The concept of just war is kind of interesting because you don't really just have to justify.
The concept of justice doesn't apply, say, to this delicious dinner we just ate.
Nobody said that was a just dinner or unjust dinner.
So justice applies to actions which are killing, which war is, a mass killing.
And obviously, since the acts of killing are grave actions, they have to be justified in some way,
vindicated or justified.
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,
much of their literature is developing the criteria of a just war. What is a just war? Well, it's an unjust war.
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.
That's a just war, in my point of view.
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.
That's a fairly simple, I think, and direct criteria.
Now, I admit there is some room for fuzzy interpretation of what constitutes a menace of impending nomination that might justify going to war.
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.
So, you don't want to go that far. So, what is the criterion for an impending or threat?
My own preference, as always, is for strict construction.
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.
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.
Anything else, I think, is illegitimate.
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.
in pursuit of the unjust goal of coercive domination over all the peoples,
or at very best, conjuring up alleged threats that have seriously been either clear or present.
I've had a reputation as an anti-war activist because in my own lifetime,
my ideological activism has been generally focused in opposition to America's wars.
First, because I believe I'm waging them to be unjust,
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,
who said, war has always been the health of the state.
It's the instrument for aggrandizing state power over the health of lives, the prosperity of the subject citizens and the social institutions.
So even a just war can't be entered into lightly. An unjust war, of course, has to be a national one.
Some people have thought I've been a pacifist because I've been opposed to wars, but surely
in all kinds of pacifism, a pacifist for example, who championed the death penalty for violent
criminals as well as caving for vandals, not your common warden variety of pacifists.
The point is, I think that there are two wars in American history that I think have been
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.
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.
And these two wars, both of these wars, Americans are trying to rid themselves of unwanted domination by other people.
In both cases, the other side ferociously tried to maintain their coercive rule over Americans who wanted to rule themselves.
In each case, our side, if you will, one side was notably just, the other side, unjust.
These two just wars in American history have been the American Revolution and the War for Southern Independence.
At this point, I'd like to mention just a few vital features of the treatment of war by classical international lawyers.
One, they dealt with just wars. This is a war of just and unjust.
The other aspect of what they were dealing with is, what are the limitations on war?
Should war be unlimited? And even a just war.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The enemy countries could not interfere with shipping goods to the other side.
The only thing they could interfere with was contraband, which was very narrowly defined as arms and ammunition, and that's it.
I mean, that's just food and medical supplies.
Anything else, industrial material, everything, capital goods, machinery, that has to pass.
in the past. You could not blockade and keep out neutral rights.
This is of course meant that every side, every country expected to be one time or another neutral.
They wanted to preserve their rights. They didn't want to be international pariahs for the rest of the centuries.
And so it's more or less these principles are observed, at least during the 19th century.
And observed more and more over time. This was sort of the laws of civilized warfare, limiting warfare.
Don't target civilians and keep neutrals out of it. Allow neutrals to proceed.
So, in the old days, for example, as I say, neutrality is considered not just justifiable, but a positive virtue.
In the old days, he kept us out of war. It was a high tribute to a president or any political leader.
But now, of course, all the pundits and professors condemn any president who, quote,
The only day standing idly by was considered an act of high statesmanship, and as I say,
new fools had rights, you couldn't interfere with new fools.
So in modern international law, we have a very different situation, starting with Woodrow
The Evil Woodrow Wilson, continuing on since.
Both of these, by the way, criteria, both of these modern law criteria are developed by Wilson.
And one of them is that so-called collective security against aggression.
You figure out, this country is fighting each other all the time, there's wars all the time.
Let's say the Hoodoos and the Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi is a good laboratory taste.
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.
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.
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.
The model of this was the cop on the corner. This was the famous idea of the International Police Force,
the League of Nations, the UN, the US, NATO, whatever other collective security, whatever alphabet arrangement they've got.
So the idea is if a war breaks out somewhere, first you find who the bad guys are.
How the hell do you know? They say they're thousands of miles away from the action.
Who knows? You get some CNN TV camera coming in, you shoot somebody in action,
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.
It's overly soul-satisfying, conceptually easy.
There are, however, certain problems with this. In the first place, what's aggressive?
I mean, the cop on the corner, if you see somebody mugging somebody else, it's pretty clear who the aggressor is.
The cop comes in and zaps the mugger. It's simple.
International relations are not that easy. Who knows what the just boundary is?
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.
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?
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.
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.
That was a wonderful point.
With Wilsonianism, you have very different situations.
One is you have to find the aggressor, and that has happened.
The interesting thing, for example, in Bosnia, it's very interesting.
You have to demonize one group.
In order to get the American suckers to intervene in the rest of the United Nations, you have to have one evil demon.
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.
But then it turns out the Croats and the Monsignans were also killing people and they got a chance, killing civilians.
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?
If all sides are somehow bad, that's not going to fly.
The warmongers have to create a situation where the Serbs are pure evil, somehow the devil is anointed in them as evil,
Everybody else are good and victims and wonderful and believers of freedom and democracy and all the other crap.
And that's the...
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.
Which leaves a gap in the situation.
So that's the one of the Wilsonian, vicious, pernicious Wilsonian arguments.
You have to find the aggressor and zap him.
The other, of course, argument is, you have to, in the United States and every other country,
you've got to impose democracy and human rights throughout the world.
This is even worse in a sense.
In other words, we've got now a situation where, I mean, democracy and human rights
don't exist very many places in the world.
I don't want to disillusion many people here, but there's very few places, very few places
we have this situation.
And now it's the God-given assignment for the United States to go and impose democracy
throughout the world, everywhere, every place, regardless.
So now you have Charles Beard, and somebody mentioned that this weekend too, Charles Beard
said that the policy of stamping out aggression, collective security of aggression, is a policy
of perpetual war for perpetual peace, and the pursuit of world perpetual peace you have
to keep fighting constantly.
Now you have the other part of the equation, the perpetual war to impose human rights and
democracy everywhere.
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.
In addition to that, the idea of using war, of imposing democracy and human rights by the sword, is kind of odd anyway.
And the Samanian intervention, to me, is a beautiful case study of this. I mean, it's perfect.
If you remember the Wilsonian Greenman practice, he had a situation, and the entire left, by the way, loved it.
They loved the Somalian intervention because there was no American interest at all, conceivable interest in Somalia.
Nothing. No resources, no fighting against communism, nothing. Zippo.
No strategic sea routes. They couldn't find anything.
So the left, the allegedly anti-war left, they all loved the Somalian intervention because,
Because America has no interest in it, therefore it's good.
To me it's totally bizarre.
The whole culture is crazy and that's part of it.
So now when the Somalian intervention came in, they extolled, if you remember the press
in that period, for a few heady months.
They extolled a new kind of army, what we can call a new modern army.
Apologies to Cromwell.
Engaging a new kind of high moral intervention.
The U.S. soldier with a care package on one hand and a gun on the other.
So we're bringing food and peace and human rights to the masses,
in the meantime we're bringing a gun.
So that, we're bringing democracy and peace and human rights
into the United Peoples of Somalia and doing it nobly and altruistically.
Well, it worked for about two months, if it had worked that much.
And then, of course, everything hits the fan.
The consequences show up.
We wind up with every Somalian virtually hating the United States,
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.
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.
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,
for the War for Democracy and Human Rights and Peace and Unending Peace and all that.
So they were able to seize the high moral ground, and apparently they were not successfully challenged on this.
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,
for mass murder, for perpetual war, and a spokesman for the merchants of death, a great phrase that should be revived.
So a warmonger was not considered a high moral person.
I bring up the cause of human rights, so-called, because this, of course, is precisely the
critical argument which, at least in retrospect, Father Abraham's war of Northern aggression
against the South was justified and even glorified.
The humanitarian, again with a gun, with butchery in his wake, writes the wrongs of slavery
by mass murder, destruction of property and institutions, and wreaking havoc which has
still not disappeared.
This is about Patterson, one of the great essays on political philosophy of the century,
zeroing in on what she aptly called the humanitarian or the guillotine, those of us who read my
art review on Chronicles, I apologize for repeating it, I think this is great stuff.
She wrote, the humanitarian wishes to be a prime mover in the lives of others.
He cannot admit either the divine or the natural order by which men have the power to help themselves.
The humanitarian puts himself in the place of God.
But Mrs. Patterson notes, the humanitarian is confronted by two awkward facts.
First, the company do not need his assistance.
And second, the majority of the people, if un-perverted, positively do not want to be done good by the humanitarian, unquote.
Having considered what the good of others might be and who is to decide on the good, and on what to do about it,
Mrs. Patterson points out, quote, of course what the humanitarian actually proposes is that he should do what he thinks is good for everybody.
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.
Point by point, I said, I don't know why.
Most of my friends and colleagues are hesitant to concede the existence of universal natural rights.
I believe in natural rights.
But I think one of the problems is they worry they might find themselves forced to support American or worldwide intervention
to try to enforce these rights everywhere.
Well, I think the resolution of this is that classical national law and international jurists,
they weren't in favor of universal collective security or enforcement of rights.
If, for example, Tutsis are slaughtering hoodoos in Rwanda, or vice versa,
the natural lawyers would have said, look, it's too bad, it violates the natural rights of the hoodoos or Tutsis,
but that doesn't mean anybody else should leap in and do something about it. Quite the contrary.
We might encapsulate this position into a slogan. This is my slogan for the night.
Rights may be universal, but their enforcement must be local.
Order without the motto of the Irish revolution, fame, ourselves alone.
We want to enforce our rights, we should do it ourselves.
We're not going to expect everybody else to do it for us.
We've got rights, we've got to do something about it.
This, of course, would be American revolutionaries.
American revolutionaries were happy to accept French aid, but they were prepared,
they pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to do it themselves.
So, to put it another way, I mentioned environmentalists a minute ago. I've always believed that when
the loony left claims that all sorts of entities have rights, animals, alligators, trees, plants,
rocks, beaches, the earth, the ecology, quote unquote, the proper response is, okay, when
those entities act like Americans in the American Revolution, they set forth a declaration,
and then they take up arms to support their rights, then I can take them seriously.
Although I shut up.
Let us now turn to America's two just wars.
It plainly evidenced to me that the American Revolution was a just war.
It was a war of peoples forming an independent nation and casting off the bonds of another
people, insisting on perpetuating rule over them.
Obviously, the Americans, while welcoming French support, decided to do it on their own.
What I want to stress here is not so much the grievances, which are mostly taxation in order to extend from it,
but the fact that the grounds on which they stood for this solemn act of separation,
the political philosophy in those days, basically the old-fashioned political philosophy,
which was getting obsolete by the 18th century, was that the king is sovereign, the king is divine,
of the Divine Powers, everybody else is subordinated to the king, and any rebellion against the
king is evil and satanic. This was basically the theory of order. That wasn't working too
well in the United States, especially in America, but even so, even with the, what might I say,
the conservative natural, that was the theory of order, the divine sovereignty. Among the
One of the contractual theorists, natural law theorists, Hugo Rochas and other Rochians
were conservatives. They believed that people were originally sovereign. They delegated a
power so the king laid back at some misty wood. But then it's perpetual. The king has
to keep it forever and they can't get it back. This seems to me and seems to other more radical
natural rights people as being inconsistent. And so, Paul of Ronde de Mariana, one of my
favorite people in The Theory of Political Thought, Spanish Jesuit scholastic, John Locke
and his followers, they said, no, look, if we delegated our powers to the king, and the
king turns out to be a bad guy and violates his trust, we can take it back. Why can't
we take these powers back? So the theory, this is essentially a theory of the American
Revolutionary. So we delegated certain powers to the king, he violated it, we're taking
it back. It was a contractual theory of government. Government by the just consent of the governed
and not by some divine sovereignty. Now whether or not you agree with that, it seems to me
The American Revolution was founded on that principle, that this is the contractual compact
theory of government.
And interestingly enough, by the way, as well known, it was a big psychological thing for
the American Revolution, it was to break with the king.
They called him that they didn't give a damn about, called him that they hated and that
was it.
Remember the Declaration of Independence says, no mention of problem, it's all the
king, the king has done this, the king is evil, blah, blah, blah, but they had to break
this cord with the king.
It was a terrible thing for them, they had all taken oaths of allegiance to the king,
The king was a real person. Unlike the so-called Union, which I'll come to a minute, the king was real, okay?
So, they had a break with the king with a powerful problem with him, and Tom Paine's common sense essentially did that.
He knew in the terms of the New Left, Paine's common sense, de-sacrifice, de-legitimatize the king.
He said, the king of Great Britain, Tom Paine wrote, is only to the senate of, quote,
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.
And now he says the kings are, the royal brood of Great Britain are but crown ruffians.
This is a powerful thing for Americans, for American psychology.
And they only broke with the king about a year after the war started.
The American Revolution started in the spring of 1775 and only by July of 1776 were we able to make the break.
Okay, so government, the American Republic is founded on contractual and withdrawing consent from the king, from the government.
Now what happens is that every, the 13 colonies, each of the 13 colonies form 13 separate contractual republics.
Each of them are based on libertarian doctrine, on classical republican models.
In each case they set up independent sovereign states with powers of government strictly limited.
I think the first time in human history they had a written constitution whose purpose was to strictly limit the powers of the government.
The powers reserved for the people, the checks and balances and everything else they're trying to limit.
They're very suspicious of all government power, even local government power.
They want to keep it limited, keep their eye on it all the time and zap it whenever it gets strong.
And each of those 13 republics did that.
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.
Then they decided, after about a decade later, to scrap the Articles of the Confederation, adopt a new constitution.
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.
Okay, the 13 states said, okay, we think the Articles are now insufficient, whatever, and we're going to form the Constitution.
It would be very peculiar to hold that the American revolutionaries had repudiated their Pledge of Allegiance to a real king in order to,
and then, a couple of years later, scrapped the article of the Federation in order to sign up to adopt the Constitution,
which they consider to be totally perpetual, like a one-way Venus flytrap.
Once you adopt it, you're finished forever. You can't get out.
Can you imagine if the Constitution was hardly ratified as it was?
I mean, most of the majority of the public is against the Constitution anyway.
Can you imagine them doing it if they knew this was a one-way ticket to disaster, to suicide?
Of course not.
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.
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.
Once the act of adopting the Union was adopted, it was a one-way ticket. That's it.
As I say, kamikaze for sovereignty.
In 1861, the southern states, believing correctly that their cherished institutions were under grave threat,
I think they were, and under assault from federal government,
they decided to exercise a natural, contractual and constitutional right to enroll the CC from that Union.
and they came together in another confederation, the Confederated States of America.
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,
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.
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.
In both cases, the courageous Cedars pledged to each other their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.
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.
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.
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.
The general search warrants were searching for customs, you know, customs booty.
is all connected with taxes, and the southern core is also mostly connected with taxes and high tariffs,
as Lew Rockwell pointed out today, bleeding the South in order to create inefficient southern, inefficient northern manufacturers and shippers.
So, and again, I'm not going to go into this whole thing about taxes, but John C. Calhoun was a brilliant tax analyst.
The very existence of government, the very existence of taxation creates conflicting classes.
This is not a Marxist theory of class struggle, it's a libertarian theory of class struggle.
Namely, once you've got a government, some people are living off taxes and other people are paying it.
Bureaucrats don't pay taxes. A guy who works for the government doesn't pay taxes.
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.
The 10,000 is simply fiction. It's accounting fiction that justifies his existence to the rest of the poor public.
One of the interesting things, coming from New York as I do, the United Nations, the beloved United Nations,
the bureaucrats there pay no taxes at all. And people are indignant, yeah, they pay no taxes.
It's great, but of course they're more candid about it than the United States government.
They just don't pay taxes. The United States government, the accounting fiction is preserved.
And so in zeroing in on the tariff is a key question. Calhoun pointed out, quote,
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
and an undue proportion appropriated to the North and for monopolization of Northern industry.
Of course we know that somebody mentioned again today, this week, the first South Carolina threat of nullification came about
because of the tariff of abomination of 1828, the evil high tariff of 1828.
Here, what about the opposition of these two just wars?
It seems to me plainly evidently just.
Both the opponents were unjust.
The British, what was the British motivation?
The British wanted to hold on to their empire.
It's fairly clear why they wanted to hold on to their empire.
They wanted to believe they were the Americans.
In a sense, it's coherent, at least.
What were the motivations of the North?
That's to me more interesting.
Why, in the famous words of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison,
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.
Why didn't they let him go? Why didn't they let the Souths D.C.? What was the point?
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.
Now, contrasting about most people, the Yankees are not just people who lived in the North.
The Yankees were a specific ethno-cultural group, started in New England, then spread
out, they're very mobile.
They migrated upstate New York to northern Indiana, northern Illinois, eastern Ohio,
and places around the Great Lakes, and they were the major proponents of this stuff, abolitionism
and general coercion.
The Yankees had been swept up by a new form of Protestantism around 1830, a new form as
Phenomenal and emotional neopuranism, driven by a fervent post-millennialism, which held
as a precondition for the second advent of Jesus Christ, man must set up a thousand-year
kingdom gone on earth.
Lord, if a Jesus were alive, you have to have a thousand-year kingdom gone on earth, set
up by man.
Okay, and what's a thousand-year kingdom going to look like?
Well, that's been contested, it's a little vague, but one thing's pretty clear, it has
to be perfect society.
To be a thousand-year kingdom, people have got to be perfect. How do you get perfect people?
Well, there are different ways of going about it.
In the Anabaptists of the 16th century, you slaughter all the heretics. That was the way you get perfect people.
Perfect people are defined as those who are followers of XYZ, the Messiah.
You slaughter everybody else, you have a perfect world, right?
Okay, so this is...
The Northern Yankees didn't exactly want to slaughter everybody right away
because the immediate slaughter was sort of discredited from the 16th century on.
What they wanted to do was to shape everybody else, stamp out sin fairly gradually.
Gradually doesn't mean really gradually. It means by saying 50 years.
50 years is always sort of a big post-millennial thing.
In 50 years we'll set up a kingdom of God on earth.
And very early in the game the Yankees realized in order to do this they have to turn the government to do it.
You can't stamp out sin without government.
Of course the Yankees have always been in favor of government anyway.
They were always itching for coercion.
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.
So they were primed for this anyway, and so they took to this as a duck taste of water.
And Yankee evangelical post-millennialism essentially was this.
First of all, you have to stamp out sin to set up a kingdom.
Second of all, if you don't do your best, you damn this and set up to stamp out sin, you will be damned.
You can only achieve salvation by maximizing the occasion for salvation of everybody else.
These people are very energetic fanatics, because they want to be saved themselves.
In order to do that, they have to try to save everybody else.
The other people don't like it, you set up a guillotine, you set up a sword of fire.
According to the Yankee doctrine, sin was very broadly defined.
And essentially, if you remember the old shadow radio commercial, radio series, anything which might cloud men's minds.
So anything which might cloud men's minds so they couldn't achieve salvation has to be stamped out as sin.
The mind clouding is as follows.
Liquor, demon rum, has to be stamped out.
Obviously liquor could cloud your mind, okay?
But it's permanent and it has a story.
So liquor has got to be stamped out.
2. Anything on Sunday except going to church and reading the Bible is going to be stamped out.
Any Sabbath activities whatsoever. And Sabbath is often broadly defined as Sunday plus Saturday night to make sure nobody can enjoy themselves ever.
And 3. The Roman Catholic Church reports of the agent of Satan, the agent of the Antichrist.
These are the three major things that have to be stamped out.
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.
On the state and local level, on the immigration level, you try to keep out Catholic immigrants.
They realize they're unconstitutional and do that, so they essentially try to keep out immigrants, period, or else.
What they call Christianize the Catholics.
They have a public school system, a compulsory education, so they force the Catholic kids into public schools so they can be Christianized.
turn on the Protestants. Catholic adults are considered damned anyway. Who cares about them? You get the kids.
So that was the immigration front. Liquor, of course, had to stamp out liquor.
And the Catholic Church and Sabbath activities. Slavery was also central, but the slavery interfered with the salvation of the slave.
That was it. The abolitionism had nothing to do with human rights or anything like that. It was essentially a theological point.
Well, this was their activity, these people, for 100 years, 30 years, until the Civil War.
Of course, in this coalition was first the Whig Party, and then particularly the Republican
Party, which was founded as an evangelical party.
The Republican Party was known throughout the 19th century as a party of great moral
ideas, which means stamping out sin, of course, using the government to stamp out sin.
The Democratic Party was known as the party of personal liberty, which meant they were
saying, well, look, the Democratic Party consists of everybody except evangelicals, in other
with Catholics, Lutherans, secularists, southerners, and we weren't part of this in all, and everybody
else wanted to be left alone with Democrats and the high moral idea of people, crusaders
of fire and sword of the Republicans.
So in this coalition, so that's why the Northern War against the South took on a fanatical
tinge to it.
A cheerful willingness, uprooted institutions, to crush, to kill, to plunder, to loot, to
Target Women, as Tom Plumby pointed out, all of the things with high moral principle
and the perfect world coming up. That's why they could take the high moral ground, because
they're creating a perfect world with the Kingdom of God on Earth. The Communists, in
their way in the 20th century, are quite similar. They thought they were creating a perfect
world. Sure, you have to kill 30 million people. I mean, intelligent Communists. Yeah, yeah.
It's worth it to create the perfect world, a sort of atheist version of the Kingdom of
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.
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,
of making a purely secular cause into a holy crusade, as a perfect evangelical doctrine, pure doctrine.
So the modern left-level historians put this in a slightly different way.
Take, for example, the eminent abolitionist historian of the Civil War, James McPherson.
Somebody mentioned him today, too.
McPherson, in a recent book review, talks about...
He uses the Isaiah Berlin phony distinction between negative liberty and positive liberty.
We're in favor of liberty because we're in favor of both negative and positive.
Negative liberty means people like myself are in favor of the law of rights
Against Intervention, things like that.
So here's McPherson's Positive Liberty Empowerment.
So, negative liberty, says McPherson.
As I say, he means liberty.
Negative liberty is the dominant theme in early American history.
Freedom from constraints on individual rights
deposed by a powerful state.
The Bill of Rights, he goes on, is the classic expression of negative liberty,
or Jeffersonian humanistic liberalism.
These first ten amendments of the Constitution, he says,
to protect individual liberty by placing a straitjacket of shall-nots on the Federal Government.
Yes.
In 1861, McPherson continues, Southern states invoked the negative liberty of state sovereignty
and individual rights of property to break up the United States.
Now, what was McPherson's hero Abraham Lincoln's response?
Lincoln, he writes, quote, thereby gained an opportunity to invoke the positive liberty,
he means, of course, stated in the semi-socialism, the positive liberty of reform liberalism,
Exercise to the Power of the Army and the State, the humanitarian or the guillotine again.
So what would throw the negative liberties of this Union and ownership of slaves?
The interesting thing is of course McPherson says he's a favorite blend of both.
There is no blend of both, either one or the other.
Of course what he's really a favorite is reform liberalism.
Another new model Army at work, the Union Army is another new model Army.
So this is, it seems to me pretty clear the more the reform liberalism powers one group,
The more you're interfering with the so-called negative liberties of another group, it should
be mentioned by the way that slavery, the Southern United States is the only place in
the Western Hemisphere where slavery was abolished by the terrible swift sword.
Every other place in the Western Hemisphere that was abolished peacefully by peaceful compensation
of the slaveholders.
This includes the West Indies and Brazil, I think by itself.
So we do not need a civil war, a terrible monstrous war to get rid of slavery, but we
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.
Okay, in the Republican Party, in this mighty coalition, we're more or less dedicated to this triad,
there were different parts of the coalition, different people stressing different things.
At the very faithful Republican convention of 1860, for example,
the major candidates for president were the two veteran abolitionists, William Seward and the Orbit Salmon and Pete Chase of Ohio.
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.
Chase, on the other hand, was very happy to play along with the anti-Catholic know-nothings. He loved them.
On the other hand, he meant he would lose any kind of sort of moderate German Lutheran vote.
So he was distressed about Seward-I, so they sort of knocked each other off, and a dark horse was nominated, Abraham Lincoln.
Abraham Lincoln was able to finesse the Catholic question because his major emphasis was on
economic statism.
He had an old-fashioned wig, his big shtick with high tariffs, partnership of government
and industry, subsidies of big railroads, public works, all the rest of it, sort of
a proto-New Dealer.
So he was a compromised candidate.
The other people didn't care that much about the economic stuff.
They were willing to go along with it.
Abraham Lincoln, who was Lincoln by the way?
The idea was a rail splitter, sort of like Bill Clinton being a heroic figure or something
like that.
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.
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.
In return for this, early in the Civil War, Lincoln makes him a general, and his task
is to take a whole bunch of Union soldiers to clear the path of Indians, and nothing
to do with the South, clear the path of Indians so they could construct the Union Pacific
Railroad, which was chartered by Lincoln, the first big government charter, federal government
charter railroad, heavily subsidized by the taxpayer, and so he cleared the path.
In other words, the Union Pacific Railroad was able to socialize the cost of construction
by using the U.S. Army, the conscript army, to wipe out Indians.
And then, Rembo Dodger, having done his constructive work, retires from the army, becomes one of
the owners of the Union Pacific Railroad.
That was the Dodge-Lincoln connection.
It was the military-industrial complex at full blast.
So the Republican Party was shot through with this stuff.
The whole Lincoln and Grant administration, essentially one big boodle after the other.
on the enormous boom. Unbelievably racket.
Anyway, the, so this is the, his major focus was on forcing a protective tariff.
Another reason he got nominated was the Pennsylvania delegation was mostly interested in protective tariff.
They, of course, were abolitionists and all that, but their big thing was protective tariff.
Pennsylvania was the home of the iron and steel industry from almost, you know, early 1815 on.
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.
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.
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.
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.
and Southern Taxes, you see from Southern ports, Charleston and New Orleans were two big Southern ports,
Fort Sumter was guarding Charleston Harbor and he wanted to keep Fort Sumter to collect those tariffs
and of course he then maneuvered the South into firing the first shot at Fort Sumter.
But the tariffs and taxes were a key point for Lincoln and the Republican Party.
Lying to South Carolina, Abraham Lincoln managed to deal with Franklin Roosevelt and Henry Stimson
In honoring the Southerners, the Fire and Forth Sumter, that movement for Thurgood Pharisee
collapsed.
Well, I honored the Copperheads.
To me, the Copperheads were one of the great groups in American history.
The Copperheads were the pro-Southern Northerners against the war, won a negotiated peace.
My particular hero was Charles O'Connor, the head of the New York City bar, distinguished
lawyer, who was Jefferson Davis' lawyer for his treating trial, whichever it came about
after the war.
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.
New York City almost seceded from the North during the war.
Mayor Fernando would want to secede a free trade with the South.
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.
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,
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.
Anyway, so that's, Lincoln and, what else did the Republican Party do when they took over, in addition to butchery, of course.
They took advantage of the one party, more or less one party Congress to push through the entire Whig Republican economic program.
High tariffs, like I said already, huge railroad land grants, railroad subsidies, sin taxes on alcohol and tobacco,
You can't imagine how cheap liquor was before the Civil War.
A gallon of good scotch for 20 cents or something. Forget about price inflation. It was magnificent.
He ruined that. The income tax for the first time in American history, the monstrous income tax,
Ludwig von Lincoln, and of course paper money, the fiat money, and nationalizing the banking system,
and every rotten thing you can think of is in my Lincoln.
Plus, the conscription comes in a huge scale, massive conscription to get these people to fight.
The right of habeas corpus was suspended, arrest of dissenters, civil liberties were attacked, everything else.
The whole thing is absolutely monstrous.
What I heard, by the way, is interesting.
I heard that my old friend, the late Mel Brackard, was denied the post of national endowment
Manatee's chairman early in the Reagan administration because he was anti-Lincoln, which made him
a fascist.
I said, what do you mean?
Lincoln was a frickin' big fascist.
Why are they doing him that?
On the religious, I just want to say about Lincoln, on the religious front, I don't think
Lincoln was very religious, but he went along with the culture.
He was apparently very sober and stern, he was personally opposed to alcohol and tobacco,
And he's opposed to the private carrying of guns, by the way, one of the first gun controllers.
He's also, of course, running for president since almost as early as those.
He also acted viciously toward his own humble family in Kentucky.
He repudiated his entire family.
He's having to do with them.
He dumped his fiancee to marry a wealthier girl, Mary Todd,
whose family were friends of Henry Clay.
Coming up...
He repudiates his own family,
But then the whole world becomes his family, right?
The Union becomes his god, the mystical Union.
As a matter of fact, he prefigured our own beloved Mario Cuomo in New York,
by declaring the Union was really a family,
bound indissolubly together by the most intimate organic bonds.
In a few days, it's his own family, and he takes the Union,
its non-existent thing out there, as his family.
This is, I think, typical of the Union, you know, liberalism in action, that's what it is.
So, and the difference, I think, between the British and the North, again, the British
were at least loyal to an existing person, the King, that was there, you know, at least
coherent.
The North was loyal, engaged in monstrous war, plunder and mass murder and destruction
and assault of women and all the rest of it, and allegiance to a mystical non-existent
entity, the Union, which would have been totally illogical, totally absurd.
This becomes the God of the North.
There is no heresy greater and no political theory more pernicious than sacralizing the secular and make a secular institution a divine entity.
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.
The Northern war, however, was very opposite of honorable.
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.
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.
There's been a lot of talk in recent years about memory, about never forgetting, capital
N, capital F, about history's retroactive punishment for crimes of war and mass murder.
The great libertarian historian Lord Acton put it that the historian who lasted analysis
must be a moral judge.
The muse of the historian who wrote about Cleo of Atamancus, the legendary avenger of
innocent blood.
All right, in that spirit, we must always remember, we must never forget, we must put
in the Dock and Hang Higher than Heyman, those who in modern times opened the Pandora's Box
of Genocide and the extermination of civilian Shermans Grant and Lincoln.
Perhaps someday, their statue, like Lenin's in Russia, will be toppled and melted down.
They are insignias and battle flags will be desecrated. They are war songs tossed into the flame.
And then Davis and Lee and Jackson and Forrest and all the heroes of the South, Dixie and the stars and bars, will once again be truly honored and remembered.
The classic comment on that meretricious TV series, that rotten series of Civil War, is made by that marvelous and feisty Great Southern writer, Florence King, one of my favorite writers.
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.
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.
Thank you very much.