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Lincoln and Trump: Two of a Kind?


Muda69

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https://mises.org/wire/lincoln-and-trump-two-kind

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President Trump has outraged legions of political opponents with his plan to give a Fourth of July speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. A Washington Post columnist frets that Trump’s speech will leave a “stain” that “won’t ever completely wash away.” But before any more teeth-gnashing occurs, we should recognize the surprising parallels between Trump and President Lincoln.

Trump sparked an uproar in 2017 by tweeting derisively about the “so-called judge” who blocked his order severely restricting immigration from seven nations. Twitter was not around in the 1860s so Lincoln never took online swipes at the judiciary. However, when Supreme Court ChiefJustice Roger Taney ruled in 1861 that Lincoln had no right to suspend habeas corpus along a railroad corridor, Lincoln ignored his decision. The following year, Lincoln greatly expanded the suspension, resulting in the arrest and military trials of people who had done nothing more than insult the president. Up to 15,000 northerners became political prisoners as a result of Lincoln’s orders.

Trump mortifies the press corps and millions of non-ink-stained wretches when he denounces that the media is “the enemy of the American people.” Lincoln refrained from such rude comments during his four years in the White House. However, on May 18, 1864, Lincoln issued an executive order for “arrest and imprisonment of irresponsible newspaper reporters and editors” after the New York World and Journal of Commerce published an incorrect report on a pending expansion of conscription. Lincoln forcibly shut down 300 newspapers in the North that were insufficiently supportive of military policies and hundreds of editors, publishers, and reporters were tossed into prison without charges.

Trump has been widely condemned for canceling the Obama administration mandate compelling every public school to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms and locker rooms of their choice. Transgender rights were not an issue in the 1860s, but Lincoln’s treatment of the most reviled ethnic group of his era was not his finest hour. In 1862, Lincoln approved the largest mass execution in American history — 39 Sioux Indians. In 1863, Lincoln approved brutally expelling Navajos and Apaches from the New Mexico territory. In 1864, John Evans, a personal friend of Lincoln’s and his appointee as Colorado territorial governor, launched a military campaign that culminated in the U.S. cavalry slaughtering more than 100 peaceful Indian women and children at Sand Creek, an unprovoked attack that even Congress labeled a “massacre.”

Trump was denounced for his “tyrannical and despotic” attempt to withhold federal funds from self-proclaimed “sanctuary cities” that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. Rather than sanctuary cities, Lincoln dealt with border states that threatened to secede and he did not rely on sweet words alone. In September 1861, Lincoln sent federal troops to arrest pro-southern members of the Maryland legislature. In Kentucky, Union commanders targeted Southern sympathizers with roving “execution squads,” as the New York Times noted. Vast swaths of southern Missouri were devastated and depopulated to prevent any support for Confederate forces.

Trump suggested in 2016 that the U.S. government could kill the families of terrorists to dissuade others from launching attacks — and to hell with Geneva Conventions rules protecting non-combatants. Lincoln also relied on a catch-all notion of collective guilt. Shortly before his 1864 march across Georgia, Union Gen. William Sherman telegramed Washington that “there is a class of people — men, women, and children — who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order.” Lincoln congratulated Sherman for a ruthless destructive campaign that made “Georgia howl.” After Union Gen. Phil Sheridan torched much of Virginia, Lincoln sent him a message declaring “my own personal admiration and gratitude for the month’s operation in the Shenandoah Valley.” Historians swept Lincoln’s brutal tactics under the rug long before his memorial was consecrated in 1922.

Trump and Lincoln are soulmates on today’s most contentious economic issue. Trump portrays imports as a pox while his trade wars are ravaging American farmers and many manufacturers. Promising high tariffs helped Lincoln capture the presidency in 1860 and he cheered in February 1861 when congressional Republicans boosted tariffs as high as 216%. The New York Times denounced that bill as a “disastrous measure” that “alienates extensive sections of the country we seek to retain” and will “deal a deadly blow … at the measures now in progress to heal our political differences.” That tariff law helped drive Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee out of the Union, thereby making the Civil War far more destructive. Protectionism remains as idiotic now as it was 150 years ago but politicians continue to demagogue the issue.

