Every society has a segment of its population that obsesses over
totalitarian control of others. They are called “politicians” or
“political activists.” (There are one or two exceptions, every now and
then, such as former Congressman Ron Paul). These are people who just
cannot stand the fact that many others prefer to live their own lives,
abiding by the basic laws protecting life, liberty and property, and the
moral codes that help to enforce such behavior. They just cannot stand
the fact that so many others prefer to plan their own lives instead of having
the political authorities plan their lives for them. They are often
more than willing to use the coercive forces of government – including deadly
force, including war – to get their way. They think of themselves as
Our Superiors, God’s chosen people, or just plain smarter and more moral than
everyone else. Or they are con-men and con-women out to plunder
their fellow citizens to enrich themselves under the phony guise of “public
service,” “democracy,” and myriad other grandiose-sounding scams.
In a lecture on institutionalized lying by government delivered at the
Mises Institute, Judge Andrew Napolitano introduced his audience to the Latin
phrase “libido dominande” that describes such attitudes. In Latin, it
means “lust to dominate.” Now along comes Clyde Wilson with his new
book, The
Yankee Problem: An American Dilemma, that describes in great detail
the peculiar American version of “libido dominande” that has plagued America
(and the world) ever since the Pilgrims landed.
Wilson describes “Yankees” as “that peculiar ethnic group descended from
New Englanders, who can be easily recognized by their arrogance, hypocrisy,
greed, lack of congeniality, and penchant for ordering other people
around” (emphasis added). This, of course, does not include all
New Englanders and their descendants, but a rather small but dominant (and
domineering) subset. “Hillary Rodham Clinton, raised a Northern
Methodist in Chicago, is a museum-quality specimen of the Yankee –
self-righteous, ruthless, and self-aggrandizing,” writes Wilson.
Before American history was completely rewritten from a New England
perspective and taught to generations of schoolchildren, this fact was widely
known. The novelists Washington Irving, James Finemore Cooper, James
Kirke Paulding, and Herman Melville, among others, wrote novels that
ridiculed the “Yankee” mentality that they all abhorred. (In Irving’s
story of “The Headless Horseman” Ichabod Crane was a Yankee who had come from
Connecticut to New York and “made himself a nuisance” so a young New Yorker
played a trick on him to send him packing back to “Yankeeland”). Thomas
Jefferson himself once complained that “It is true that we are completely
under the saddle of Massachusetts and Connecticut, and that they ride us very
hard, insulting our feelings, as well as exhausting our strength and
substance.” This was long before anyone began debating the issue of
slavery. The Yankees said Jefferson, “were marked with such a
perversity of character” that America was bound to be forever divided between
Yankees and non-Yankees.
Wilson describes how New England writers have falsified the history
of America by emphasizing the Mayflower Pilgrims while ignoring or
downplaying the earlier, Jamestown Pilgrims; by pretending that New
Englanders alone won the American Revolution and ignoring the efforts of
Francis Marion and other Southern revolutionary heroes; by ludicrously
portraying the Virginia planter George Washington as a New England “prig” in
their books and movies; and of course reserving their biggest lies in their
discussions of the causes and consequences of the “Civil War.” As if to
prove Jefferson’s point, Daniel Webster wrote in his diary: “O New
England! How superior are thy inhabitants
in morals, literature, civility, and industry!”
The Yankees’ “quest for power grew into a frenzy” as soon as George
Washington left the scene, writes Wilson, by passing the Sedition Act during
the Adams administration, which made it a crime to criticize Adams and the
government. Their rewriting of history began very early and has never
stopped. Although the settlement of the American West was
“predominantly the work of Southerners and not of New Englanders at all,”
silly books like The Oregon Trail, “written by a Boston tourist” became
popular, as did “the phony cavortings of the Eastern sissy Teddy Roosevelt in
the cattle country opened by Southerners.” “The great America outdoors”
are now symbolized by “Henry David Thoreau and a little frog pond . . . in
the sight of the Boston smokestacks.”
