It's harder and harder these days to tell a liberal from a conservative --
given the former category's increasingly blatant hostility toward the First
Amendment, and the latter's prissy new disdain for the Second Amendment -- but
it's still easy to tell a liberal from a libertarian.
Just ask about either Amendment.
If what you get back is a spirited defense of the ideas of this country's
Founding Fathers, what you've got is a libertarian. By shameful default,
libertarians have become America's last and only reliable stewards of the Bill
of Rights.
But if -- and this usually seems a bit more difficult to most people -- you'd
like to know whether an individual is a libertarian or a conservative, ask about
Abraham Lincoln.
Suppose a woman -- with plenty of personal faults herself, let that be
stipulated -- desired to leave her husband: partly because he made a regular
practice, in order to go out and get drunk, of stealing money she had earned
herself by raising chickens or taking in laundry; and partly because he'd
already demonstrated a proclivity for domestic violence the first time she'd
complained about his stealing.
Now, when he stood in the doorway and beat her to a bloody pulp to keep her
home, would we memorialize him as a hero? Or would we treat him like a dangerous
lunatic who should be locked up, if for no other reason, then for trying to
maintain the appearance of a relationship where there wasn't a relationship any
more? What value, we would ask, does he find in continuing to possess her in an
involuntary association, when her heart and mind had left him long ago?
History tells us that Lincoln was a politically ambitious lawyer who eagerly
prostituted himself to northern industrialists who were unwilling to pay world
prices for their raw materials and who, rather than practice real capitalism,
enlisted brute government force -- "sell to us at our price or pay a fine
that'll put you out of business" -- for dealing with uncooperative southern
suppliers. That's what an export tariff's all about. In support of this
"noble principle", when southerners demonstrated what amounted to no
more than token resistance, Lincoln permitted an internal war to begin that
butchered more Americans than all of this country's foreign wars -- before or
afterward -- rolled into one.
Lincoln saw the introduction of total war on the American continent --
indiscriminate mass slaughter and destruction without regard to age, gender, or
combat status of the victims -- and oversaw the systematic shelling and burning
of entire cities for strategic and tactical purposes. For the same purposes,
Lincoln declared, rather late in the war, that black slaves were now free in the
south -- where he had no effective jurisdiction -- while declaring at the same
time, somewhat more quietly but for the record nonetheless, that if maintaining
slavery could have won his war for him, he'd have done that, instead.
The fact is, Lincoln didn't abolish slavery at all, he nationalized it,
imposing income taxation and military conscription upon what had been a free
country before he took over -- income taxation and military conscription to
which newly "freed" blacks soon found themselves subjected right
alongside newly-enslaved whites. If the civil war was truly fought against
slavery -- a dubious, "politically correct" assertion with no
historical evidence to back it up -- then clearly, slavery won.
Lincoln brought secret police to America, along with the traditional midnight
"knock on the door", illegally suspending the Bill of Rights and, like
the Latin America dictators he anticipated, "disappearing" thousands
in the north whose only crime was that they disagreed with him. To finance his
crimes against humanity, Lincoln allowed the printing of worthless paper money
in unprecedented volumes, ultimately plunging America into a long, grim
depression -- in the south, it lasted half a century -- he didn't have to live
through, himself.
In the end, Lincoln didn't unite this country -- that can't be done by force
-- he divided it along lines of an unspeakably ugly hatred and resentment that
continue to exist almost a century and a half after they were drawn. If Lincoln
could have been put on trial in Nuremburg for war crimes, he'd have received the
same sentence as the highest-ranking Nazis.
If real libertarians ran things, they'd melt all the Lincoln pennies, shred
all the Lincoln fives, take a wrecking ball to the Lincoln Memorial, and
consider erecting monuments to John Wilkes Booth. Libertarians know Lincoln as
the worst President America has ever had to suffer, with Woodrow Wilson,
Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson running a distant second, third, and
fourth.
Conservatives, on the other hand, adore Lincoln, publicly admire his methods,
and revere him as the best President America ever had. One wonders: is this
because they'd like to do, all over again, all of the things Lincoln did to the
American people? Judging from their taste for executions as a substitute for
individual self-defense, their penchant for putting people behind bars -- more
than any other country in the world, per capita, no matter how poorly it works
to reduce crime -- and the bitter distaste they display for Constitutional
"technicalities" like the exclusionary rule, which are all that keep
America from becoming the world's largest banana republic, one is well-justified
in wondering.
The troubling truth is that, more than anybody else's, Abraham Lincoln's
career resembles and foreshadows that of V.I. Lenin, who, with somewhat better
technology at his disposal, slaughtered millions of innocents -- rather than
mere hundreds of thousands -- to enforce an impossibly stupid idea which, in the
end, like forced association, was proven by history to be a resounding failure.
Abraham Lincoln was America's Lenin, and when America has finally absorbed
that painful but illuminating truth, it will at last have begun to recover from
the War between the States.
Order L. Neil Smith's books at: http://www.webleyweb.com/lneil/lnsbooks.html
L. Neil Smith's home page on the web, The Webley Page: www.webleyweb.com/lneil/
L. Neil Smith's e-zine: The Libertarian Enterprise: www.webleyweb.com/tle/
Other recommended articles by L. Neil Smith:
