Abraham Lincoln – America’s Most Reverenced And Bloodstained Sociopath

By Trace Mayer, on September 22nd, 2010

A sociopath is a person with a personality disorder manifesting itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and a lack of conscience. Nowhere are sociopaths better able to act out their extreme antisocial attitudes than with genocidal behavior through the instrumentality of government. Often times the most reprehensible are the most reverenced. For example, throngs flock to reverence and adore Chairmen Mao’s body in Tiananmen Square and Lenin’s embalmed body in the Red Square at the heart of Moscow.

Like victims with Stockholm Syndrome it seems that citizens that are left love and reverence their most culpable genociders. After all, both per capita GDP increases and the unemployment rate decreases significantly when you reduce the denominator or numerator by 6, 20 or 40 million.

In California IOUs I mentioned the sacrosanct sociopaths, Abraham Lincoln and Alexander Hamilton. I received quite a few emails and comments from apologists for the Church of Lincoln along with some questions such as ‘What possible evidence can you offer?’, ‘Should Lincoln have allowed the South to leave with slavery intact?’ and ‘Maybe you can explain what you were trying to point out by placing them in this category?’ To help answer those questions I have brought on the show one of the preeminent Lincoln scholars.

INTERVIEW WITH THOMAS DILORENZO

Lincoln responded by issuing an arrest warrant for Chief Justice Taney.

Trace: In the episode 76 of the RunToGold.com podcast I brought on the Thomas DiLorenzo. He is an American economics professor at Loyola University in Maryland,  adheres to the Austrian School of Economics. He’s a senior faculty member at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Virginia Tech. He has authored quite a few books on this topic including The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln; his agenda and an unnecessary civil war where 500,000 Americans were genocided, then we also have Lincoln Unmasked: What You are Not Supposed to Know about Dishonest Abe, and is Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Arch-Enemy Betrayed the American Revolution, and What it Means to Americans Today.

So, as we delve into these topics, I think you’ll find it very interesting to remove some of the false assumptions that we find in our revisionist history. So, without further ado, on to the interview with Dr. Tom DiLorenzo.

Trace: Welcome to the show, Dr. DiLorenzo.

Tom: I’m pleased to be with you today!

Thomas DiLorenzo

Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo

Trace: Well, I have recently wrote an article about Lincoln and I mentioned Lincoln and Alexander Hamilton and some of the great injustices that they wrought on the American people, and I had quite a few questions about it, and I thought who better than the preeminent expert on Lincoln? You have written 2 books The Real Lincoln: A New Look at His Agenda and an Unnecessary War and also the book Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed to Know About to Know About Dishonest Abe. So when we’re talking about this great, revered American president, what are some of the things that are hidden about him? What are these things that we are not supposed to know about President Lincoln?

Tom: Well, one of the things you are not supposed to know is what he said in his first inaugural address, where he pledge his support for a constitutional amendment that would have prohibited the federal government from ever interfering with slavery, and so in his first inaugural he was satisfied with enshrining slavery in the constitution explicitly. It had never been explicitly in the constitution. And in that same speech, he threatened a war over tax-collection. He said that it is my duty to collect the duties and imports – which is tariffs- but beyond that there would be no invasion of any state.

So he literally threatened a war, and carried out his threats, of course, by invading the Southern States over tax-collection, and that’s not taught in school. So, that’s one thing, he illegally suspended the Writ of Habeas Corpus and imprisoned tens of thousands of Northern civilians, he shut down over 300 opposition newspapers, he deported an outspoken democratic party-member of Congress named Clement L. Vallandigham from Ohio and he confiscated firearms which violates the second amendment. And he basically started the war without the permission of Congress. So that’s why some historians call Lincoln a dictator, but they say he was a good dictator.

Lincoln promised iron-clad constitutional protection of slavery but of course slavery was already protected by the Constitution.

Trace: Oh yeah, because they are apologising, perhaps, for having a strong federal government and violating the 10th amendment, and a lot of those things. So when we are looking at Lincoln, and his… you know, you started with these gross violations of private property rights, really the Civil War was about collecting taxes, you say. It didn’t have anything to do with slavery.

Tom: Well, it did have something to do with slavery because Lincoln and the Republican party opposed only the extension of slavery into the new territories, it never opposed Southern slavery. In fact, as I just mentioned, Lincoln promised iron-clad constitutional protection of slavery but of course slavery was already protected by the Constitution, the Southern states did not have to secede to protect slavery, it was already constitutional, there were no challenges. The courts–the slavery — I wish there were, I wish we could have ended it peacefully, like all the other countries in the world did in time, but we did not.

And so, the basic cause of the war though was the Southern States thought that they were sovereign and they had the right to be in the union or not be in the union. Lincoln was the first American president ever to take the position that the federal government had the right to literally invade, pledge war on, his own country, to stop them from seceding. You have the New England federalists to secede in the early part of the 19th century they even have a convention in Hartford Connecticut in 1814 to vote up or down on succession and there was little discussion about whether it was illegal or not.

