Revisiting Lincoln: Things Your Teacher Never Told You, Part Two

From Wolves of Liberty:

Revisiting Lincoln – Things Your Teacher Never Told You Part 2




10. May, 2010 Comments (9)





By GJ Merits





It is interesting to note how entrenched the mythology of Lincoln is. After my previous post, a moderator at one site where I often cross-post threatened to remove any further posts concerning Lincoln. He accused me of being on an anti-Lincoln crusade. It was quite obvious from the remark the moderator never took the time to even read the post. The immediate knee-jerk reaction from a supposed educated man is quite telling. Here, I back up even further my statements in the previous post. A follow up article will finish my thoughts on Lincoln as we continue our journey by going back to the beginning to events leading up to and including the ratification of our Constitution. There are many other places to visit as well. Myths abound and lurk in every nook and cranny of our so-called education system, infecting even conservative sites with propaganda and a twisted sense of political correctness.



Is this an anti-Lincoln crusade? Hardly. It is, rather, a truth crusade. A quick Google search of the moderator in question turned up an interesting amount of information that lead me to the conclusion the moderator dominates others to the same extent that power dominates him – lending credence to the old idiom that power corrupts. Why Lincoln? Because he is pivotal to the transference of state powers to the federal government – something anathema to the Constitution itself. Putting Lincoln in perspective is the first step towards unraveling the political myth the left uses in classrooms across the country today. A few interesting pieces – one by the African American icon Lerone Bennett, Jr, longtime managing editor of Ebony magazine and author of a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., What Manner of Man and another referenced below seal the case.



MLK’s passive-aggressive non-violent civil disobedience campaign greatly interests me, as does the man himself. It was Gandhi and MLK that made an art of non-violence and its use in achieving political ends. Anyone who knows me recognizes my affinity for using this approach to achieve our own political goals of taking back power from the Statists and placing it back in the hands of people.



Before continuing with Mr. Bennett’s insightful analysis, I would like to turn the reader’s attention to the following article that clarifies the importance of education in shaping a political mythology. Any website that is serious about taking this country back recognizes that it starts with the mind, that liberal control of education is primary in shaping future trends in propagating political myths:





Every time I make some passing reference in print to the tyrant Lincoln, as I did a few weeks ago, a fair number of readers insist on proving the dangers of letting unionized government functionaries “educate” our children.



I believe we can confidently presume most who rail “Such a bizarre and outlandish statement proves what dangerous wackos Suprynowicz and his conservative pals are!” (I’m a libertarian; I’ve never claimed to be a “conservative”) are government-school ex-inmates.



I dare say they have read no legitimate scholarship on “Honest Abe” since hearing him praised decades ago in a room smelling of poster paints and waxed sawdust floor-sweeping compound as a “strong leader who saved the nation and ended slavery” by a government employee with a vested interest in seeing the state continue to tax our parents (and now us) within an inch of our lives to fund today’s largest remaining American institution of compulsion, incarceration, and propaganda – the “public schools.”



So why threaten to censure this? While the moderator and owner of the site in question have every right to control the content of their site, I also have every right to question any decision that aids the propagation of mythologies so powerful they have shaped this country into what it is today and will continue to do so. As long as these myths are allowed to propagate, no amount of good deeds will bring back Constitutional governance until we remove the cancer – liberal control of education – from the dying patient.



From the Lew Rockwell article about Lerone Bennett, Jr. (emphasis mine):





The gigantic collection of myths, lies, and distortions that comprise The Legend of Abraham Lincoln is the ideological cornerstone of the American warfare/welfare state. It has been invoked for generations to make the argument that if the policies of the U.S. government are not “the will of God,” then at least they are the will of “Father Abraham.” Moreover, this legend – this false history of America – did not arise spontaneously. It was invented and nurtured by an intergenerational army of court historians who, as Murray Rothbard once said, are absolutely indispensable to any government empire. All states, said Rothbard, depend for their existence on a series of myths about their benevolence, heroism, greatness, or even divinity.



Since very few Americans have spent much time educating themselves about Lincoln and nineteenth-century American history (much of which has been falsified anyway), it is easy for members of what I call the Lincoln Cult to dismiss all literary criticisms of Lincoln as the work of “neo-Confederates,” their code-word for “defenders of slavery” (as though anyone in America today would defend slavery), or “racist.” Although they label themselves “Lincoln scholars,” the last thing they want is honest scholarship when it comes to the subject of Lincoln and his war. They are, at best, cover-up artists and pandering court historians who feed at the government grant trough, “consuming” tax dollars to support their “research” and their overblown university positions.



But they’ve got a big problem (more than one, actually). The big problem is the publication of a 662-page book by the distinguished African-American author Lerone Bennett, Jr. entitled Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream. The book was originally published in 1999 and was recently released in paperback. Bennett was a longtime managing editor of Ebony magazine and, among other things, the author of a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., What Manner of Man. Although several “Civil War” publications have labeled yours truly as the preeminent Lincoln critic of our day, Forced into Glory is a much more powerful critique of Dishonest Abe than anything I have ever written. The Lincoln Cult, which would not dare to personally attack a serious African-American scholar like Bennett, has largely ignored the book instead.



When they are not ignoring the book and hoping that it (and the author) would just go away, they “have responded by recycling the traditional Lincoln apologies,” writes Bennett. (Being a “Lincoln scholar” means taking some of Lincoln’s unsavory words and deeds, such as his lifelong support for the policy of “colonization” or deportation of all black people in America, and dreaming up excuses for why he was supposedly “forced” into taking that position).



Bennett argues that “academics and [the] media had been hiding the truth for 135 years and that Lincoln was not the great emancipator or the small emancipator or the economy-sized emancipator.” He presents chapter and verse of how the Emancipation Proclamation freed no one, since it only applied to “rebel territory,” and specifically exempted all the slave-owning/Union-controlled border states and other areas that were occupied by the U.S. army at the time. He quotes James Randall, who has been called the “greatest Lincoln scholar of all time,” as writing, “the Proclamation itself did not free a single slave.” It was the Thirteenth Amendment that finally ended slavery, he correctly notes, and Lincoln was dragged into accepting it kicking and screaming all the way…



… Why, one would ask, is such a distinguished African-American journalist so incensed over the Lincoln myth? It is because of his twenty years of painstaking research, resulting in this book, that proves, among other things, what a vulgar racist Lincoln was. Bennett provides quote after quote of Lincoln’s own words, habitually using the N-word so much that people in Washington thought he was weirdly consumed by his racism. Bennett tells of first-hand accounts by some of Lincoln’s generals of how they left a meeting with him during a crisis in the war in which the president spent most of his time in the meeting telling off-color “darkie” jokes (Lincoln’s language). General James Wadsworth, for example, was “shocked by the racism in the Lincoln White House.”



I will not repeat any of this language here; suffice it to say that Bennett has scoured Lincoln’s Collected Works and demonstrates that he used the N-word about as frequently as your modern-day “gangster rapper” does. Bennett also describes how this has all been covered up by the Lincoln Cult. Despite the hundreds of examples that are right there in black and white in Lincoln’s own speeches, “Carl Sandburg, who spent decades researching Lincoln’s life, denied that Lincoln used the N-word.” And “Harold Holzer, who edited a collection of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, was surprised that Lincoln used the N-word twice in the first Lincoln-Douglas debate.” (Lincoln personally edited the transcripts of the debates, so there is no question that he said these things).



Read the entire article.



This is truth – not an anti-Lincoln crusade. Anyone who believes this information does not have a place in public discourse needs to have their head examined. We are talking about a serial pattern of abuse whereby our children and young adults are indoctrinated into thinking in a certain way. Mr. Bennett understands the need for truth.



Unless one wants to accuse Mr. Bennett of being on an anti-Lincoln crusade as well. Any takers?