnson failed to deliver the radical changes Radical Republicans demanded, our 1865 Antifans accused him of being “tainted by Lincolnism.”

Let’s unpack this …

… READ THE REST. The complete column, “The Radical Republicans: The Antifa Of 1865,” is currently on WND.com.

FACEBOOK THREAD:

Me: Dig deep into what the Union League (the KKK of the Republicans) did to innocents … Violence, coercion, discrimination, intimidation; disfranchisement; Antifa has done nothing compared to the RR. The metaphor is more than apt, except the RR WERE THE GOVERNMENT. Antifa are still extra-governmental.

UPDATE I (9/6/017):

Readers write:
AvatarAmerican_cavalier • a day ago:

Brilliant and utterly unsurprising that Ilana has been the only author of note to write on this subject. The Radicals were not only tyrants, they were criminals. We owe almost the entire organized crime of America to these individuals. With their graft, greed, formation of identity politics, corporate chicanery, and corruption, they made national the Tammany Hall style of politics. It was from the road paved with this corruption that the mafia, Irish mob and others rode their way to global power.

KonfederateKonservationKorps • a day ago:

Thank you for this thoughtful and well-researched article. God save the South.

“Fool me” writes a day ago:

Ten thumbs up for Ilana!

Petronius • a day ago:

Ms Mercer’s list of Jacobins is woefully incomplete without Edwin McMasters Stanton, Lincoln’s Secretary of War, who should probably rank as America’s greatest war criminal. ..

MORE.

UPDATE II:

Historian of the South Clyde N. Wilson writes with a correction to Clement Wood, whom I quote in “The Radical Republicans: The Antifa Of 1865“:

Dear Ilana—great historical work you are doing!! One mild correction. The Southern states in the first elections after the war did not elect “secessionists” to office. In fact, they carefully elected and Johnson appointed, men who had not been active secessionists but had gone along loyally with their people—Perry in SC., Sharkey in MS, Worth in NC, etc.

 

UPDATE II (8/29): Lincoln Or Lee? What Would Hitler Say?

Federalism, History, States' Rights, War

“Lincoln Or Lee? What Would Hitler Say?” is the current column, now on The Unz Review. An excerpt:

“Some crazy person just compared President Abraham Lincoln to Hitler. Yes, this just happened on CNN and Brooke Baldwin’s reaction was perfect.”

So scribbled one Ricky Davila on Social Media (Twitter).

Indeed, an elderly Southern gentleman had ventured that President Lincoln, not General Lee, murdered civilians, a point even a Court historian and a Lincoln idolater like Doris Kearns Goodwin would concede.

While the Argument From Hitler is seldom a good one; Ms. Baldwin’s response was way worse. Were she an honest purveyor of news and knowledge; anchor-activist Baldwin would have sought the facts. Instead, she pulled faces, so the viewer knew she not only looked like an angel, but was on the side of the angels.

Pretty, but not terribly bright, Ms. Baldwin would be shocked to hear that the civics test administered by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) recognizes as correct the following answers to questions about the “Civil War”:

If asked to “Name one problem that led to the Civil War,” you may legitimately reply: “States’ right.”

If asked to “Name the war between the North and the South,” you may call it, “the War between the States.”

Brook would wince, but, again, your reply would be perfectly proper if you chose to name “economic reasons” as one of the problems that led to the Civil War.

Not even the government—the USCIS, in this case—will risk denying that the 1861 Morrill tariff was one cause of the War of Northern Aggression. Lincoln, a protectionist, was expected to enforce the tariff with calamitous consequences to the “the import-dependent South, which was paying [at the time] as much as 80 percent of the tariff.”

It’s fair to assume that the civics naturalization test (I took it) was not written by pro-South historians. Yet even they did not conceal some immutable truths about the War of Northern Aggression—truths banished from Brooke Baldwin’s network.

And from Fox News.

There, you must tolerate progressive Republicans, like John Daniel Davidson of the Federalist, warning about the dangers of identity politics in a majority-white country like the US. (Davidson should try out identity politics in a minority white country like my birthplace, South Africa, where the lives of white farmers are forfeit.) Another Federalist editor seen on Fox is Molly Hemingway. She has vaporized about the merits of “taking down Confederate statues.” If memory serves, that was a position the oracular Chucky Krauthammer was willing to dignify.

Back to the white, marginalized gentleman, mocked on CNN.

In all, Lincoln’s violent, unconstitutional revolution took the lives of 620,000 individuals, including 50,000 Southern civilians, white and black. It maimed thousands, and brought about “the near destruction of 40 percent of the nation’s economy.”

While “in the North a few unfortunate exceptions marred the general wartime boom,” chronicled historian William Miller,  “[t]he south as a whole was impoverished. At the end of the war, the boys in blue went home at government expense with about $235 apiece in their pockets.”  “[S]ome of Lee’s soldiers had to ask for handouts on the road home, with nothing to exchange for bread save the unwelcome news of Appomattox.”

Many years hence, Americans look upon the terrible forces unleashed by Lincoln as cathartic, glorious events. However, “The costs of an action cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to morality,” noted Mises Institute scholar David Gordon, in Secession, State & Liberty.

At his most savage, General William Tecumseh Sherman waged “total war” on civilians and did not conceal his intent to so do. On commencing his march through Georgia, in September 1864, Sherman had vowed “to demonstrate the vulnerability of the South and make its inhabitants feel that war and individual ruin [were] synonymous terms.” To follow was an admission (of sorts) to war crimes: “The amount of plundering, burning, and stealing done by our own army makes me ashamed of it.”