Just about everyone assumed that it certainly was legal because the States were sovereign. And so that was really what the war was about; are the States sovereign or is the government at Washington the master of us all? And of course when the North won the war, it proved that the government at Washington is our master, and no longer our servant.

Trace: Yeah, and I mean it was a very accepted doctrine that the States had a right to secede back then, especially Lysander Spooner was one of the people that argued quite a bit in favour of these states-rights, because how else can you have a government that governs with the consent of the governed, unless the people have a right to leave, or the states in this case.

Tom: That’s right. All you have to do to convince yourself of that is read article 7 of the U.S. Constitution which says that the constitution will be ratified by 5/13 states at the time. It didn’t say the U.S. government will ratify the states; it says the states ratify the constitution, granting delegated powers to the U.S. government, and those powers were supposed to be used to the benefit of the people of the states. The original system was that if the people were ever to be in charge for sovereign control of their own government, the way in which they would do it would be through political communities organized at the state and local level, that’s how we were supposed to be the masters rather than the servants of our own government, our own central government, and that was understood by everybody.

Like I said there was a group of federalists talked about secession, there was a secession movement in the middle Atlantic states in the 1850’s and even some of the famous abolitionists of the North proposed that New England secede from the South because they did not want to be apart of a country that still had slavery. Although I think we need to keep in mind that there were still slaves in New York City as late as 1853, so that’s not too far off of the Civil War era.

Trace: Yeah, so when we look at Lincoln it appears that ironically he extended slavery to all people in the Americas instead of actually abolishing it. In his erosion of these essential checks and balances in the political machinery that we have been talking about, you hit on it in the beginning, his gross violations in the beginning of the Great Writ, the Writ of Habeas Corpus, can you explain a little what the writ of Habeas Corpus is, and then delve in to what he did with his interference with the federal courts, and also with.

Tom: Well, see, it’s the one thing in the Constitution that guarantees our personal liberty and whenever the government accuses us of a crime we have the right to due process, we have the right to confront our accusers, we have a right to a speedy trial by a jury of our peers, and so forth, so that when Lincoln listed that he had the army literally break down the doors of houses of people and dragged them out to some dungeon somewhere in a gulag. And there were tens of thousands of people, including the mayor of Baltimore, the grandson of Francis Scott Key who wrote the Star-Spangled Banner, he was a newspaper editor who was opposing all of this, and a lot of prominent citizens.

Lincoln essentially redefined treason to mean anyone who disagreed with him.

These weren’t spies, these weren’t confederate spies, they were just Northern state citizens who were criticising the Lincoln administration. And they were imprisoned by the tens of thousands, and as far ex-parte Milligan goes, after the Civil War in 1866, Lincoln was dead, the Supreme Court slyly had a great ruling where they said that it was illegal for either Lincoln or the Congress to have suspended Habeas Corpus as long as the civil courts were operating the North, which they were. And they said that it is especially during wartime that we need to guard liberties because that is when they are most threatened, when it is some kind of an emergency.

And so they took the exact opposite tactic of what Lincoln himself said, and essentially suspending the constitution, is that it is most important during an emergency like war, to protect the constitution. And I think that’s one of the finest statements ever made by a supreme court in terms of constitutional liberty.

Trace: Yeah, so you had Lincoln, and I think…what was his argument? You said “you know, if we have to cut off the arm to save the body then it’s good”. So the Supreme Court battled with Lincoln over the great Writ of Habeas Corpus, and what is this about Lincoln issuing an arrest warrant for the chief justice?

Tom: Yes, in my book Lincoln Unmasked I wrote about the Chief Justice of the United States, Roger B. Taney, issued an opinion that Lincoln’s suspension of Habeas Corpus was illegal because the government can’t do it but the Congress has to do it, and Lincoln responded by issuing an arrest warrant for Chief Justice Taney, and I site several sources on that, including a former Supreme Court Justice among other people.

And so he did that. It’s really an act of tyranny, it’s an attack on the separation of power, and also documented in my book “Lincoln Unmasked” that Lincoln also trenched soldiers to arrest other federal judges, not just Taney but other judges who were about to writ the Habeas Corpus, that is, that would give people accused of a crime their day in court. And so this was not just an intimidation of Roger. B. Taney, it was intimidation of a lot of other federal judges as well that went on during the Lincoln administration.

Trace: Oh yeah, because he would actually station troops outside of their homes to prevent them from going to meet in session, right?

