Colonel_Reb
Hall of Famer
This is one of several issues I've had with Beck since I first heard him 3-4 years ago. Of course, the same goes for Rush Limbaugh,
Sean Hannity and every other neo-con talking head.
<h1 align="center">Glenn
Beck's Lincoln Contradictions</font></font></h1>By Thomas DiLorenzo
I've been
occasionally watching Glenn Beck on the Fox News Channel and think
he has done an admirable job of smoking out and identifying the
shockingly hardcore, radical socialists who dominate the Obama administration.
He has also done a generally good job talking about the libertarian
founding principles of America, how they have been lost, and our
duty to regain them. But he has been absolutely abysmal when discussing
the subject of Lincoln, the War to Prevent Southern Independence,
and its legacy. I suspect that the reason for this disconnect with
historical reality is that: 1) The Fox News Channel is essentially
a propaganda arm of the neoconservative political cabal that has
captured the Republican Party; 2) One of the cornerstones of neocon
ideology is Lincoln idolatry and hatred of the South and Southerners.
(Professor Paul Gottfried, for one, has written extensively about
this.) 3) Therefore, if Glenn wants to keep his gig at Fox, he must
toe the party line on Lincoln. Being otherwise libertarian â€" while
the Democrats are in power â€" serves the purposes of the neocon
cabal nicely.</font>
To the neocons,
Lincoln idolatry serves the purpose of helping to prop up the centralized,
bureaucratic, liberty-destroying, military-industrial complex that
defines their existence. As William F. Buckley, Jr., the original
neocon, declared in 1952, fighting the Cold War meant that "we
have got to accept Big Government for the duration," including
"a totalitarian bureaucracy within our own shores" with
its "large armies, atomic energy, central intelligence, war
production boards, and the attendant centralization of power in
Washington." In case you haven't noticed, for quite some time
now the Republican Party has stood for war, war, and more war, and
little else. How on earth genuine conservatives who favor limited
constitutional government came to embrace Buckley as one of their
leading spokesmen is a bizarre mystery. </font>
<t></t><t></t>
When I debated
one of the gurus of neocon Lincoln idolatry â€" Harry Jaffa â€"
shortly after <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0761526463?ie=UTF8&tag=lewrockwell&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0761526463" target="_blank">The
Real Lincoln</a> was published in 2002, he bellowed at one point
that "9/11 proves more than ever that we need a strong central
government." (In reality, it proved the failure and
incapability of "the central government" to protect even
its own D.C. headquarters from a few nuts armed with box cutters.)
"We need big, totalitarian government to fight all the new
Hitlers and potential Hitlers in the world" is the neocon mantra,
in a nutshell. </font>
To neocons,
Lincoln is the poster boy of militaristic big government that runs
roughshod over civil liberties while bankrupting the country with
taxes and debt and murdering thousands of innocent foreigners (not
that Southerners during the 1861â€"1865 war were foreigners; they
were fellow American citizens). Doesn't this sound like the Republican
Party of today, as embodied in the recently dethroned Bush administration?</font>
Despite his
admirable performances discussing the founding fathers, socialism,
progressivism, and other topics, Glenn Beck has been absolutely
awful and sometimes untruthful when discussing Lincoln and his legacy.
During one show he claimed to have read the actual original copy
of The Confederate Constitution. I assume he made this assertion
to show that he must really be quite the expert on the document.
I didn't believe him when he said this, and his next sentence proved
to me that he did not read the document. The next sentence was the
statement that the formal title of the document was "The Slaveholders'
Constitution . . ." Anyone can look the document up at Yale
University's online Avalon Project, which warehouses all
the American founding documents, commentaries, and more, to see
for yourself that Beck was wrong about this. </font>
Beck's next
false statement was that "I read it" (the Confederate
Constitution) and "it wasn't about states' rights, it was all
about slavery." Read it yourself online. It is a virtual carbon
copy of the U.S. Constitution, with a few exceptions: The Confederate
president had a line-item veto; served for one six-year term; protectionist
tariffs are outlawed; government subsidies for corporations are
outlawed; and the "General Welfare Clause" of the U.S.
Constitution was deleted. </font>
<t></t><t></t>
The act of
secession was the very essence of states' rights, contrary to Beck's
proclamation, for the basic assumption was that the states were
sovereign. They delegated certain defined powers to the central
government for their own mutual benefit, but all other powers
remained in the hands of the people and the states, as stated in
the Tenth Amendment. As sovereigns, they had a right to secede for
whatever reason. If a state needed the permission of others to secede,
as Lincoln argued, then it was not really sovereign. </font>
The U.S. Constitution
adopted a federal, not a national system of government. That is
another way of saying a states' rights system of government. The
Confederate Constitution was nearly identical. </font>
As for slavery,
the Confederate Constitution was not essentially different from
the U.S. Constitution as it existed at the time. Beck was grossly
deceiving when he told his audience that the Confederate Constitution
protected slavery while saying not one word about how the U.S. Constitution
did the exact same thing. Slavery had been protected by the U.S.
Constitution since 1789. That's seventy-two years of slavery protection
under the U.S. Constitution. A Fugitive Slave Clause was written
into the original U.S. Constitution, and the 1850 Fugitive Slave
Act passed by Congress was never challenged constitutionally. That
in fact is why the great libertarian abolitionist Lysander Spooner
launched so many vitriolic attacks on the Lincoln administration.
As a trained lawyer, he had laid out the constitutional case against
slavery, but the Lincoln administration and the Republican Party
wanted nothing to do with him or his peaceful route to emancipation
â€" the same route all other countries of the world (and the Northern
states) took during the nineteenth century to end slavery. </font>
Moreover, Beck's
hero, Lincoln, orchestrated passage through the U.S. Senate and
the U.S. House of Representatives of the Corwin Amendment to the
Constitution, which would have formally and explicitly enshrined
slavery in the U.S. Constitution by prohibiting the government from
ever interfering with Southern slavery. This amendment passed the
Senate and the House just days before Lincoln was inaugurated. In
his first inaugural address he said he believed slavery was already
constitutional and then, alluding to the Corwin Amendment, said:
"I have no objection to it [slavery protection] being made
express and irrevocable" in the Constitution. This was by far
the strongest defense of slavery ever made by an American politician,
coming from the president himself. Beck and the wacky preacher posing
as an intellectual made no mention of this. </font>
<t></t><t></t>
More recently,
Beck has admirably attacked the idea of "collective salvation"
that Obama himself espouses, and which is apparently as much a part
of the ideology of the American Left today as militarism fueled
by Lincoln idolatry is of the Right. According to the doctrine of
"collective salvation," a Christian cannot be saved and
go to Heaven unless one first embarks on a crusade to have government
"save" the "oppressed" of society by expanding
the welfare state, raising taxes, making taxation more "progressive,"
adopting more racial hiring quotas, and regulating and nationalizing
as much of private industry as possible. It is a variant of "liberation
theology" which, according to Pope John Paul, II, is essentially
Marxism masquerading as Christianity. </font>
What Beck and
his wacky preacher/faux Lincoln expert do not know is that the
main supporters of the Lincoln regime believed in the exact same
quasi-religious ideas. Indeed, it defined their very existence.
As explained by Murray Rothbard in "America's Two Just Wars:
1775 and 1861" (in John Denson, ed., <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0765804875?ie=UTF8&tag=lewrockwell&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0765804875" target="_blank">The
Costs of War</a>, Transaction Publishers, 1997, p. 128):</font>
<blockquote>
The North,
in particular the North's driving force, the "Yankees"
â€" that ethnocultural group who either lived in New England or
migrated from there to upstate New York, northern and eastern
Ohio, northern Indiana, and northern Illinois â€" had been swept
by a new form of Protestantism. This was a fanatical and emotional
neo-Puritanism driven by a fervent "postmillennialism" which held
that, as a precondition for the Second Advent of Jesus Christ,
man must set up a thousand-year Kingdom of God on Earth.</font>
</blockquote>
To the
Yankees, their "kingdom" was to be a "perfect society"
cleansed of sin, the principal causes of which were slavery, alcohol,
and Catholicism. Furthermore, "government is God's major instrument
of salvation," Rothbard wrote. This is why the Yankees never
seriously considered ending Southern slavery how THEY had ended
it in their own states â€" peacefully through some kind of
compensated emancipation. They were not so concerned about the welfare
of the poor slaves. Indeed, even Tocqueville noticed that "the
problem of race," as he phrased it, was worse in the
North than it was in the South. Instead, as Rothbard continues:</font>
<blockquote>
The Northern
war against slavery partook of fanatical millennialist fervor,
of a cheerful willingness to uproot institutions, to commit mayhem
and mass murder, to plunder and loot and destroy, all in the name
of high moral principle and the birth of a perfect world. The
Yankee fanatics were veritable Pattersonian humanitarians with
the guillotine: the Anabaptists, the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks,
of their era.</font>
</blockquote>
<t></t><t></t>
"Collective
salvation," as opposed to the individualistic salvation that
the Bible teaches, was what motivated the Yankees and their war
on the South. This of course is exactly what Glenn Beck has been
ranting and raving about recently when it is practiced by opponents
of the neocon establishment â€" the exact same establishment that
embraces the Lincolnite, Yankee millennialist fervor as one of its
defining characteristics. That's why the neocons constantly invoke
Lincoln's "all men are created equal" words from the Gettysburg
Address (via Jefferson's Declaration of Secession) to "justify"
their endless military meddling in over 100 countries of the world.
ALL men deserve "equal" liberty, they tell us, and it
is OUR job to invade, conquer, and occupy any nation on earth where
there is a lack of such liberty. </font>
America was
founded with the George Washington/Thomas Jefferson foreign policy
of commercial relationships with all nations, entangling alliances
with none. The neocon establishment, which is influential in both
major political parties, believes in just the opposite: "entangling
alliances" and endless military interventionism with as many
nations as possible, all in the name of some undefinable Great Moral
Cause, in the tradition of Dishonest Abe. </font>
Of course,
all of this high-handed talk about the Republican Party supposedly
being "the party of great moral ideas" is also a convenient
smokescreen for the economic greed that is its real motivation,
and has been ever since the party first gained power. As Rothbard
further explained: "On the economic level, the Republicans
[in 1860] adopted the Whig program of statism and big government:
protective tariffs, subsidies to big business, strong central government,
large-scale public works, and cheap credit spurred by government."
It hasn't changed much since.</font>
July
17, 2010</font>
Thomas
J. DiLorenzo [send him mail]
is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the
author of </font><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0761526463?ie=UTF8&tag=lewrockwell&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0761526463" target="_blank">The
Real Lincoln; </a></font></font><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307338428?ie=UTF8&tag=lewrockwell&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0307338428" target="_blank">Lincoln
Unmasked: What You're Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe</a>
and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400083311?ie=UTF8&tag=lewrockwell&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1400083311" target="_blank">How
Capitalism Saved America</a>. His latest book is <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307382842?ie=UTF8&tag=lewrockwell&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0307382842" target="_blank">Hamilton's
Curse: How Jefferson's Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution
â€" And What It Means for America Today</a>.</font>
Copyright
© 2010 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in
part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.</font>http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo190.html
Sean Hannity and every other neo-con talking head.
<h1 align="center">Glenn
Beck's Lincoln Contradictions</font></font></h1>By Thomas DiLorenzo
I've been
occasionally watching Glenn Beck on the Fox News Channel and think
he has done an admirable job of smoking out and identifying the
shockingly hardcore, radical socialists who dominate the Obama administration.
He has also done a generally good job talking about the libertarian
founding principles of America, how they have been lost, and our
duty to regain them. But he has been absolutely abysmal when discussing
the subject of Lincoln, the War to Prevent Southern Independence,
and its legacy. I suspect that the reason for this disconnect with
historical reality is that: 1) The Fox News Channel is essentially
a propaganda arm of the neoconservative political cabal that has
captured the Republican Party; 2) One of the cornerstones of neocon
ideology is Lincoln idolatry and hatred of the South and Southerners.
(Professor Paul Gottfried, for one, has written extensively about
this.) 3) Therefore, if Glenn wants to keep his gig at Fox, he must
toe the party line on Lincoln. Being otherwise libertarian â€" while
the Democrats are in power â€" serves the purposes of the neocon
cabal nicely.</font>
To the neocons,
Lincoln idolatry serves the purpose of helping to prop up the centralized,
bureaucratic, liberty-destroying, military-industrial complex that
defines their existence. As William F. Buckley, Jr., the original
neocon, declared in 1952, fighting the Cold War meant that "we
have got to accept Big Government for the duration," including
"a totalitarian bureaucracy within our own shores" with
its "large armies, atomic energy, central intelligence, war
production boards, and the attendant centralization of power in
Washington." In case you haven't noticed, for quite some time
now the Republican Party has stood for war, war, and more war, and
little else. How on earth genuine conservatives who favor limited
constitutional government came to embrace Buckley as one of their
leading spokesmen is a bizarre mystery. </font>
<t></t><t></t>
When I debated
one of the gurus of neocon Lincoln idolatry â€" Harry Jaffa â€"
shortly after <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0761526463?ie=UTF8&tag=lewrockwell&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0761526463" target="_blank">The
Real Lincoln</a> was published in 2002, he bellowed at one point
that "9/11 proves more than ever that we need a strong central
government." (In reality, it proved the failure and
incapability of "the central government" to protect even
its own D.C. headquarters from a few nuts armed with box cutters.)
"We need big, totalitarian government to fight all the new
Hitlers and potential Hitlers in the world" is the neocon mantra,
in a nutshell. </font>
To neocons,
Lincoln is the poster boy of militaristic big government that runs
roughshod over civil liberties while bankrupting the country with
taxes and debt and murdering thousands of innocent foreigners (not
that Southerners during the 1861â€"1865 war were foreigners; they
were fellow American citizens). Doesn't this sound like the Republican
Party of today, as embodied in the recently dethroned Bush administration?</font>
Despite his
admirable performances discussing the founding fathers, socialism,
progressivism, and other topics, Glenn Beck has been absolutely
awful and sometimes untruthful when discussing Lincoln and his legacy.
During one show he claimed to have read the actual original copy
of The Confederate Constitution. I assume he made this assertion
to show that he must really be quite the expert on the document.
I didn't believe him when he said this, and his next sentence proved
to me that he did not read the document. The next sentence was the
statement that the formal title of the document was "The Slaveholders'
Constitution . . ." Anyone can look the document up at Yale
University's online Avalon Project, which warehouses all
the American founding documents, commentaries, and more, to see
for yourself that Beck was wrong about this. </font>
Beck's next
false statement was that "I read it" (the Confederate
Constitution) and "it wasn't about states' rights, it was all
about slavery." Read it yourself online. It is a virtual carbon
copy of the U.S. Constitution, with a few exceptions: The Confederate
president had a line-item veto; served for one six-year term; protectionist
tariffs are outlawed; government subsidies for corporations are
outlawed; and the "General Welfare Clause" of the U.S.
Constitution was deleted. </font>
<t></t><t></t>
The act of
secession was the very essence of states' rights, contrary to Beck's
proclamation, for the basic assumption was that the states were
sovereign. They delegated certain defined powers to the central
government for their own mutual benefit, but all other powers
remained in the hands of the people and the states, as stated in
the Tenth Amendment. As sovereigns, they had a right to secede for
whatever reason. If a state needed the permission of others to secede,
as Lincoln argued, then it was not really sovereign. </font>
The U.S. Constitution
adopted a federal, not a national system of government. That is
another way of saying a states' rights system of government. The
Confederate Constitution was nearly identical. </font>
As for slavery,
the Confederate Constitution was not essentially different from
the U.S. Constitution as it existed at the time. Beck was grossly
deceiving when he told his audience that the Confederate Constitution
protected slavery while saying not one word about how the U.S. Constitution
did the exact same thing. Slavery had been protected by the U.S.
