WEBVTT NOTE Two Just Wars: 1776 and 1861 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.560 The concept of just war is kind of interesting because you don't really just have to justify. 2 00:00:04.560 --> 00:00:07.920 The concept of justice doesn't apply, say, to this delicious dinner we just ate. 3 00:00:07.920 --> 00:00:12.480 Nobody said that was a just dinner or unjust dinner. 4 00:00:12.480 --> 00:00:18.720 So justice applies to actions which are killing, which war is, a mass killing. 5 00:00:18.720 --> 00:00:23.200 And obviously, since the acts of killing are grave actions, they have to be justified in some way, 6 00:00:23.200 --> 00:00:26.720 vindicated or justified. 7 00:00:26.720 --> 00:00:46.720 Much of what I call classical international law theory, which was developed by the Catholic scholastics, especially the 16th century Spanish scholastics, such as Sartoria and Suarez, and then by the Dutch Protestant scholastics, and my 18th and 19th century jurists, up until the First World War, 8 00:00:46.720 --> 00:00:55.720 much of their literature is developing the criteria of a just war. What is a just war? Well, it's an unjust war. 9 00:00:55.720 --> 00:01:08.420 In my own view, to be simplified very quickly, in my view a just war exists when the people fight to ward off the spread of coercion or domination by another people, or to overthrow an already existing domination. 10 00:01:08.420 --> 00:01:10.420 That's a just war, in my point of view. 11 00:01:10.420 --> 00:01:20.220 A war is unjust, on the other hand, when the people try to impose domination on another people, or try to retain an already existing coercive rule over them. 12 00:01:20.220 --> 00:01:24.720 That's a fairly simple, I think, and direct criteria. 13 00:01:24.720 --> 00:01:33.320 Now, I admit there is some room for fuzzy interpretation of what constitutes a menace of impending nomination that might justify going to war. 14 00:01:33.320 --> 00:01:42.520 I mean, on one extreme, you can see a guy looking across the street at you, looking cross-eyed, you decide to shoot him because he might be at evil attention. 15 00:01:42.520 --> 00:01:50.320 So, you don't want to go that far. So, what is the criterion for an impending or threat? 16 00:01:50.320 --> 00:01:53.520 My own preference, as always, is for strict construction. 17 00:01:53.520 --> 00:02:04.520 In other words, without the famous criterion and another context, in my view, to justify a preemptive strike, the impending threat of force must be clear and present. 18 00:02:04.520 --> 00:02:09.520 So in other words, a guy's, you know, just about raising his gun to shoot at you, that's a clear and present danger. 19 00:02:09.520 --> 00:02:13.520 Anything else, I think, is illegitimate. 20 00:02:13.520 --> 00:02:21.520 In my view, almost every war engaged by the United States of America since its birth has been unjust, and I can't deal with that tonight. 21 00:02:21.520 --> 00:02:25.520 in pursuit of the unjust goal of coercive domination over all the peoples, 22 00:02:25.520 --> 00:02:31.520 or at very best, conjuring up alleged threats that have seriously been either clear or present. 23 00:02:31.520 --> 00:02:38.520 I've had a reputation as an anti-war activist because in my own lifetime, 24 00:02:38.520 --> 00:02:44.520 my ideological activism has been generally focused in opposition to America's wars. 25 00:02:44.520 --> 00:02:47.520 First, because I believe I'm waging them to be unjust, 26 00:02:47.520 --> 00:02:56.120 Secondly, because war, the famous phrase that I think somebody brought up this week, you know, after you've heard of the libertarian Randall Bourne, 27 00:02:56.120 --> 00:02:59.620 who said, war has always been the health of the state. 28 00:02:59.620 --> 00:03:08.120 It's the instrument for aggrandizing state power over the health of lives, the prosperity of the subject citizens and the social institutions. 29 00:03:08.120 --> 00:03:14.820 So even a just war can't be entered into lightly. An unjust war, of course, has to be a national one. 30 00:03:14.820 --> 00:03:19.700 Some people have thought I've been a pacifist because I've been opposed to wars, but surely 31 00:03:19.700 --> 00:03:25.060 in all kinds of pacifism, a pacifist for example, who championed the death penalty for violent 32 00:03:25.060 --> 00:03:36.060 criminals as well as caving for vandals, not your common warden variety of pacifists. 33 00:03:36.060 --> 00:03:41.860 The point is, I think that there are two wars in American history that I think have been 34 00:03:41.860 --> 00:03:52.860 Unquestionably proper and just. And not only that, the opposing side is clearly unjust and notably unjust. There's not even any question of it in my mind. 35 00:03:52.860 --> 00:04:01.860 These two wars have been where there's been a threat. Well, these two wars, you don't have to worry about a future threat. 36 00:04:01.860 --> 00:04:07.860 And these two wars, both of these wars, Americans are trying to rid themselves of unwanted domination by other people. 37 00:04:07.860 --> 00:04:19.860 In both cases, the other side ferociously tried to maintain their coercive rule over Americans who wanted to rule themselves. 38 00:04:19.860 --> 00:04:25.860 In each case, our side, if you will, one side was notably just, the other side, unjust. 39 00:04:25.860 --> 00:04:33.860 These two just wars in American history have been the American Revolution and the War for Southern Independence. 40 00:04:33.860 --> 00:04:41.860 At this point, I'd like to mention just a few vital features of the treatment of war by classical international lawyers. 41 00:04:41.860 --> 00:04:44.860 One, they dealt with just wars. This is a war of just and unjust. 42 00:04:44.860 --> 00:04:50.860 The other aspect of what they were dealing with is, what are the limitations on war? 43 00:04:50.860 --> 00:04:54.860 Should war be unlimited? And even a just war. 44 00:04:54.860 --> 00:05:16.860 And the classical international law tradition, which is, which grew from, say, 16th century until 1914, they, they were, what they were trying to do is this, they said, look, we don't try to abolish war, that's ridiculous, utopian, idiotic, it's not going to happen, what we're trying to do is, if there are wars, we're trying to limit their scope. 45 00:05:16.860 --> 00:05:30.860 The limitations were twofold. One, don't target civilians. It's a key. Keep civilians out of it. You want to fight. If a king wants to fight with another king, go out there with a retinue and fight each other. Keep civilians out of it. 46 00:05:30.860 --> 00:05:44.860 Number one, and number two, neutrals' rights. Other countries, not only are permitted to stand off if country A and country B are fighting, not only is it permissible for other countries to remain neutral, but it's a good thing. 47 00:05:44.860 --> 00:05:54.860 Neutrality was considered great in the old days. It was considered noble and just, and neutrals had rights. And most of international law was working out the details of this. 48 00:05:54.860 --> 00:06:01.860 For example, if country A and country B were fighting with each other, country C was trying to trade with either one of them, could not be interfered with. 49 00:06:01.860 --> 00:06:08.860 The enemy countries could not interfere with shipping goods to the other side. 50 00:06:08.860 --> 00:06:14.860 The only thing they could interfere with was contraband, which was very narrowly defined as arms and ammunition, and that's it. 51 00:06:14.860 --> 00:06:16.860 I mean, that's just food and medical supplies. 52 00:06:16.860 --> 00:06:21.860 Anything else, industrial material, everything, capital goods, machinery, that has to pass. 53 00:06:21.860 --> 00:06:25.860 in the past. You could not blockade and keep out neutral rights. 54 00:06:25.860 --> 00:06:31.860 This is of course meant that every side, every country expected to be one time or another neutral. 55 00:06:31.860 --> 00:06:36.860 They wanted to preserve their rights. They didn't want to be international pariahs for the rest of the centuries. 56 00:06:36.860 --> 00:06:41.860 And so it's more or less these principles are observed, at least during the 19th century. 57 00:06:41.860 --> 00:06:46.860 And observed more and more over time. This was sort of the laws of civilized warfare, limiting warfare. 58 00:06:46.860 --> 00:06:54.860 Don't target civilians and keep neutrals out of it. Allow neutrals to proceed. 59 00:06:54.860 --> 00:07:02.860 So, in the old days, for example, as I say, neutrality is considered not just justifiable, but a positive virtue. 