But don’t expect Trump to mention any of these Lincoln debacles (except maybe tariffs) in his July 4th spiel. Trump being Trump, his speech will probably have some howlers and the media’s fact checkers will lustfully throw plenty of penalty flags. But after it is all over, most Americans will remember only the fireworks they saw, the beer they drank, and maybe the hot dogs they chomped that day.

Hmm,  two peas in a pod.   Lincoln isn't close to the saint the government history books portray him as.

 

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14 hours ago, Wabash82 said:

You #sjw types just insist on applying your modern, "woke" PC sensibilities to historical figures.  Shame!  

So you agree that the late Mr. Lincoln was no saint, and disagree with the defacto deification of him in most American government school history texts?

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I only attended "government school" for kindergarten and law school. In the former their was only one coloring book page with a picture of Lincoln (I made his beard purple), and in the latter we only had time to review some of his slightly less satanic activities, like freeing millions of slaves....

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2 hours ago, Wabash82 said:

I only attended "government school" for kindergarten and law school. In the former their was only one coloring book page with a picture of Lincoln (I made his beard purple), and in the latter we only had time to review some of his slightly less satanic activities, like freeing millions of slaves....

So freeing millions of slaves, while surely a virtuous and just act,  automatically covers Mr. Lincoln's other anti-freedom actions and policies.  Got it.

Can you please post a picture of your coloring book Lincoln? Surely your mother preserved something so precious created by his little boy.

 

 

 

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Just now, TrojanDad said:

WB's mother was a "he" back in the day??  

He was part of the "new normal" before we called it the "new normal".......

Sorry for the typo.  Thanks for finding it TD.

 

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34 minutes ago, Muda69 said:

So freeing millions of slaves, while surely a virtuous and just act,  automatically covers Mr. Lincoln's other anti-freedom actions and policies.  

So, Republicans really haven’t changed much.

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http://www.quebecoislibre.org/08/080815-2.htm

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...

 Founded in 1854, the Republican Party rose to prominence and power when its nominee, Abraham Lincoln, won the presidential election of 1860. To this day, many people regard it as the “Party of Lincoln” and historians and the general public have long considered Lincoln, next only to Washington, asAmerica’s greatest president (see also "Rating the Presidents" by Pat Buchanan and "Down With the Presidency" by Lew Rockwell). 

          The first big lie, which is universally believed, is that Lincoln, dubbed the “Great Emancipator” by his cult of worshippers, went to war in order to free slaves. The abhorrence of racial injustice and the desire to abolish slavery played no role in the Union’s determination to strangle the Confederacy in its cradle. What did? One factor was Lincoln’s determination to preserve the Union at any cost – including the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. In 1862, Lincoln wrote to Horace Greeley (the leading Northern newspaperman of the day): “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it.” 

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Another factor that motivated war was the Republican Party’s lust (which, with few and brief exceptions, it has retained to the present day) to tax and spend. The North waged war against the South in order to regain the federal tax revenue that would be lost if the Southern states seceded peacefully.(2) Republicans were then, and remain today, a Party of Big Government. In Lincoln’s time, Republicans championed a high (i.e., protectionist) tariff. They used the proceeds – which were laundered through roads, canals, railways, etc. – to dispense lavish corporate welfare to their backers. To Republicans, the fact that tariffs, corporate welfare and the like favoured an anointed few (whose residences, factories, etc., were overwhelmingly in the North) and punished a benighted many (Southerners were mostly “outs” rather than “ins”) was inconsequential. What was essential, however, was that consumers, Southern as well as Northern, subsidise Republicans’ wealthy backers. Southerners’ unwillingness to subjugate themselves to Republicans ultimately drove them to secede. 