Tom: Yes, I got out of the National Archives a letter from a federal judge explaining to his fellow federal judges why he did not show up in court that day. He said he got home and his home was surrounded by armed soldiers who kept him essentially kidnapped in his own home, they kept him from going to court to issue the writ of Habeas Corpus, and I have to believe that this was a not a lone incidence of that sort. Lincoln essentially redefined treason to mean anyone who disagreed with him. So if you read article 3 section 3 of the U.S. Constitution which defines treason, it says waging war against the states or giving aid and comfort to their enemy, and so literally Lincoln’s invasion of the Southern states was the very definition of treason under the U.S. constitution. Anyone can ready article 3, section 3 and they will know that I am right about this.

Standardized for today’s population, that would be the equivalent 6 million Americans dying in 4 years.

Trace: And so, it’s kind of like terrorism. When I was in law school, I took a counter-terrorism class, and of course the law can’t define terrorism, and it seems to be terrorism is any opposition or dissent. And so Lincoln, who is engaged in perhaps the bloodiest episode of terrorism in the U.S., he did it definitely in violation of the constitution, and it’s great that you have done a lot of the research on these things, to expose a little bit about the revisionist’s history surrounding this historical figure because it appears that every country loves their dictators. Stalin is pickled, and you’ve got Mao, and he’s pickled. And last time I was in Beijing, you had lines of people to go and see Chairman Mao who, like Lincoln, definitely increased the per capita GDP by reducing the denominator, so we see the same thing with Lincoln, we have this giant Lincoln temple in Washington D.C.; to this person who really didn’t do nice things to the people of the United States.

Tom: One of the things that Americans don’t know is that all of the other countries in the world who ended slavery did it peacefully. And that includes the Northern states. There were no wars of emancipation in Pennsylvania, or Illinois or Massachusetts. Everyone in the world found a way pragmatically to get rid of slavery without mass murder and mass killing, there were over 650 thousand people died, including some 50 thousand Southern civilians during the Civil War and that, if you standardized for today’s population, that would be the equivalent 6 million Americans dying today in 4 years. If you put it that way, why didn’t we end slavery peacefully?

Well, the main reason was that the war wasn’t about ending slavery. I don’t think you’d find an historian who would tell you that Lincoln invaded to free the enslaved; he didn’t. He very clearly said, in fact, that his purpose was to save the union, not to do anything about the slaves. Although, of course I argued that he actually destroyed the voluntary union of the founding fathers and replaced it with a Soviet-style mandatory union.

Trace: Well, thank you very much. This has been an enlightening interview that helps clear away some of the lies found in the revisionist American history and I am sure we will have you again on the RunToGold.com Podcast. Perhaps to discuss Alexander Hamilton. Thank you.

So please do your civic and patriotic duty by leaving your comments about the reverenced Abraham Lincoln and sharing this with your friends and family!



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The 10 Worst Presidents (from a free-market perspective): Part 2

By J.D. Seagraves, on January 26th, 2009

Last week, I produced a list of the Top 10 Worst Presidents (from a free-market perspective), #s 6-10. Starting with #6, they were Richard Nixon, George Washington, George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, and Theodore Roosevelt. Now here are the “top” 5:

5. Lyndon Johnson : In addition to the pointless death and destruction of Vietnam, Johnson’s “Great Society” also caused irreparable damage to the U.S. economy and the American family. Even his “civil rights” initiatives, for which conservatives give him begrudging praise, are condemned by libertarians. The Civil Rights Act, for example, amounted to the nationalization of private property and ushered in Affirmative Action, which arguably exacerbated racism. LBJ’s hyper spending was monetized by the Federal Reserve — according to the current head of the Dallas Fed, Johnson once physically beat a Fed chairman until he agreed to “print the money” Johnson “needed.” The huge amounts of new money created under Johnson’s reign as chief executive made the severing of the gold standard virtually inevitable, and set us on the path to monetary oblivion we’re currently on.

4. Harry Truman : The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed tens of thousands of innocent women and children — and it was all unnecessary. Although we’re not taught this in our government-funded schools, Japan had already offered a conditional surrender, but the U.S. demanded unconditional surrender. The Japanese were worried that the U.S. would kill or humiliate their Emperor, a religious figure, if their surrender was “unconditional.” Truman used this as an excuse to display the U.S.’s horrible military might — and put the Soviets on notice, igniting the Cold War.

Nothing can top the immorality of mass murder, but in terms of precedent, Truman’s unilateral invasion of Korea — without congressional consent, let alone a declaration of war — ranks as his worst deed. Truman considered his power as commander in chief to be absolute, and U.N. resolutions to overrule the U.S. Constitution. Since Korea, no U.S. president has sought a formal declaration of war — it’s “anachronistic,” they say. Oh, and when steel workers threatened to strike in 1952, Truman nationalized their mills (until blocked by the Supreme Court) because the steel industry was “vital” to the nation’s defense.