“For Sherman’s troops sacked and razed entire cities and communities“: …

… READ THE REST. “Lincoln Or Lee? What Would Hitler Say?” is now on The Unz Review.

UPDATED (8/29): What does Diana West say?

Great job!! Such an important point to bang into the “collective” wooden head!
Marx, of course, was also a huge fan of Lincoln’s at the time.
You may want to revise your casualties upward — 750,000 seems to be the accepted new estimate.

(Some links to that and other casualty research in this May column about Trump/Jackson./Civil War — including black soldiers, postwar decimation of freed slaves due to illness, etc. — and I think there’s even one to environment disaster the war wrought also. http://dailycaller.com/2017/05/04/trump-vs-the-historians/. )

The blind worship of these warmongers (including FDR) is unbearable!

D.

UPDATE II: Clyde Wilson says:

August 29, 2017 at 12:24 pm GMT • 200 Words

“Grandpa Charlie has let his imagination run away with him. Wonder what source he is channeling for his false information? Or possibly reading comic books. Sherman did not have black Buffalo soldiers as a bodyguard. They did not even exist at the time. The notion of powerful black men protecting and liked by Sherman is pure fantasy and could not have been possible at the time. Sherman is on record as saying that he would be happy if the blacks could have been gotten rid of. Yes, Yankee soldiers did tear up dolls and nail pets to the door, as well as put guns to the heads of women, shoot 13 and 14 year old boys and black men, and rape black women. They also danced around in women’s clothes while they burned houses, schools, churches, libraries, convents, etc. It is all documented as well as anything in history. At Appomattox Grant allowed the Confederates some rifles for protection on their way home. So that statement is false. Joe Johnston served as a pallbearer for Sherman not because they were great friends but as a gesture of reconciliation. Grandpa, put down those comic books and read some actual history.”

Jake says:
August 30, 2017 at 3:28 am GMT

Ilana Mercer is brilliant and brave. Precious few are her equal.
Anybody who would trash Lee and laud Lincoln is either stupid as a post or just plain evil in the power-worshiping sense.

UPDATED (8/22): Someone Doesn’t Know The First Thing About America First

Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, War

POTUS, in outlining a “new” Afghanistan plan, has declared that “the American people are weary of war without victory.” Promising to increase American presence in Afghanistan, by sending 4000 additional soldiers there, Trump alleges he is fighting terrorism, not undertaking nation building. This is tantamount to talking out of both sides of his mouth.

There is no way to tease those two facets apart in war. If you’re sending “about 4,000 more soldiers to add to the 8,400 now deployed in Afghanistan,” you’ll be doing what Obama was doing in Afghanistan, and Bush before him: Killing some civilians mixed in with bad guys. Sitting down with tribal leaders to mediate and bribe. Basically perfecting the credo of a global fighting force that doesn’t know the first thing about America First.

We are weary of WAR, full stop. We thought Candidate Trump understood that there is no victory to be had in Afghanistan.

Apparently he didn’t.

A lot of very bad men are thrilled with Trump’s Afghanistan commitment. There is no chance of Lindsey Graham being blinded by the solar eclipse; he’s already deaf, dumb and blind to the Deplorables’ plight. And now, Graham is overjoyed with Trump’s Afghan plans. The presidency is going his way. Hopefully, Deplorables understand what that means. I bet all three amigos—Joe Lieberman, Lindsey Graham and John McCain—are currently smiling upon Trump.

RELATED: “Trump lays out plan to continue Afghanistan War.”

UPDATE (8/22): MAfgGA: Make Afghanistan Great Again.

Ending nation building with a surge. What a joke.


You can’t say America First and stay in wherever Afghanistan is.


Who did 9/11?


Talking, talking, in Phoenix, Arizona:


Not even the misnomer “radical Islam.”

UPDATED: The Clash Of Civilizations: LATEST From America’s Frontlines

History, Nationhood, Propaganda, Racism, Socialism, States' Rights, Terrorism, The State, The West, War

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Barely a Blog’s correspondent, Dr. Boyd Cathey, writes:

Violent antifa/Marxist/BlackLM demonstrators have just destroyed the Confederate Memorial in Durham (the most leftist city in NC) and are now marching on the police department. Yeah, these are those “peaceful” demonstrators who oppose “hate.” Now, such monuments are protected by state law, and those “peaceful demonstrators” have committed a felony. Let’s just see if the leftist authorities in Durham will prosecute them !!!!

Who will condemn this hate and extremism? Steve Hayes or the Kraut? You want to bet money?

Fox News has become the “Voice of Leon Trotsky Unmasked.”
As we say down here, “the Leopard can’t change his spots.” The Neocons are revealing their quintessential, revolutionary progressivism, and it is foul, ugly, and bestial.

Maybe Kimberley G-String or Dana Perino will defend what’s right?

A note to the “police,” who took an oath to protect us: “We were just following orders” is not an excuse for dereliction of duty.

UPDATE (8:30 Eastern Daylight Time): Sources close to law enforcement tell me a crowd of angry demonstrators was forming on the South side of the Confederate Cemetery on State Street, Raleigh. He said he didn’t know their intentions but plans to break it up as they are in the street. Let’s see.


Is “Sieg Heel” racist or just racy?