60 00:07:02.860 --> 00:07:07.860 In the old days, he kept us out of war. It was a high tribute to a president or any political leader. 61 00:07:07.860 --> 00:07:11.860 But now, of course, all the pundits and professors condemn any president who, quote, 62 00:07:11.860 --> 00:07:27.300 The only day standing idly by was considered an act of high statesmanship, and as I say, 63 00:07:27.300 --> 00:07:30.820 new fools had rights, you couldn't interfere with new fools. 64 00:07:30.820 --> 00:07:36.220 So in modern international law, we have a very different situation, starting with Woodrow 65 00:07:36.220 --> 00:07:42.220 The Evil Woodrow Wilson, continuing on since. 66 00:07:42.220 --> 00:07:49.220 Both of these, by the way, criteria, both of these modern law criteria are developed by Wilson. 67 00:07:49.220 --> 00:07:54.220 And one of them is that so-called collective security against aggression. 68 00:07:54.220 --> 00:07:58.220 You figure out, this country is fighting each other all the time, there's wars all the time. 69 00:07:58.220 --> 00:08:03.220 Let's say the Hoodoos and the Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi is a good laboratory taste. 70 00:08:03.220 --> 00:08:13.220 First you figure out who the aggressor is. Who the hell knows? They could both be aggressors, right? No, no. You've got to figure out who the good guy is and who the bad guy is. 71 00:08:13.220 --> 00:08:21.220 Always have to be only one bad guy, because if both guys are bad, you're not going to get the whole world to march in and shoot somebody. 72 00:08:21.220 --> 00:08:28.220 There has to be one clear aggressor and the other clear victims, and then the whole world is supposed to leap in and crush the aggressor. 73 00:08:28.220 --> 00:08:34.220 The model of this was the cop on the corner. This was the famous idea of the International Police Force, 74 00:08:34.220 --> 00:08:41.220 the League of Nations, the UN, the US, NATO, whatever other collective security, whatever alphabet arrangement they've got. 75 00:08:41.220 --> 00:08:45.220 So the idea is if a war breaks out somewhere, first you find who the bad guys are. 76 00:08:45.220 --> 00:08:49.220 How the hell do you know? They say they're thousands of miles away from the action. 77 00:08:49.220 --> 00:08:55.220 Who knows? You get some CNN TV camera coming in, you shoot somebody in action, 78 00:08:55.220 --> 00:09:00.820 You figure out who the bad guys are and then you come in and zap a bomb them, crush them, send troops in and all that. 79 00:09:00.820 --> 00:09:03.920 It's overly soul-satisfying, conceptually easy. 80 00:09:03.920 --> 00:09:07.920 There are, however, certain problems with this. In the first place, what's aggressive? 81 00:09:07.920 --> 00:09:13.120 I mean, the cop on the corner, if you see somebody mugging somebody else, it's pretty clear who the aggressor is. 82 00:09:13.120 --> 00:09:17.020 The cop comes in and zaps the mugger. It's simple. 83 00:09:17.020 --> 00:09:21.020 International relations are not that easy. Who knows what the just boundary is? 84 00:09:21.020 --> 00:09:28.020 Who knows whether the land along the Burundi border should be this way to some lake or the north of some lake or whatever. It's not that clear. 85 00:09:28.020 --> 00:09:36.020 Also, the boundary shifts a lot through history. So the boundary now could be very different from the boundary ten years from now. Which is the just boundary? Who knows? Who cares? 86 00:09:36.020 --> 00:09:46.020 Why should everybody get involved in this? So the whole idea of the classical international law is to limit warfare, keep everybody out, limit civilians and limit the other people. 87 00:09:46.020 --> 00:09:53.020 The rest of the world can go about its business, and the wars will be, you can't abolish war, but you can at least confine it to small areas. 88 00:09:53.020 --> 00:09:55.020 That was a wonderful point. 89 00:09:55.020 --> 00:09:57.020 With Wilsonianism, you have very different situations. 90 00:09:57.020 --> 00:10:00.020 One is you have to find the aggressor, and that has happened. 91 00:10:00.020 --> 00:10:04.020 The interesting thing, for example, in Bosnia, it's very interesting. 92 00:10:04.020 --> 00:10:07.020 You have to demonize one group. 93 00:10:07.020 --> 00:10:13.020 In order to get the American suckers to intervene in the rest of the United Nations, you have to have one evil demon. 94 00:10:13.020 --> 00:10:20.020 So the Serbs were nominated as the evil demon very early, and everybody, the Serbs are evil, they're ethnic cleansing, they're killing people, killing civilians and all that. 95 00:10:20.020 --> 00:10:26.020 But then it turns out the Croats and the Monsignans were also killing people and they got a chance, killing civilians. 96 00:10:26.020 --> 00:10:32.020 That money even waters a little bit. See, that confuses the Americans. Who's going to march in and send troops and bombers and all that? 97 00:10:32.020 --> 00:10:36.020 If all sides are somehow bad, that's not going to fly. 98 00:10:36.020 --> 00:10:42.020 The warmongers have to create a situation where the Serbs are pure evil, somehow the devil is anointed in them as evil, 99 00:10:42.020 --> 00:10:47.020 Everybody else are good and victims and wonderful and believers of freedom and democracy and all the other crap. 100 00:10:47.020 --> 00:10:49.020 And that's the... 101 00:10:49.020 --> 00:10:56.020 So in other words, they have to know nothing about foreign policy to really fall for this stuff, which of course most Americans don't. 102 00:10:56.020 --> 00:10:59.020 Which leaves a gap in the situation. 103 00:10:59.020 --> 00:11:03.020 So that's the one of the Wilsonian, vicious, pernicious Wilsonian arguments. 104 00:11:03.020 --> 00:11:07.020 You have to find the aggressor and zap him. 105 00:11:07.020 --> 00:11:14.620 The other, of course, argument is, you have to, in the United States and every other country, 106 00:11:14.620 --> 00:11:19.220 you've got to impose democracy and human rights throughout the world. 107 00:11:19.220 --> 00:11:20.620 This is even worse in a sense. 108 00:11:20.620 --> 00:11:25.300 In other words, we've got now a situation where, I mean, democracy and human rights 109 00:11:25.300 --> 00:11:27.340 don't exist very many places in the world. 110 00:11:27.340 --> 00:11:32.700 I don't want to disillusion many people here, but there's very few places, very few places 111 00:11:32.700 --> 00:11:33.700 we have this situation. 112 00:11:33.700 --> 00:11:38.180 And now it's the God-given assignment for the United States to go and impose democracy 113 00:11:38.180 --> 00:11:42.300 throughout the world, everywhere, every place, regardless. 114 00:11:42.300 --> 00:11:45.980 So now you have Charles Beard, and somebody mentioned that this weekend too, Charles Beard 115 00:11:45.980 --> 00:11:50.660 said that the policy of stamping out aggression, collective security of aggression, is a policy 116 00:11:50.660 --> 00:11:55.540 of perpetual war for perpetual peace, and the pursuit of world perpetual peace you have 117 00:11:55.540 --> 00:11:56.540 to keep fighting constantly. 118 00:11:56.540 --> 00:12:01.340 Now you have the other part of the equation, the perpetual war to impose human rights and 119 00:12:01.340 --> 00:12:03.220 democracy everywhere. 120 00:12:03.220 --> 00:12:15.220 Now you have a formula for an unending loss of treasure and life, and every conflict all over the globe, and a totally impossible quest. 121 00:12:15.220 --> 00:12:23.220 In addition to that, the idea of using war, of imposing democracy and human rights by the sword, is kind of odd anyway. 122 00:12:23.220 --> 00:12:30.220 And the Samanian intervention, to me, is a beautiful case study of this. I mean, it's perfect. 123 00:12:30.220 --> 00:12:38.220 If you remember the Wilsonian Greenman practice, he had a situation, and the entire left, by the way, loved it. 124 00:12:38.220 --> 00:12:43.220 They loved the Somalian intervention because there was no American interest at all, conceivable interest in Somalia. 125 00:12:43.220 --> 00:12:47.220 Nothing. No resources, no fighting against communism, nothing. Zippo. 126 00:12:47.220 --> 00:12:51.220 No strategic sea routes. They couldn't find anything. 127 00:12:51.220 --> 00:12:58.220 So the left, the allegedly anti-war left, they all loved the Somalian intervention because, 128 00:12:58.220 --> 00:13:03.220 Because America has no interest in it, therefore it's good. 129 00:13:03.220 --> 00:13:05.220 To me it's totally bizarre. 130 00:13:05.220 --> 00:13:08.220 The whole culture is crazy and that's part of it. 131 00:13:08.220 --> 00:13:13.220 So now when the Somalian intervention came in, they extolled, if you remember the press 132 00:13:13.220 --> 00:13:16.220 in that period, for a few heady months. 133 00:13:16.220 --> 00:13:20.220 They extolled a new kind of army, what we can call a new modern army. 134 00:13:20.220 --> 00:13:23.220 Apologies to Cromwell. 135 00:13:23.220 --> 00:13:26.220 Engaging a new kind of high moral intervention. 136 00:13:26.220 --> 00:13:30.220 The U.S. soldier with a care package on one hand and a gun on the other. 137 00:13:30.220 --> 00:13:33.220 So we're bringing food and peace and human rights to the masses, 138 00:13:33.220 --> 00:13:36.220 in the meantime we're bringing a gun. 139 00:13:36.220 --> 00:13:39.220 So that, we're bringing democracy and peace and human rights 140 00:13:39.220 --> 00:13:43.220 into the United Peoples of Somalia and doing it nobly and altruistically. 141 00:13:43.220 --> 00:13:47.220 Well, it worked for about two months, if it had worked that much. 142 00:13:47.220 --> 00:13:50.220 And then, of course, everything hits the fan. 143 00:13:50.220 --> 00:13:52.220 The consequences show up. 144 00:13:52.220 --> 00:13:55.220 We wind up with every Somalian virtually hating the United States, 145 00:13:55.220 --> 00:14:04.220 American soldiers dragging their bodies through the streets and all that. Fortunately, we got out. I don't know if it's by some luck, the United States got out. 146 00:14:04.220 --> 00:14:15.220 I think CNN or the pictures of the bodies being dragged through the streets didn't quite have the effect as opposed to Americans that were votes against the whole process and got out. 147 00:14:15.220 --> 00:14:45.220 So we have, now the interesting thing in both cases here, in both of these cases, the modern interventionists, the warmongers, the modern international war people, have won by seizing the moral high ground, very much like the environmentalists do it, it's very similar, environmentalists, they speak for the cosmos, they speak for the rights of beaches and trees and insects and whatever, and we are just narrow human being types, yeah, right? So they speak for the earth and everything else, and similarly here, we speak for a narrow, selfish American interests, 148 00:14:45.220 --> 00:14:49.220 for the War for Democracy and Human Rights and Peace and Unending Peace and all that. 149 00:14:49.220 --> 00:14:55.220 So they were able to seize the high moral ground, and apparently they were not successfully challenged on this. 150 00:14:55.220 --> 00:15:01.220 In the old days, that wasn't true. In the old days, if you're in a dimension as a warmonger, you're considered a propagandist for despotism, 151 00:15:01.220 --> 00:15:08.220 for mass murder, for perpetual war, and a spokesman for the merchants of death, a great phrase that should be revived. 152 00:15:08.220 --> 00:15:11.220 So a warmonger was not considered a high moral person. 153 00:15:11.220 --> 00:15:30.380 I bring up the cause of human rights, so-called, because this, of course, is precisely the 154 00:15:30.380 --> 00:15:35.420 critical argument which, at least in retrospect, Father Abraham's war of Northern aggression 155 00:15:35.420 --> 00:15:39.900 against the South was justified and even glorified. 156 00:15:39.900 --> 00:15:46.620 The humanitarian, again with a gun, with butchery in his wake, writes the wrongs of slavery 157 00:15:46.620 --> 00:15:50.340 by mass murder, destruction of property and institutions, and wreaking havoc which has 158 00:15:50.340 --> 00:15:51.340 still not disappeared. 159 00:15:51.340 --> 00:15:56.740 This is about Patterson, one of the great essays on political philosophy of the century, 160 00:15:56.740 --> 00:16:01.180 zeroing in on what she aptly called the humanitarian or the guillotine, those of us who read my 161 00:16:01.180 --> 00:16:05.660 art review on Chronicles, I apologize for repeating it, I think this is great stuff. 162 00:16:05.660 --> 00:16:10.660 She wrote, the humanitarian wishes to be a prime mover in the lives of others. 163 00:16:10.660 --> 00:16:16.660 He cannot admit either the divine or the natural order by which men have the power to help themselves. 164 00:16:16.660 --> 00:16:19.660 The humanitarian puts himself in the place of God. 165 00:16:19.660 --> 00:16:24.660 But Mrs. Patterson notes, the humanitarian is confronted by two awkward facts. 166 00:16:24.660 --> 00:16:27.660 First, the company do not need his assistance. 167 00:16:27.660 --> 00:16:36.420 And second, the majority of the people, if un-perverted, positively do not want to be done good by the humanitarian, unquote. 168 00:16:36.420 --> 00:16:41.420 Having considered what the good of others might be and who is to decide on the good, and on what to do about it, 169 00:16:41.420 --> 00:16:48.420 Mrs. Patterson points out, quote, of course what the humanitarian actually proposes is that he should do what he thinks is good for everybody. 170 00:16:48.420 --> 00:16:56.140 Because at this point the humanitarian sets up a guillotine, and she concludes the humanitarian in theory is a terrorist in action, which is exactly it. 171 00:16:56.140 --> 00:16:59.140 Point by point, I said, I don't know why. 172 00:16:59.140 --> 00:17:12.140 Most of my friends and colleagues are hesitant to concede the existence of universal natural rights. 173 00:17:12.140 --> 00:17:14.140 I believe in natural rights. 174 00:17:14.140 --> 00:17:21.140 But I think one of the problems is they worry they might find themselves forced to support American or worldwide intervention 175 00:17:21.140 --> 00:17:24.140 to try to enforce these rights everywhere. 176 00:17:24.140 --> 00:17:29.140 Well, I think the resolution of this is that classical national law and international jurists, 177 00:17:29.140 --> 00:17:33.140 they weren't in favor of universal collective security or enforcement of rights. 178 00:17:33.140 --> 00:17:39.140 If, for example, Tutsis are slaughtering hoodoos in Rwanda, or vice versa, 179 00:17:39.140 --> 00:17:44.140 the natural lawyers would have said, look, it's too bad, it violates the natural rights of the hoodoos or Tutsis, 180 00:17:44.140 --> 00:17:49.140 but that doesn't mean anybody else should leap in and do something about it. Quite the contrary. 181 00:17:49.140 --> 00:17:54.140 We might encapsulate this position into a slogan. This is my slogan for the night. 182 00:17:54.140 --> 00:17:58.140 Rights may be universal, but their enforcement must be local. 183 00:17:58.140 --> 00:18:02.140 Order without the motto of the Irish revolution, fame, ourselves alone. 184 00:18:02.140 --> 00:18:04.140 We want to enforce our rights, we should do it ourselves. 185 00:18:04.140 --> 00:18:06.140 We're not going to expect everybody else to do it for us. 186 00:18:06.140 --> 00:18:08.140 We've got rights, we've got to do something about it. 187 00:18:08.140 --> 00:18:10.140 This, of course, would be American revolutionaries. 188 00:18:10.140 --> 00:18:13.140 American revolutionaries were happy to accept French aid, but they were prepared, 189 00:18:13.140 --> 00:18:17.140 they pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to do it themselves. 190 00:18:17.140 --> 00:18:29.220 So, to put it another way, I mentioned environmentalists a minute ago. I've always believed that when 191 00:18:29.220 --> 00:18:34.820 the loony left claims that all sorts of entities have rights, animals, alligators, trees, plants, 192 00:18:34.820 --> 00:18:40.020 rocks, beaches, the earth, the ecology, quote unquote, the proper response is, okay, when 193 00:18:40.020 --> 00:18:45.540 those entities act like Americans in the American Revolution, they set forth a declaration, 194 00:18:45.540 --> 00:18:48.940 and then they take up arms to support their rights, then I can take them seriously. 195 00:18:48.940 --> 00:18:50.740 Although I shut up. 196 00:18:50.740 --> 00:19:01.640 Let us now turn to America's two just wars. 197 00:19:01.640 --> 00:19:04.740 It plainly evidenced to me that the American Revolution was a just war. 198 00:19:04.740 --> 00:19:08.740 It was a war of peoples forming an independent nation and casting off the bonds of another 199 00:19:08.740 --> 00:19:12.740 people, insisting on perpetuating rule over them. 200 00:19:12.740 --> 00:19:17.940 Obviously, the Americans, while welcoming French support, decided to do it on their own. 201 00:19:17.940 --> 00:19:25.340 What I want to stress here is not so much the grievances, which are mostly taxation in order to extend from it, 202 00:19:25.340 --> 00:19:31.540 but the fact that the grounds on which they stood for this solemn act of separation, 203 00:19:31.540 --> 00:19:36.540 the political philosophy in those days, basically the old-fashioned political philosophy, 204 00:19:36.540 --> 00:19:42.640 which was getting obsolete by the 18th century, was that the king is sovereign, the king is divine, 205 00:19:42.640 --> 00:19:46.840 of the Divine Powers, everybody else is subordinated to the king, and any rebellion against the 206 00:19:46.840 --> 00:19:54.200 king is evil and satanic. This was basically the theory of order. That wasn't working too 207 00:19:54.200 --> 00:20:01.480 well in the United States, especially in America, but even so, even with the, what might I say, 208 00:20:01.480 --> 00:20:07.320 the conservative natural, that was the theory of order, the divine sovereignty. Among the 209 00:20:07.320 --> 00:20:12.440 One of the contractual theorists, natural law theorists, Hugo Rochas and other Rochians 210 00:20:12.440 --> 00:20:16.680 were conservatives. They believed that people were originally sovereign. They delegated a 211 00:20:16.680 --> 00:20:21.480 power so the king laid back at some misty wood. But then it's perpetual. The king has 212 00:20:21.480 --> 00:20:26.080 to keep it forever and they can't get it back. This seems to me and seems to other more radical 213 00:20:26.080 --> 00:20:30.400 natural rights people as being inconsistent. And so, Paul of Ronde de Mariana, one of my 214 00:20:30.400 --> 00:20:35.680 favorite people in The Theory of Political Thought, Spanish Jesuit scholastic, John Locke 215 00:20:35.680 --> 00:20:40.120 and his followers, they said, no, look, if we delegated our powers to the king, and the 216 00:20:40.120 --> 00:20:43.280 king turns out to be a bad guy and violates his trust, we can take it back. Why can't 217 00:20:43.280 --> 00:20:47.600 we take these powers back? So the theory, this is essentially a theory of the American 218 00:20:47.600 --> 00:20:51.480 Revolutionary. So we delegated certain powers to the king, he violated it, we're taking 219 00:20:51.480 --> 00:20:56.920 it back. It was a contractual theory of government. Government by the just consent of the governed 220 00:20:56.920 --> 00:21:02.120 and not by some divine sovereignty. Now whether or not you agree with that, it seems to me 221 00:21:02.120 --> 00:21:07.720 The American Revolution was founded on that principle, that this is the contractual compact 222 00:21:07.720 --> 00:21:08.720 theory of government. 223 00:21:08.720 --> 00:21:15.760 And interestingly enough, by the way, as well known, it was a big psychological thing for 224 00:21:15.760 --> 00:21:17.560 the American Revolution, it was to break with the king. 225 00:21:17.560 --> 00:21:20.720 They called him that they didn't give a damn about, called him that they hated and that 226 00:21:20.720 --> 00:21:21.720 was it. 227 00:21:21.720 --> 00:21:24.560 Remember the Declaration of Independence says, no mention of problem, it's all the 228 00:21:24.560 --> 00:21:27.440 king, the king has done this, the king is evil, blah, blah, blah, but they had to break 229 00:21:27.440 --> 00:21:28.440 this cord with the king. 230 00:21:28.440 --> 00:21:31.760 It was a terrible thing for them, they had all taken oaths of allegiance to the king, 231 00:21:31.760 --> 00:21:38.500 The king was a real person. Unlike the so-called Union, which I'll come to a minute, the king was real, okay? 232 00:21:38.500 --> 00:21:44.600 So, they had a break with the king with a powerful problem with him, and Tom Paine's common sense essentially did that. 233 00:21:44.600 --> 00:21:51.100 He knew in the terms of the New Left, Paine's common sense, de-sacrifice, de-legitimatize the king. 234 00:21:51.100 --> 00:21:58.100 He said, the king of Great Britain, Tom Paine wrote, is only to the senate of, quote, 235 00:21:58.100 --> 00:22:09.100 Nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang, whose savage manner of preeminence and subtlety obtained him the title of chief among plunderers. 236 00:22:09.100 --> 00:22:15.100 And now he says the kings are, the royal brood of Great Britain are but crown ruffians. 237 00:22:15.100 --> 00:22:19.100 This is a powerful thing for Americans, for American psychology. 238 00:22:19.100 --> 00:22:23.100 And they only broke with the king about a year after the war started. 239 00:22:23.100 --> 00:22:29.100 The American Revolution started in the spring of 1775 and only by July of 1776 were we able to make the break. 240 00:22:29.100 --> 00:22:37.100 Okay, so government, the American Republic is founded on contractual and withdrawing consent from the king, from the government. 241 00:22:37.100 --> 00:22:44.100 Now what happens is that every, the 13 colonies, each of the 13 colonies form 13 separate contractual republics. 242 00:22:44.100 --> 00:22:49.100 Each of them are based on libertarian doctrine, on classical republican models. 243 00:22:49.100 --> 00:22:54.100 In each case they set up independent sovereign states with powers of government strictly limited. 244 00:22:54.100 --> 00:23:01.100 I think the first time in human history they had a written constitution whose purpose was to strictly limit the powers of the government. 245 00:23:01.100 --> 00:23:05.100 The powers reserved for the people, the checks and balances and everything else they're trying to limit. 246 00:23:05.100 --> 00:23:09.100 They're very suspicious of all government power, even local government power. 247 00:23:09.100 --> 00:23:14.100 They want to keep it limited, keep their eye on it all the time and zap it whenever it gets strong. 248 00:23:14.100 --> 00:23:17.100 And each of those 13 republics did that. 249 00:23:17.100 --> 00:23:32.100 So then, of course, the thirteen separate republics, having done this, have been making this fantastic break, Britain, form, and represent us the Continental Congress, and they form the Confederation to help them fight the war, with severely limited central powers. 250 00:23:32.100 --> 00:23:40.100 Then they decided, after about a decade later, to scrap the Articles of the Confederation, adopt a new constitution. 251 00:23:40.100 --> 00:23:50.500 Of the very point, which should be emphasized more, the fact that the Articles of the Federation could be scrapped just like that of a piece of paper meant that it was not supposed to be perpetual. 252 00:23:50.500 --> 00:23:57.900 Okay, the 13 states said, okay, we think the Articles are now insufficient, whatever, and we're going to form the Constitution. 253 00:23:57.900 --> 00:24:04.300 It would be very peculiar to hold that the American revolutionaries had repudiated their Pledge of Allegiance to a real king in order to, 254 00:24:04.300 --> 00:24:10.460 and then, a couple of years later, scrapped the article of the Federation in order to sign up to adopt the Constitution, 255 00:24:10.460 --> 00:24:14.060 which they consider to be totally perpetual, like a one-way Venus flytrap. 256 00:24:14.060 --> 00:24:16.940 Once you adopt it, you're finished forever. You can't get out. 257 00:24:16.940 --> 00:24:20.380 Can you imagine if the Constitution was hardly ratified as it was? 258 00:24:20.380 --> 00:24:23.020 I mean, most of the majority of the public is against the Constitution anyway. 259 00:24:23.020 --> 00:24:28.140 Can you imagine them doing it if they knew this was a one-way ticket to disaster, to suicide? 260 00:24:28.140 --> 00:24:29.420 Of course not. 261 00:24:29.420 --> 00:24:41.420 And so the idea that the union was somehow perpetual and eternal is ridiculous, it's illogical and ridiculous, it violates the entire process by which the American republics were founded. 262 00:24:41.420 --> 00:24:52.420 And yet, of course, this is the illogic, this monstrous illogic is the argument of the North of why the South could not see seed from the union. 263 00:24:52.420 --> 00:24:59.860 Once the act of adopting the Union was adopted, it was a one-way ticket. That's it. 264 00:24:59.860 --> 00:25:04.060 As I say, kamikaze for sovereignty. 265 00:25:04.060 --> 00:25:09.380 In 1861, the southern states, believing correctly that their cherished institutions were under grave threat, 266 00:25:09.380 --> 00:25:12.540 I think they were, and under assault from federal government, 267 00:25:12.540 --> 00:25:18.940 they decided to exercise a natural, contractual and constitutional right to enroll the CC from that Union. 268 00:25:18.940 --> 00:25:24.940 and they came together in another confederation, the Confederated States of America. 269 00:25:24.940 --> 00:25:30.940 So if the American Revolutionary War is just, if we're prepared to say that, then we have to be prepared to say in the Southern cause, 270 00:25:30.940 --> 00:25:40.940 the war for Southern countries was also just and equally so, and if the British were unjust, I think they were, the Northern cause was also equally unjust. 271 00:25:40.940 --> 00:25:48.940 Now, of course, in either case, in neither the break in the American Revolution, nor the Southern Cessation, was the decision made for lighter, transient causes. 272 00:25:48.940 --> 00:25:55.940 In both cases, the courageous Cedars pledged to each other their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. 273 00:25:55.940 --> 00:26:06.940 And, as I say, if the Southern cause is wrong, then both North and South should have gone to the King of England with hand in hand and beg forgiveness and rejoin the Empire. 274 00:26:06.940 --> 00:26:16.940 Okay, so now, what about the grievances? I don't want to spend too much time on the grievances, but basically the American grievance was on taxes and different forms of taxes. 275 00:26:16.940 --> 00:26:26.940 The trial by jury question was really a question of, because the juries would not, American juries would not convict so-called smugglers for disobeying British tariffs. 276 00:26:26.940 --> 00:26:31.940 The general search warrants were searching for customs, you know, customs booty. 277 00:26:31.940 --> 00:26:36.940 is all connected with taxes, and the southern core is also mostly connected with taxes and high tariffs, 278 00:26:36.940 --> 00:26:46.940 as Lew Rockwell pointed out today, bleeding the South in order to create inefficient southern, inefficient northern manufacturers and shippers. 279 00:26:46.940 --> 00:26:54.940 So, and again, I'm not going to go into this whole thing about taxes, but John C. Calhoun was a brilliant tax analyst. 280 00:26:54.940 --> 00:27:03.940 The very existence of government, the very existence of taxation creates conflicting classes. 281 00:27:03.940 --> 00:27:07.940 This is not a Marxist theory of class struggle, it's a libertarian theory of class struggle. 282 00:27:07.940 --> 00:27:12.940 Namely, once you've got a government, some people are living off taxes and other people are paying it. 283 00:27:12.940 --> 00:27:16.940 Bureaucrats don't pay taxes. A guy who works for the government doesn't pay taxes. 284 00:27:16.940 --> 00:27:22.940 If he's getting a salary of $50,000 a year and pays $10,000 in taxes, he's getting a salary of $40,000. 285 00:27:22.940 --> 00:27:28.940 The 10,000 is simply fiction. It's accounting fiction that justifies his existence to the rest of the poor public. 286 00:27:28.940 --> 00:27:35.940 One of the interesting things, coming from New York as I do, the United Nations, the beloved United Nations, 287 00:27:35.940 --> 00:27:39.940 the bureaucrats there pay no taxes at all. And people are indignant, yeah, they pay no taxes. 288 00:27:39.940 --> 00:27:43.940 It's great, but of course they're more candid about it than the United States government. 289 00:27:43.940 --> 00:27:48.940 They just don't pay taxes. The United States government, the accounting fiction is preserved. 290 00:27:48.940 --> 00:27:53.440 And so in zeroing in on the tariff is a key question. Calhoun pointed out, quote, 291 00:27:53.440 --> 00:28:00.440 the North has adopted a system of revenue disbursements in which an undue proportion of the burden of taxation has been imposed on the South 292 00:28:00.440 --> 00:28:04.940 and an undue proportion appropriated to the North and for monopolization of Northern industry. 293 00:28:04.940 --> 00:28:11.940 Of course we know that somebody mentioned again today, this week, the first South Carolina threat of nullification came about 294 00:28:11.940 --> 00:28:17.940 because of the tariff of abomination of 1828, the evil high tariff of 1828. 295 00:28:17.940 --> 00:28:20.940 Here, what about the opposition of these two just wars? 296 00:28:20.940 --> 00:28:22.940 It seems to me plainly evidently just. 297 00:28:22.940 --> 00:28:25.940 Both the opponents were unjust. 298 00:28:25.940 --> 00:28:27.940 The British, what was the British motivation? 299 00:28:27.940 --> 00:28:29.940 The British wanted to hold on to their empire. 300 00:28:29.940 --> 00:28:31.940 It's fairly clear why they wanted to hold on to their empire. 301 00:28:31.940 --> 00:28:33.940 They wanted to believe they were the Americans. 302 00:28:33.940 --> 00:28:35.940 In a sense, it's coherent, at least. 303 00:28:35.940 --> 00:28:37.940 What were the motivations of the North? 304 00:28:37.940 --> 00:28:39.940 That's to me more interesting. 305 00:28:39.940 --> 00:28:43.940 Why, in the famous words of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, 306 00:28:43.940 --> 00:28:51.940 Did not the North, quote, let their erring sisters go in peace, at least Garrison's original position before he got swept up in the war fever. 307 00:28:51.940 --> 00:28:56.940 Why didn't they let him go? Why didn't they let the Souths D.C.? What was the point? 308 00:28:56.940 --> 00:29:05.940 The driving, here the driving force, again I don't want to go into too deep here, the driving force of the North, the driving force for the war is a group of people called the Yankees. 309 00:29:05.940 --> 00:29:09.940 Now, contrasting about most people, the Yankees are not just people who lived in the North. 310 00:29:09.940 --> 00:29:14.740 The Yankees were a specific ethno-cultural group, started in New England, then spread 311 00:29:14.740 --> 00:29:17.740 out, they're very mobile. 312 00:29:17.740 --> 00:29:23.060 They migrated upstate New York to northern Indiana, northern Illinois, eastern Ohio, 313 00:29:23.060 --> 00:29:27.900 and places around the Great Lakes, and they were the major proponents of this stuff, abolitionism 314 00:29:27.900 --> 00:29:30.580 and general coercion. 315 00:29:30.580 --> 00:29:36.700 The Yankees had been swept up by a new form of Protestantism around 1830, a new form as 316 00:29:36.700 --> 00:29:43.900 Phenomenal and emotional neopuranism, driven by a fervent post-millennialism, which held 317 00:29:43.900 --> 00:29:48.460 as a precondition for the second advent of Jesus Christ, man must set up a thousand-year 318 00:29:48.460 --> 00:29:49.460 kingdom gone on earth. 319 00:29:49.460 --> 00:29:52.980 Lord, if a Jesus were alive, you have to have a thousand-year kingdom gone on earth, set 320 00:29:52.980 --> 00:29:53.980 up by man. 321 00:29:53.980 --> 00:29:56.980 Okay, and what's a thousand-year kingdom going to look like? 322 00:29:56.980 --> 00:30:02.860 Well, that's been contested, it's a little vague, but one thing's pretty clear, it has 323 00:30:02.860 --> 00:30:03.860 to be perfect society. 324 00:30:03.860 --> 00:30:08.860 To be a thousand-year kingdom, people have got to be perfect. How do you get perfect people? 325 00:30:08.860 --> 00:30:11.860 Well, there are different ways of going about it. 326 00:30:11.860 --> 00:30:15.860 In the Anabaptists of the 16th century, you slaughter all the heretics. That was the way you get perfect people. 327 00:30:15.860 --> 00:30:19.860 Perfect people are defined as those who are followers of XYZ, the Messiah. 328 00:30:19.860 --> 00:30:22.860 You slaughter everybody else, you have a perfect world, right? 329 00:30:22.860 --> 00:30:24.860 Okay, so this is... 330 00:30:24.860 --> 00:30:29.860 The Northern Yankees didn't exactly want to slaughter everybody right away 331 00:30:29.860 --> 00:30:34.860 because the immediate slaughter was sort of discredited from the 16th century on. 332 00:30:34.860 --> 00:30:38.860 What they wanted to do was to shape everybody else, stamp out sin fairly gradually. 333 00:30:38.860 --> 00:30:41.860 Gradually doesn't mean really gradually. It means by saying 50 years. 334 00:30:41.860 --> 00:30:43.860 50 years is always sort of a big post-millennial thing. 335 00:30:43.860 --> 00:30:46.860 In 50 years we'll set up a kingdom of God on earth. 336 00:30:46.860 --> 00:30:51.860 And very early in the game the Yankees realized in order to do this they have to turn the government to do it. 337 00:30:51.860 --> 00:30:53.860 You can't stamp out sin without government. 338 00:30:53.860 --> 00:30:55.860 Of course the Yankees have always been in favor of government anyway. 339 00:30:55.860 --> 00:30:57.860 They were always itching for coercion. 340 00:30:57.860 --> 00:31:04.860 The Yankees had set up the first public school system in order to teach the kids civics and shape them up and teach them obedience in the state. 341 00:31:04.860 --> 00:31:08.860 So they were primed for this anyway, and so they took to this as a duck taste of water. 342 00:31:08.860 --> 00:31:13.860 And Yankee evangelical post-millennialism essentially was this. 343 00:31:13.860 --> 00:31:16.860 First of all, you have to stamp out sin to set up a kingdom. 344 00:31:16.860 --> 00:31:22.860 Second of all, if you don't do your best, you damn this and set up to stamp out sin, you will be damned. 345 00:31:22.860 --> 00:31:28.860 You can only achieve salvation by maximizing the occasion for salvation of everybody else. 346 00:31:28.860 --> 00:31:33.860 These people are very energetic fanatics, because they want to be saved themselves. 347 00:31:33.860 --> 00:31:36.860 In order to do that, they have to try to save everybody else. 348 00:31:36.860 --> 00:31:41.860 The other people don't like it, you set up a guillotine, you set up a sword of fire. 349 00:31:41.860 --> 00:31:47.860 According to the Yankee doctrine, sin was very broadly defined. 350 00:31:47.860 --> 00:31:56.860 And essentially, if you remember the old shadow radio commercial, radio series, anything which might cloud men's minds. 351 00:31:56.860 --> 00:32:01.860 So anything which might cloud men's minds so they couldn't achieve salvation has to be stamped out as sin. 352 00:32:01.860 --> 00:32:04.860 The mind clouding is as follows. 353 00:32:04.860 --> 00:32:07.860 Liquor, demon rum, has to be stamped out. 354 00:32:07.860 --> 00:32:09.860 Obviously liquor could cloud your mind, okay? 355 00:32:09.860 --> 00:32:11.860 But it's permanent and it has a story. 356 00:32:11.860 --> 00:32:13.860 So liquor has got to be stamped out. 357 00:32:13.860 --> 00:32:18.860 2. Anything on Sunday except going to church and reading the Bible is going to be stamped out. 358 00:32:18.860 --> 00:32:24.860 Any Sabbath activities whatsoever. And Sabbath is often broadly defined as Sunday plus Saturday night to make sure nobody can enjoy themselves ever. 359 00:32:24.860 --> 00:32:33.860 And 3. The Roman Catholic Church reports of the agent of Satan, the agent of the Antichrist. 360 00:32:33.860 --> 00:32:36.860 These are the three major things that have to be stamped out. 361 00:32:36.860 --> 00:32:45.860 And the public policy on the state and local level and the federal level of the evangelicals for 100 years is the center of these problems, these questions. 362 00:32:45.860 --> 00:32:50.860 On the state and local level, on the immigration level, you try to keep out Catholic immigrants. 363 00:32:50.860 --> 00:32:56.860 They realize they're unconstitutional and do that, so they essentially try to keep out immigrants, period, or else. 364 00:32:56.860 --> 00:32:58.860 What they call Christianize the Catholics. 365 00:32:58.860 --> 00:33:04.860 They have a public school system, a compulsory education, so they force the Catholic kids into public schools so they can be Christianized. 366 00:33:04.860 --> 00:33:10.860 turn on the Protestants. Catholic adults are considered damned anyway. Who cares about them? You get the kids. 367 00:33:10.860 --> 00:33:16.860 So that was the immigration front. Liquor, of course, had to stamp out liquor. 368 00:33:16.860 --> 00:33:25.860 And the Catholic Church and Sabbath activities. Slavery was also central, but the slavery interfered with the salvation of the slave. 369 00:33:25.860 --> 00:33:31.860 That was it. The abolitionism had nothing to do with human rights or anything like that. It was essentially a theological point. 370 00:33:31.860 --> 00:33:38.660 Well, this was their activity, these people, for 100 years, 30 years, until the Civil War. 371 00:33:38.660 --> 00:33:43.620 Of course, in this coalition was first the Whig Party, and then particularly the Republican 372 00:33:43.620 --> 00:33:46.420 Party, which was founded as an evangelical party. 373 00:33:46.420 --> 00:33:50.020 The Republican Party was known throughout the 19th century as a party of great moral 374 00:33:50.020 --> 00:33:54.340 ideas, which means stamping out sin, of course, using the government to stamp out sin. 375 00:33:54.340 --> 00:33:57.340 The Democratic Party was known as the party of personal liberty, which meant they were 376 00:33:57.340 --> 00:34:01.020 saying, well, look, the Democratic Party consists of everybody except evangelicals, in other 377 00:34:01.020 --> 00:34:08.020 with Catholics, Lutherans, secularists, southerners, and we weren't part of this in all, and everybody 378 00:34:08.020 --> 00:34:12.180 else wanted to be left alone with Democrats and the high moral idea of people, crusaders 379 00:34:12.180 --> 00:34:15.660 of fire and sword of the Republicans. 380 00:34:15.660 --> 00:34:21.620 So in this coalition, so that's why the Northern War against the South took on a fanatical 381 00:34:21.620 --> 00:34:22.620 tinge to it. 382 00:34:22.620 --> 00:34:27.780 A cheerful willingness, uprooted institutions, to crush, to kill, to plunder, to loot, to 383 00:34:27.780 --> 00:34:32.420 Target Women, as Tom Plumby pointed out, all of the things with high moral principle 384 00:34:32.420 --> 00:34:36.620 and the perfect world coming up. That's why they could take the high moral ground, because 385 00:34:36.620 --> 00:34:40.100 they're creating a perfect world with the Kingdom of God on Earth. The Communists, in 386 00:34:40.100 --> 00:34:43.100 their way in the 20th century, are quite similar. They thought they were creating a perfect 387 00:34:43.100 --> 00:34:47.100 world. Sure, you have to kill 30 million people. I mean, intelligent Communists. Yeah, yeah. 388 00:34:47.100 --> 00:34:50.780 It's worth it to create the perfect world, a sort of atheist version of the Kingdom of 389 00:34:50.780 --> 00:35:06.780 So we had then the Yankee fanatics with true Patersonian humanitarian legality, Jacobins, Anabaptists, Bolsheviks, the whole bit, all in different forms and doing the same thing. 390 00:35:06.780 --> 00:35:25.500 Of course, now we find the reason for the pseudo-biblical phraseology of the Northern, of the Yankee culture, of the Battle Herald Republic, which sums up, it really blasts from us, Battle Herald Republic, really sums up the secularized version of secular cause, 391 00:35:25.500 --> 00:35:33.980 of making a purely secular cause into a holy crusade, as a perfect evangelical doctrine, pure doctrine. 392 00:35:33.980 --> 00:35:40.380 So the modern left-level historians put this in a slightly different way. 393 00:35:40.380 --> 00:35:44.880 Take, for example, the eminent abolitionist historian of the Civil War, James McPherson. 394 00:35:44.880 --> 00:35:47.880 Somebody mentioned him today, too. 395 00:35:47.880 --> 00:35:50.680 McPherson, in a recent book review, talks about... 396 00:35:50.680 --> 00:35:56.680 He uses the Isaiah Berlin phony distinction between negative liberty and positive liberty. 397 00:35:56.680 --> 00:35:59.280 We're in favor of liberty because we're in favor of both negative and positive. 398 00:35:59.280 --> 00:36:02.180 Negative liberty means people like myself are in favor of the law of rights 399 00:36:02.180 --> 00:36:04.980 Against Intervention, things like that. 400 00:36:04.980 --> 00:36:09.180 So here's McPherson's Positive Liberty Empowerment. 401 00:36:09.180 --> 00:36:12.980 So, negative liberty, says McPherson. 402 00:36:12.980 --> 00:36:14.180 As I say, he means liberty. 403 00:36:14.180 --> 00:36:17.180 Negative liberty is the dominant theme in early American history. 404 00:36:17.180 --> 00:36:19.380 Freedom from constraints on individual rights 405 00:36:19.380 --> 00:36:21.180 deposed by a powerful state. 406 00:36:21.180 --> 00:36:24.580 The Bill of Rights, he goes on, is the classic expression of negative liberty, 407 00:36:24.580 --> 00:36:26.980 or Jeffersonian humanistic liberalism. 408 00:36:26.980 --> 00:36:29.180 These first ten amendments of the Constitution, he says, 409 00:36:29.180 --> 00:36:33.680 to protect individual liberty by placing a straitjacket of shall-nots on the Federal Government. 410 00:36:33.680 --> 00:36:34.680 Yes. 411 00:36:34.680 --> 00:36:41.380 In 1861, McPherson continues, Southern states invoked the negative liberty of state sovereignty 412 00:36:41.380 --> 00:36:44.680 and individual rights of property to break up the United States. 413 00:36:44.680 --> 00:36:49.180 Now, what was McPherson's hero Abraham Lincoln's response? 414 00:36:49.180 --> 00:36:53.180 Lincoln, he writes, quote, thereby gained an opportunity to invoke the positive liberty, 415 00:36:53.180 --> 00:36:58.680 he means, of course, stated in the semi-socialism, the positive liberty of reform liberalism, 416 00:36:58.680 --> 00:37:03.320 Exercise to the Power of the Army and the State, the humanitarian or the guillotine again. 417 00:37:03.320 --> 00:37:06.920 So what would throw the negative liberties of this Union and ownership of slaves? 418 00:37:06.920 --> 00:37:09.600 The interesting thing is of course McPherson says he's a favorite blend of both. 419 00:37:09.600 --> 00:37:12.080 There is no blend of both, either one or the other. 420 00:37:12.080 --> 00:37:15.440 Of course what he's really a favorite is reform liberalism. 421 00:37:15.440 --> 00:37:20.040 Another new model Army at work, the Union Army is another new model Army. 422 00:37:20.040 --> 00:37:26.000 So this is, it seems to me pretty clear the more the reform liberalism powers one group, 423 00:37:26.000 --> 00:37:32.200 The more you're interfering with the so-called negative liberties of another group, it should 424 00:37:32.200 --> 00:37:36.040 be mentioned by the way that slavery, the Southern United States is the only place in 425 00:37:36.040 --> 00:37:40.840 the Western Hemisphere where slavery was abolished by the terrible swift sword. 426 00:37:40.840 --> 00:37:44.840 Every other place in the Western Hemisphere that was abolished peacefully by peaceful compensation 427 00:37:44.840 --> 00:37:45.840 of the slaveholders. 428 00:37:45.840 --> 00:37:48.640 This includes the West Indies and Brazil, I think by itself. 429 00:37:48.640 --> 00:37:54.640 So we do not need a civil war, a terrible monstrous war to get rid of slavery, but we 430 00:37:54.640 --> 00:38:01.640 We need it if we want to have the puritan millennialists at work imposing a kingdom god on earth by fire and sword and plunder. 431 00:38:01.640 --> 00:38:07.640 Okay, in the Republican Party, in this mighty coalition, we're more or less dedicated to this triad, 432 00:38:07.640 --> 00:38:12.640 there were different parts of the coalition, different people stressing different things. 433 00:38:12.640 --> 00:38:16.640 At the very faithful Republican convention of 1860, for example, 434 00:38:16.640 --> 00:38:22.640 the major candidates for president were the two veteran abolitionists, William Seward and the Orbit Salmon and Pete Chase of Ohio. 435 00:38:22.640 --> 00:38:30.640 Seward, however, was distressed about the anti-Catholic hothead. He wasn't anti-Catholic. He was almost pro-Catholic, so he was even distressed about everybody else. That killed him off. 436 00:38:30.640 --> 00:38:35.640 Chase, on the other hand, was very happy to play along with the anti-Catholic know-nothings. He loved them. 437 00:38:35.640 --> 00:38:40.640 On the other hand, he meant he would lose any kind of sort of moderate German Lutheran vote. 438 00:38:40.640 --> 00:38:47.640 So he was distressed about Seward-I, so they sort of knocked each other off, and a dark horse was nominated, Abraham Lincoln. 439 00:38:47.640 --> 00:38:53.040 Abraham Lincoln was able to finesse the Catholic question because his major emphasis was on 440 00:38:53.040 --> 00:38:54.040 economic statism. 441 00:38:54.040 --> 00:38:58.480 He had an old-fashioned wig, his big shtick with high tariffs, partnership of government 442 00:38:58.480 --> 00:39:02.360 and industry, subsidies of big railroads, public works, all the rest of it, sort of 443 00:39:02.360 --> 00:39:04.440 a proto-New Dealer. 444 00:39:04.440 --> 00:39:05.440 So he was a compromised candidate. 445 00:39:05.440 --> 00:39:07.800 The other people didn't care that much about the economic stuff. 446 00:39:07.800 --> 00:39:10.000 They were willing to go along with it. 447 00:39:10.000 --> 00:39:11.640 Abraham Lincoln, who was Lincoln by the way? 448 00:39:11.640 --> 00:39:15.560 The idea was a rail splitter, sort of like Bill Clinton being a heroic figure or something 449 00:39:15.560 --> 00:39:16.560 like that. 450 00:39:16.560 --> 00:39:29.560 It sure used to be a railroad when he was 18 years old, but for his adult life, he was a big shot railroad lawyer. He was the candidate of the Illinois Central Railroad, the biggest railroad of the time. He was Mr. Railroad. 451 00:39:29.560 --> 00:39:41.560 So one reason for his victory at the convention was, for example, that Iowa railroad entrepreneur Granville Dodge, one of my favorite stories about the Civil War, Granville Dodge was a railroad entrepreneur in Iowa. 452 00:39:41.560 --> 00:39:50.560 In return for this, early in the Civil War, Lincoln makes him a general, and his task 453 00:39:50.560 --> 00:39:55.800 is to take a whole bunch of Union soldiers to clear the path of Indians, and nothing 454 00:39:55.800 --> 00:39:58.680 to do with the South, clear the path of Indians so they could construct the Union Pacific 455 00:39:58.680 --> 00:40:02.960 Railroad, which was chartered by Lincoln, the first big government charter, federal government 456 00:40:02.960 --> 00:40:07.760 charter railroad, heavily subsidized by the taxpayer, and so he cleared the path. 457 00:40:07.760 --> 00:40:11.760 In other words, the Union Pacific Railroad was able to socialize the cost of construction 458 00:40:11.760 --> 00:40:16.280 by using the U.S. Army, the conscript army, to wipe out Indians. 459 00:40:16.280 --> 00:40:21.040 And then, Rembo Dodger, having done his constructive work, retires from the army, becomes one of 460 00:40:21.040 --> 00:40:22.560 the owners of the Union Pacific Railroad. 461 00:40:22.560 --> 00:40:24.560 That was the Dodge-Lincoln connection. 462 00:40:24.560 --> 00:40:29.400 It was the military-industrial complex at full blast. 463 00:40:29.400 --> 00:40:32.200 So the Republican Party was shot through with this stuff. 464 00:40:32.200 --> 00:40:35.880 The whole Lincoln and Grant administration, essentially one big boodle after the other. 465 00:40:35.880 --> 00:40:39.880 on the enormous boom. Unbelievably racket. 466 00:40:39.880 --> 00:40:47.880 Anyway, the, so this is the, his major focus was on forcing a protective tariff. 467 00:40:47.880 --> 00:40:52.880 Another reason he got nominated was the Pennsylvania delegation was mostly interested in protective tariff. 468 00:40:52.880 --> 00:40:56.880 They, of course, were abolitionists and all that, but their big thing was protective tariff. 469 00:40:56.880 --> 00:41:02.880 Pennsylvania was the home of the iron and steel industry from almost, you know, early 1815 on. 470 00:41:02.880 --> 00:41:12.880 The iron and steel industry, my least favorite industry in America, has been always inefficient, ever since its existence, always calling for protective tariff or subsidies for import quotas, always bowling for federal aid. 471 00:41:12.880 --> 00:41:22.880 And so they were, they essentially ran Pennsylvania as a Republican party, and so, since he was a sound on the tariff question, Pennsylvania and the globe went to Lincoln. 472 00:41:22.880 --> 00:41:35.880 And as Lew Rockwell pointed out, the first thing, practically the first thing Lincoln did was the, Lincoln Congress did was to raise the tariff, it was the highest point in American history, the moral tariff, and the tariff was raised ten times after that during the Lincoln administration. 473 00:41:35.880 --> 00:41:46.880 And then again, on Fort Sumter, interesting enough, as again, Lew also pointed out, the point of Fort Sumter was, and Lincoln said in his first inaugural, well slavery you don't care about, we've got to collect those taxes. 474 00:41:46.880 --> 00:41:52.880 and Southern Taxes, you see from Southern ports, Charleston and New Orleans were two big Southern ports, 475 00:41:52.880 --> 00:41:57.880 Fort Sumter was guarding Charleston Harbor and he wanted to keep Fort Sumter to collect those tariffs 476 00:41:57.880 --> 00:42:03.880 and of course he then maneuvered the South into firing the first shot at Fort Sumter. 477 00:42:03.880 --> 00:42:09.880 But the tariffs and taxes were a key point for Lincoln and the Republican Party. 478 00:42:09.880 --> 00:42:14.880 Lying to South Carolina, Abraham Lincoln managed to deal with Franklin Roosevelt and Henry Stimson 479 00:42:44.880 --> 00:42:50.880 In honoring the Southerners, the Fire and Forth Sumter, that movement for Thurgood Pharisee 480 00:42:50.880 --> 00:42:51.880 collapsed. 481 00:42:51.880 --> 00:42:52.880 Well, I honored the Copperheads. 482 00:42:52.880 --> 00:42:55.880 To me, the Copperheads were one of the great groups in American history. 483 00:42:55.880 --> 00:43:00.880 The Copperheads were the pro-Southern Northerners against the war, won a negotiated peace. 484 00:43:00.880 --> 00:43:06.880 My particular hero was Charles O'Connor, the head of the New York City bar, distinguished 485 00:43:06.880 --> 00:43:11.880 lawyer, who was Jefferson Davis' lawyer for his treating trial, whichever it came about 486 00:43:11.880 --> 00:43:12.880 after the war. 487 00:43:12.880 --> 00:43:21.880 to the war, and he was a libertarian, paleo-libertarian to the hilt, to the hilt. He was a great guy and he was, of course, very anti-war. 488 00:43:21.880 --> 00:43:24.880 New York City almost seceded from the North during the war. 489 00:43:24.880 --> 00:43:28.880 Mayor Fernando would want to secede a free trade with the South. 490 00:43:28.880 --> 00:43:38.880 There was a sound sentiment, there were big rap riots in New York, the attack of rap which went off in days, another heroic libertarian gesture. 491 00:43:38.880 --> 00:43:53.880 And by the way, Charles O'Connor told at the end of his life, when the democratic party, his beloved party, picked Horace Greeley of all things, an idiot, a socialist, a protectionist, picked Horace Greeley as the presidential candidate, 492 00:43:53.880 --> 00:44:02.880 Conor formed the straight democrat ticket in 1972, ran for president. Nobody's ever written on this. I don't think one historian has ever written on this great ticket. 493 00:44:02.880 --> 00:44:11.880 Anyway, so that's, Lincoln and, what else did the Republican Party do when they took over, in addition to butchery, of course. 494 00:44:11.880 --> 00:44:22.880 They took advantage of the one party, more or less one party Congress to push through the entire Whig Republican economic program. 495 00:44:22.880 --> 00:44:29.880 High tariffs, like I said already, huge railroad land grants, railroad subsidies, sin taxes on alcohol and tobacco, 496 00:44:29.880 --> 00:44:35.880 You can't imagine how cheap liquor was before the Civil War. 497 00:44:35.880 --> 00:44:41.880 A gallon of good scotch for 20 cents or something. Forget about price inflation. It was magnificent. 498 00:44:41.880 --> 00:44:46.880 He ruined that. The income tax for the first time in American history, the monstrous income tax, 499 00:44:46.880 --> 00:44:54.880 Ludwig von Lincoln, and of course paper money, the fiat money, and nationalizing the banking system, 500 00:44:54.880 --> 00:44:57.880 and every rotten thing you can think of is in my Lincoln. 501 00:44:57.880 --> 00:45:04.880 Plus, the conscription comes in a huge scale, massive conscription to get these people to fight. 502 00:45:04.880 --> 00:45:11.880 The right of habeas corpus was suspended, arrest of dissenters, civil liberties were attacked, everything else. 503 00:45:11.880 --> 00:45:13.880 The whole thing is absolutely monstrous. 504 00:45:13.880 --> 00:45:15.880 What I heard, by the way, is interesting. 505 00:45:15.880 --> 00:45:20.880 I heard that my old friend, the late Mel Brackard, was denied the post of national endowment 506 00:45:20.880 --> 00:45:25.640 Manatee's chairman early in the Reagan administration because he was anti-Lincoln, which made him 507 00:45:25.640 --> 00:45:26.640 a fascist. 508 00:45:26.640 --> 00:45:27.640 I said, what do you mean? 509 00:45:27.640 --> 00:45:28.640 Lincoln was a frickin' big fascist. 510 00:45:28.640 --> 00:45:29.640 Why are they doing him that? 511 00:45:29.640 --> 00:45:38.640 On the religious, I just want to say about Lincoln, on the religious front, I don't think 512 00:45:38.640 --> 00:45:44.360 Lincoln was very religious, but he went along with the culture. 513 00:45:44.360 --> 00:45:50.320 He was apparently very sober and stern, he was personally opposed to alcohol and tobacco, 514 00:45:50.320 --> 00:45:54.320 And he's opposed to the private carrying of guns, by the way, one of the first gun controllers. 515 00:45:54.320 --> 00:45:58.320 He's also, of course, running for president since almost as early as those. 516 00:45:58.320 --> 00:46:03.320 He also acted viciously toward his own humble family in Kentucky. 517 00:46:03.320 --> 00:46:05.320 He repudiated his entire family. 518 00:46:05.320 --> 00:46:07.320 He's having to do with them. 519 00:46:07.320 --> 00:46:12.320 He dumped his fiancee to marry a wealthier girl, Mary Todd, 520 00:46:12.320 --> 00:46:14.320 whose family were friends of Henry Clay. 521 00:46:14.320 --> 00:46:17.320 Coming up... 522 00:46:17.320 --> 00:46:19.320 He repudiates his own family, 523 00:46:19.320 --> 00:46:22.320 But then the whole world becomes his family, right? 524 00:46:22.320 --> 00:46:25.320 The Union becomes his god, the mystical Union. 525 00:46:25.320 --> 00:46:29.320 As a matter of fact, he prefigured our own beloved Mario Cuomo in New York, 526 00:46:29.320 --> 00:46:33.320 by declaring the Union was really a family, 527 00:46:33.320 --> 00:46:36.320 bound indissolubly together by the most intimate organic bonds. 528 00:46:36.320 --> 00:46:39.320 In a few days, it's his own family, and he takes the Union, 529 00:46:39.320 --> 00:46:42.320 its non-existent thing out there, as his family. 530 00:46:42.320 --> 00:46:48.320 This is, I think, typical of the Union, you know, liberalism in action, that's what it is. 531 00:46:48.320 --> 00:46:54.040 So, and the difference, I think, between the British and the North, again, the British 532 00:46:54.040 --> 00:46:58.240 were at least loyal to an existing person, the King, that was there, you know, at least 533 00:46:58.240 --> 00:46:59.240 coherent. 534 00:46:59.240 --> 00:47:03.920 The North was loyal, engaged in monstrous war, plunder and mass murder and destruction 535 00:47:03.920 --> 00:47:07.520 and assault of women and all the rest of it, and allegiance to a mystical non-existent 536 00:47:07.520 --> 00:47:12.000 entity, the Union, which would have been totally illogical, totally absurd. 537 00:47:12.000 --> 00:47:16.000 This becomes the God of the North. 538 00:47:16.000 --> 00:47:24.000 There is no heresy greater and no political theory more pernicious than sacralizing the secular and make a secular institution a divine entity. 539 00:47:24.000 --> 00:47:38.000 To conclude, in this war between the states, it seems clear to me that the South fought for a sacred honor, no question about that, for an honorable war. 540 00:47:38.000 --> 00:47:42.000 The Northern war, however, was very opposite of honorable. 541 00:47:42.000 --> 00:47:58.000 Remember the care about international law. The North targeted civilians and targeted women and targeted civilians. First off, it destroyed civilian life, it destroyed civilian institutions. Sherman's infamous march through Georgia was just part of it, just the most famous part of this. 542 00:47:58.000 --> 00:48:09.000 The idea is to starve and kill a thousand in submission. So by targeting and butchering civilians, Lincoln and Grant and Sherman paved the way for all the genocide and horrors of the monstrous 20th century. 543 00:48:09.000 --> 00:48:14.840 There's been a lot of talk in recent years about memory, about never forgetting, capital 544 00:48:14.840 --> 00:48:20.600 N, capital F, about history's retroactive punishment for crimes of war and mass murder. 545 00:48:20.600 --> 00:48:24.720 The great libertarian historian Lord Acton put it that the historian who lasted analysis 546 00:48:24.720 --> 00:48:25.720 must be a moral judge. 547 00:48:25.720 --> 00:48:31.040 The muse of the historian who wrote about Cleo of Atamancus, the legendary avenger of 548 00:48:31.040 --> 00:48:32.040 innocent blood. 549 00:48:32.040 --> 00:48:36.560 All right, in that spirit, we must always remember, we must never forget, we must put 550 00:48:36.560 --> 00:48:41.320 in the Dock and Hang Higher than Heyman, those who in modern times opened the Pandora's Box 551 00:48:41.320 --> 00:48:46.320 of Genocide and the extermination of civilian Shermans Grant and Lincoln. 552 00:48:46.320 --> 00:49:01.320 Perhaps someday, their statue, like Lenin's in Russia, will be toppled and melted down. 553 00:49:01.320 --> 00:49:12.320 They are insignias and battle flags will be desecrated. They are war songs tossed into the flame. 554 00:49:12.320 --> 00:49:20.320 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. 555 00:49:20.320 --> 00:49:30.320 The classic comment on that meretricious TV series, that rotten series of Civil War, is made by that marvelous and feisty Great Southern writer, Florence King, one of my favorite writers. 556 00:49:30.320 --> 00:49:37.320 As 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. 557 00:49:42.320 --> 00:49:49.320 And that spirit, I'm sure that one day, aided and averted by northerners like myself and the glorious Copperhead tradition, the South shall rise again. 558 00:50:00.320 --> 00:50:02.320 Thank you very much.