3. Franklin D. Roosevelt : No executive has ever assumed more absolute power than FDR. One of his first actions as president was to dictatorially close U.S. banks. Shortly thereafter — in an episode that has been censored from our history books — he made it illegal to own gold, which then backed the U.S. dollar, and sent government agents into the homes and businesses of gold “hoarders” to confiscate the precious metal. Once all the gold had been turned in or seized, FDR revalued the dollar from 1/20 an ounce of gold, to 1/35 — an outright theft. Later, under the Bretton Woods System, this stolen gold — which is what filled Fort Knox — flowed out of the country, never to return.

We are taught in government schools that FDR “lifted us out of the Depression.” Numerous economists have shown this to be false. In fact, FDR’s New Deal policies made the Depression longer and more painful. For example: to keep food prices from dropping (as if that would have been a bad thing), FDR ordered millions of pounds of crops to be destroyed — while much of the nation went hungry. Later, unemployment did drop precipitously, but only after FDR had drafted a huge portion of the American work force into war. And, by the way, many contrarian historians believe FDR provoked Japan into bombing Pearl Harbor — and had foreknowledge of the attack.

One more thing about FDR: Today, he is celebrated as one of our greatest presidents by both the left and the right. But little is made of his internment of Japanese-American citizens in concentration camps. That he is held high as a symbol of liberalism (by the left) and war-statesmanship (by the right) is a disgrace.

2. Woodrow Wilson : “Woodrow Wilson makes George W. Bush look like a pro-bono lawyer for the ACLU,” says historian and author Bill Kauffman. And he’s right. Cindy Sheehan might have been unfairly ridiculed by Bush’s proxies in the right-wing media, but she wasn’t thrown in jail. Thousands of World War I critics, however, were. Among them, Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, who gathered nearly 6 percent of the vote against Wilson (and T.R. and Taft) in 1912, and then ran for president from a jail cell — thanks to Wilson — in 1920.

Wilson, a former Klansman, re-segregated the Capitol, which had been integrated under President Grant. He gave us the Federal Reserve Act, the income tax, the direct election of senators (which entirely crushed “states’ rights”), and lied us into the completely counterproductive World War I — which led the way to the rise of Hitler and World War II. His ascension to the top of the Democratic Party ticket also, once and for all, crushed classical liberalism (Jeffersonianism) as a serious political tendency, and set up the bi-partisan monopoly of “Hamiltonianism,” leaving Americans with no real choice on Election Day.

1. Abraham Lincoln : “But didn’t Lincoln free the slaves?” No. If, in fact, the Civil War had been a crusade to free the slaves, then perhaps it would have been morally justifiable, says Real Lincoln author and Austrian economist Thomas J. DiLorenzo. But Lincoln was a white supremacist who favored a different 13th amendment — one that would have forbidden the federal government from ever interfering in slavery where it already existed. And, as the Civil War was coming to a close, he actually appropriated money for the deportation of freed blacks to Africa. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation only applied to regions not under his control: not only were northern slave states excluded, but so were northern-controlled areas of southern states! The rest of the Western world, save for Haiti (which had a righteous slave rebellion), ended the evil practice of slavery without bloodshed. For merely the monetary expense of the Civil War, to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of lives, the North could have purchased the freedom of every slave and given him or her 40 acres and a mule.

The real motivator behind the Civil War was economic mercantilism. Lincoln believed ardently in protectionism and corporate welfare, and the states that would comprise the Confederacy were for free trade. The system that Lincoln advocated received 75 percent of its revenue from the net-exporting South, and then spent 75 percent of that money in the North — the South was getting fleeced, and that’s why they seceded. Lincoln said that his priority was “preserving the union,” and if it meant that there would still be slavery in the South, that’d be fine — just as long as the tariff was collected.

But what makes Lincoln the worst president ever? Well, he literally destroyed the founders’ republic, which was a federation of independent states — a voluntary union. Lincoln made it an involuntary one and abolished state sovereignty. He also imposed the first income tax, conscripted men into the army and paid them with fiat money (another first), illegally suspended habeas corpus, shut down opposition newspapers, imprisoned political opponents in the North, and ultimately forced his Hamiltonian agenda — which had lost for sixty years at the ballot box — on the country via a one-party monopoly that stretched from his election to that of Democratic-Hamiltonian Woodrow Wilson.

Where will President-Elect Obama rank on this list? Hopefully nowhere. Although the parallels between Hoover and Bush (both hyper-interventionists who are mischaracterized as “free-market” ideologues that”did nothing” to avoid crisis) are stunning, and Obama seems to fit the theme as a new FDR to supplant Bush’s Hoover, it must be remembered that FDR campaigned against Hoover’s interventionism and for a return to the laissez-faire Jeffersonianism of Grover Cleveland and only flip-flopped once he was in office. Perhaps Obama, who campaigned as an FDR-style Democrat, will do the same and flip-flop to the side of limited government and free markets. We can hope, can’t we?



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