Thanks to the Yankee rewriting of history few Americans know that John
Hancock, John Adams, and the majority of the Northern delegates to the
constitutional convention were slave owners; that at the time, ten percent of
the New York City population consisted of slaves; that New England shippers
were major players in the international slave trade well into the 1860s; that
numerous wealthy New Englanders, such as the founder of Brown University,
invested in the international slave trade business; that many New Englanders
continued to own slave plantations in Cuba even after slavery was ended in
the U.S.; and that in 1860 there were more free black people in the South
than in the North.
There is a 300-year history of Yankees demonizing anyone who stands in
their way of political domination, and of course, no one has been more
demonized than Southerners – the only group of Americans to ever seriously
challenge their dominance. Moreover, the identification of God with
America and the United States with infallible righteousness is Yankee stuff
through and trough,” writes Wilson. Here he is describing “American
exceptionalism,”the excuse for myriad imperialistic wars over the past 150
years, always glorified by our Yankee rulers as “righteous crusades.”
Just listen to the words of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which refers
to the death of as many as 850,000 Americans as “the glory of the coming of
the Lord.” Not to mention the slaughter of 200,000 Filipinos and
senseless American
entry into World War I, which were also “glorified” in song and words.
The “Yankee way of war,” commenced during the “Civil War” and perfected
during the subsequent twenty-five year war of genocide against the Plains
Indians (1865 – 1890), the Spanish-American War, the Philippine Insurrection,
and World War I, involves “marshaling overwhelming material to crush a weak
opponent, heedless of the cost in life and taxes, and rewards commanders
appropriately.” This does sound an awful lot like contemporary wars in
Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, etc.
The statist indoctrination academies known as “the public schools” was
also a Yankee invention, as Wilson shows, and originated as “a program of
ideological and ethnic cleansing.” It was the post “Civil War”
presidents Grant and Hayes who imposed the Yankee government school monopoly
on the South, modeled after “the statist, militarized models of
Europe.” Higher education was first politicized by the Lincoln
administration’s Morrill Act that funded “land grant universities,” and by
the creation of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which quickly politicized
agricultural education by sending “extension agents” into the public schools.
Wilson wastes no time on the self-serving Yankee fairy tale about how
righteous and super-ethical Yankees supposedly marched South in the 1860s to
heroically die by the hundreds of thousands for the benefit of black
strangers – the basic history of the “Civil War” that Yours Truly was taught
in Pennsylvania public schools. Reminding his readers that secession is
not the same thing as war, and that the causes of secession were different
from the cause of the war, Wilson lucidly states that “the war was caused by
the determination of Lincoln and his party to conquer the Southern states and
destroy their legal governments” and put themselves in charge – forever.
“The war, after all, consisted of the invasion and conquest of the South by
the U.S. government. A very simple fact that most Americans, it would
seem are unable to process, along with the plain fact that the Northern
soldiers did not make war for the purpose of freeing black people.”
In 1860 antislavery arguments were hardly sufficient to win an election,
let alone to inaugurate a war of conquest, says Wilson. Other more
realistic causes of the war were “an impulse toward national greatness”;
“the rise of an aggressive class of industrial and banking moguls” in the
North; the “arrival in the Midwest of radical, power-worshipping Germans
fleeing the failed revolutions of 1848” in Europe; and “Lincoln’s clever
manipulation of a phony but powerful issue: the ‘extension of slavery.’”
Crony capitalism run amok has been the end game of the Yankee way of
government ever since 1865. This involves not only the millions
of secret (and not-so-secret) corrupt political deals that enrich the
politically-connected at the expense of everyone else (i.e., protectionist
tariffs, bailouts of billionaire investment bankers, etc.) but also
aggressive, imperialistic wars that have the exact same purpose and
effect. This all began with the Lincoln administration’s introduction
of corporate welfare for railroad corporations, and is of course many orders
of magnitude larger today with bankster bailouts, the never-ending explosion
of spending on the military/industrial complex, and myriad other examples of
government of the crony capitalists, by the crony capitalists, for the crony
capitalists. There is no better example of this today than that
“museum-quality” specimen of a Yankee, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and her
pay-to-play Clinton Foundation. Read Clyde Wilson’s new book if you
wish to learn the real problem with government in America today.
The Best of
Thomas DiLorenzo
