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When James M. Buchanan was awarded the Nobel Prize
in Economics in 1986 the first thing he said at his George Mason University press
conference was that the award "does not make me an instant expert in
everything." Buchanan was well aware – and amused – at how
previous recipients of the award had made fools of themselves by viewing the
award as a license to pontificate about anything and everything, whether they
knew anything about the subject or not.
No such modesty and sense of reality occupies the
mind of a more recent Nobel laureate, Paul Krugman.
As a New York Times columnist he has always done what all New York
Times columnists do – pretend that he does in fact know everything
about everything. A case in point is his March 29 New York Times blog
entitled "Road to Appomattox Blogging." After mentioning how the Times
has a special "Disunion" blog to commemorate the 150th
anniversary of the start of the war, Krugman gives
a hilarious, elementary-schoolish rendition of his
"take" on the "Civil War."
Krugman said he has always been infatuated by the
"symbolism" of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, with "Lee the
patrician in his dress uniform," compared to General Grant, who was
"still muddy and disheveled from hard riding." Krugman
is apparently unaware that in 1860, on the eve of the war, Robert E. Lee was
in his thirty-second year as an officer in the United States Army, performing
mostly as a military engineer. He was hardly a "patrician" or
member of a ruling class. Grant, by contrast, was the overseer of an 850-acre
slave plantation owned by his wealthy father-in-law. The plantation, located
near St. Louis, was known as "White Haven" (which sounds like it
could have been named by the KKK) and is today a national park. (On the
"White Haven" Web site the National Park Service euphemistically
calls Grant the "manager" of the slave plantation rather than the more
historically-accurate word "overseer").
In 1862 Lee freed the slaves that his wife had
inherited, in compliance with his father-in-law’s will. Grant’s
White Haven slaves were not freed until an 1865 Missouri emancipation law
forced Grant and his father-in-law to do so. The fact that Lee changed
clothes before formally surrendering did not instantly turn the 36-year army
veteran into a "patrician," contrary to the "all-knowing"
Krugman’s assertion.
Krugman goes on to assert that the North’s victory in
the war was a victory in "manners" by a region that "excelled
at the arts of peace." Well, not really. What the North
"excelled" in was the waging of total war on the civilian
population of the South. The Lincoln administration instituted the first federal
military conscription law, and then ordered thousands of Northern men to
their death in the savage and bloody Napoleonic charges that characterized
the war. When tens of thousands of Northern men deserted, the Lincoln
administration commenced the public execution of deserters on a daily basis.
When New Yorkers rioted in protest of military conscription, Lincoln ordered
15,000 soldiers to the city where they murdered hundreds, and perhaps
thousands of draft protesters (See Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots). It also recruited thousands of European
mercenaries, many of whom did not even speak English, to arm themselves and march South to supposedly teach the
descendants of James Madison, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson what it
really meant to be an American. Lee Kennett, biographer of General William
Tecumseh Sherman, wrote of how many of Lincoln’s recruits were specially suited for pillaging, plundering and raping:
"the New York regiments were . . . filled with big city criminals and
foreigners fresh from the jails of the Old World" (Lee Kennett, Marching Through Georgia, p. 279).
The North waged war on Southern civilians for four
long years, murdering at least 50,000 of them according to historian Jeffrey
Rogers Hummel. It bombed cities like Atlanta for days at a time when they
were occupied by no one but civilians, and U.S. Army
soldiers looted, ransacked, and raped their way all throughout the South. The
"arts of peace" indeed.
As for the war being a victory of "manners,"
as Krugman says, consider this: When the women of
New Orleans refused to genuflect to U.S. Army troops who were occupying their
city and killing their husbands, sons and brothers, General Benjamin
"Beast" Butler issued an order that all the women of that city were
to henceforth be treated as prostitutes. "As the officers and soldiers
of the United States have been subject to repeated insults from the women . .
. of New Orleans," Butler wrote in his General Order Number 28 on May
15, 1862, "it is ordered that thereafter when any female shall, by word,
gesture, or movement, insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of
the United States, she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a
woman of the town plying her avocation." Butler’s order was widely
construed as a license for rape, and he was condemned by the whole world. Ah,
those Yankee "manners."
Krugman celebrates the victory of "a democratic
nation" (the North) in his blog. But during the war the North was
anything but "democratic": Lincoln illegally suspended the writ of
Habeas Corpus and imprisoned tens of thousands of Northern political critics
without any due process; shut down hundreds of opposition newspapers;
deported Congressman Clement Vallandigham of Ohio
for criticizing him; threatened to imprison Chief Justice Roger B. Taney for
issuing the (correct) opinion that Lincoln’s suspension of Habeas
Corpus was unconstitutional; censored all telegraphs; rigged elections;
imprisoned duly elected members of the Maryland legislature along with
Congressman Henry May of Baltimore and the mayor of Baltimore; illegally
orchestrated the secession of West Virginia to give the Republican Party two
more U.S. senators; confiscated firearms in the border states in violation of
the Second Amendment; and committed a grand act of treason by invading the
sovereign states of the South (Article 3, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution
defines treason as "only" levying war against the states, or
giving aid and comfort to their enemies).
Krugman is right about democracy in a sense: Democracy is
essentially one big organized act of bullying whereby a larger group bullies
a smaller group in order to plunder it with taxes. The "Civil War"
proved that whenever a smaller group has finally had enough, and attempts to
leave the game, the larger group will resort to anything – even the
mass murder of hundreds of thousands and the bombing and burning of entire
cities – to get its way. After all, in his first inaugural address
Lincoln literally threatened "force," "invasion" and
"bloodshed" (his exact words) in any state that refused to pay the
federal tariff, which had just been more than doubled two days earlier. He
followed through with his threat. This is "the kind of nation I believe
in," says Paul Krugman.
Thomas DiLorenzo
Article originally published on www.LewRockwell.com. By authorization
of the author
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