          In Lincoln’s view, only by keeping the Union intact – by force of arms if necessary – could Republicans’ lust to tax, dispense largesse and build an empire be sated. In his First Inaugural Address (4 March 1861), Lincoln threatened to invade any state that failed to collect federal “duties and imposts.” On 19 April, he rationalised his order to blockade Southern ports on the grounds that “the collection of the revenue cannot be effectually executed” in the states that had seceded.(3)

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A second wicked lie is that Lincoln championed natural rights and racial equality. Both his words and his deeds utterly repudiated any belief in or respect for these admirable principles. “I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races,” he announced in the first (21 August 1858) of his celebrated debates with Stephen Douglas. Like many and perhaps most other men of his time and place, Lincoln was an unapologetic and irredeemable racist: “I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favour of the race to which I belong having the superior position.” He added “Free them [slaves] and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this. We cannot, then, make them equals.” 

          No reasonable person can possibly deny Lincoln’s staunch and vociferous advocacy of apartheid and white supremacy.(4) On 17 July 1858, he said: “What I would most desire would be the separation of the white and black races.” And in the fourth of his debates with Douglas (on 18 September), he vowed: “I will to the very last stand by the law of this state, which forbids the marrying of white people with Negroes.” Lincoln enthusiastically supported the Illinois Constitution, which at that time prohibited the emigration of black people into the state; he also backed the infamous Illinois Black Codes, which deprived the small number of free blacks residing within the state any semblance of citizenship; and he applauded the Fugitive Slave Act (1850), which compelled Northerners to capture runaway slaves and return them to their owners.

...

A fourth blatant lie, cherished by Republicans, is the assertion that Lincoln was a “Defender of the Constitution.” The polar opposite is true: Lincoln was a tyrant and the despoiler par excellence of the Constitution. Generations of historians have accurately labelled him a “dictator.” “Dictatorship played a decisive role in the North’s successful effort to maintain the Union by force of arms,” wrote Clinton Rossiter in Constitutional Dictatorship (first published in 1948). “Lincoln’s amazing disregard for the Constitution was considered by nobody as legal.” 

...

A fifth lie is that Lincoln was a “great humanitarian” who bore “malice towards none.” The truth is that Lincoln planned and managed a total war upon Southern civilians (see in particular Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War, Cambridge University Press, 1997). Like Robert Mugabe today and sordid host of dictators during the 20th century, Lincoln ordered his troops to murder women and children. His war included the destruction of entire towns populated solely by civilians, massive looting, rape and execution without trial (or even charge) of non-combatants. To this day, General William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea (November-December 1864) remains the worst act of terrorism committed on American soil (see, for example, "Sherman’s March" by Clyde Wilson). Americans would be wise to remove their blinds and recall that this evil act was perpetrated by the agents of the U.S. Government at the vengeful behest of a Republican president. Sherman wrote on 24 December: “We are not only fighting armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as their organised armies. I know that this recent movement of mine through Georgia has had a wonderful effect in this respect.” Using the rules established by the Allies after the Second World War, Lincoln and the high command of the Union Army unquestionably qualified as war criminals.(6) 

          A sixth lie, perhaps the most despicable of all, is that the War of Northern Aggression was necessary. Only war, say its mythologisers and apologists, could have ended slavery. The truth, of course, is that it was a war of choice and not of necessity. This war, the deadliest in American history, caused the deaths of 620,000 soldiers and an undetermined number (but possibly as many as 250,000) of civilians. Approximately one in four adult, white male Southerners perished. And it was all for nothing. During the 19th century, dozens of countries, including the British, Russian and Spanish empires, abolished the indefensible institution of slavery. They did so peacefully and by means of compensated emancipation. Among the countries of the Western Hemisphere that followed this route were Argentina, Colombia, Chile, all of Central America, Mexico, Bolivia, Uruguay, various French colonies, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela. Only in the Land of the Free is war and the destruction of property and constitution regarded as a necessary condition of emancipation. Whether in the American South or the Middle East, Republicans, it seems, have to destroy a country in order to deliver it.

          Abraham Lincoln, then, was not the Great Emancipator: he was the Great Warmonger and Imperialist, the Great Racist, the Great Taxer-and-Spender, the Great Corruptionist, the Great Incarcerator and the Great Vandal of the Constitution. He was a war criminal and America’s worst-ever president.

 

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