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Jim C.
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Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism

- Tom DiLorenzo - Mises.org

As long as 24hr Gold reprints articles that have little to do with finance - gold and silver - I assume they wish and expect commentary pro and con and expect spirited debate (as has been the case!)

So..... DiLorenzo goes on and on about fascism and imperialism and all the misuse of power that goes with that. All that is well and true and most who frequent this site would agree. The question is why does DiLorenzo so rant? What is motivating him? At the end of the article he quotes the following from Ludwig von Mises: "Or as Ludwig von Mises wrote, under imperialism, “the individual no longer has value."

So it is clear that DiLorenzo's criticisms of fascism and imperialism are based on their violations of individual rights -- and rightly so. This issue is valid for our time: the violations of individual rights increasing at an alarming rate under both recent Republican and Democratic Administrations.

However, when it comes to the violations of individual rights under the southern slave system, DiLorenzo in article after article is strangely silent. Why so great a silence? It appears that the craggy figure of President Abraham Lincoln stands in his way. You see, to destroy slavery in America, Lincoln had no choice but to destroy the southern states, who had initiated the violence. It was either respond to aggression with aggression or to allow the expansion of that horrendous institution into newly formed states -- as Democratic Stephen Douglas and all the Southern politicians wished to do with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

DiLorenzo's diatribes against Lincoln are against the means that Lincoln chose to use. Apparently, if DiLorenzo had to chose between allowing a slave state to exist and taking action against said slave state, he would without hesitation take the former course. To him, and the intellectual minds tethered to Lew Rockwell, the right of a state to allow violations of human rights is inviolate since no outside power has the moral authority to interfere. No other explanation is possible. DiLorenzo criticizes Lincoln for BOTH the violations of individual rights in the North and for responding to force (attack on Fort Sumter) with force. The former critique of Lincoln may be valid (especially conscription); the later is not.

The Declaration of Independence allows for state secession but only when said states are having the rights of their citizens violated, and is clearly spelled out by Jefferson. No such condition existed in any southern state. In fact, it was the southern states doing the violating and Lincoln had the right to respond to force with force. He recognized the basic issue involved (the evil of slavery) and eventually ended that institution after the insurrection was put down with the 13th Amendment.

It is either honest intellectual and moral confusion (not seeing the forest for the trees) on DiLorenzo's part or the other -- that he is rationalizing slavery. I give and have given DiLorenzo the benefit of the doubt and ascribe his mental state to the former.

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Beginning of the headline :For generations, American students have been taught that their government was a constitutional republic and, as such, is truly “exceptional.” So-called American exceptionalism is contrasted in the classroom first with the imperialistic British Empire from which the original colonists rebelled. From there... Read More

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