Constitution since 1789. That's seventy-two years of slavery protection
under the U.S. Constitution. A Fugitive Slave Clause was written
into the original U.S. Constitution, and the 1850 Fugitive Slave
Act passed by Congress was never challenged constitutionally. That
in fact is why the great libertarian abolitionist Lysander Spooner
launched so many vitriolic attacks on the Lincoln administration.
As a trained lawyer, he had laid out the constitutional case against
slavery, but the Lincoln administration and the Republican Party
wanted nothing to do with him or his peaceful route to emancipation
â€" the same route all other countries of the world (and the Northern
states) took during the nineteenth century to end slavery. </font>
Moreover, Beck's
hero, Lincoln, orchestrated passage through the U.S. Senate and
the U.S. House of Representatives of the Corwin Amendment to the
Constitution, which would have formally and explicitly enshrined
slavery in the U.S. Constitution by prohibiting the government from
ever interfering with Southern slavery. This amendment passed the
Senate and the House just days before Lincoln was inaugurated. In
his first inaugural address he said he believed slavery was already
constitutional and then, alluding to the Corwin Amendment, said:
"I have no objection to it [slavery protection] being made
express and irrevocable" in the Constitution. This was by far
the strongest defense of slavery ever made by an American politician,
coming from the president himself. Beck and the wacky preacher posing
as an intellectual made no mention of this. </font>
<t></t><t></t>
More recently,
Beck has admirably attacked the idea of "collective salvation"
that Obama himself espouses, and which is apparently as much a part
of the ideology of the American Left today as militarism fueled
by Lincoln idolatry is of the Right. According to the doctrine of
"collective salvation," a Christian cannot be saved and
go to Heaven unless one first embarks on a crusade to have government
"save" the "oppressed" of society by expanding
the welfare state, raising taxes, making taxation more "progressive,"
adopting more racial hiring quotas, and regulating and nationalizing
as much of private industry as possible. It is a variant of "liberation
theology" which, according to Pope John Paul, II, is essentially
Marxism masquerading as Christianity. </font>
What Beck and
his wacky preacher/faux Lincoln expert do not know is that the
main supporters of the Lincoln regime believed in the exact same
quasi-religious ideas. Indeed, it defined their very existence.
As explained by Murray Rothbard in "America's Two Just Wars:
1775 and 1861" (in John Denson, ed., <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0765804875?ie=UTF8&tag=lewrockwell&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0765804875" target="_blank">The
Costs of War</a>, Transaction Publishers, 1997, p. 128):</font>
<blockquote>
The North,
in particular the North's driving force, the "Yankees"
â€" that ethnocultural group who either lived in New England or
migrated from there to upstate New York, northern and eastern
Ohio, northern Indiana, and northern Illinois â€" had been swept
by a new form of Protestantism. This was a fanatical and emotional
neo-Puritanism driven by a fervent "postmillennialism" which held
that, as a precondition for the Second Advent of Jesus Christ,
man must set up a thousand-year Kingdom of God on Earth.</font>
</blockquote>
To the
Yankees, their "kingdom" was to be a "perfect society"
cleansed of sin, the principal causes of which were slavery, alcohol,
and Catholicism. Furthermore, "government is God's major instrument
of salvation," Rothbard wrote. This is why the Yankees never
seriously considered ending Southern slavery how THEY had ended
it in their own states â€" peacefully through some kind of
compensated emancipation. They were not so concerned about the welfare
of the poor slaves. Indeed, even Tocqueville noticed that "the
problem of race," as he phrased it, was worse in the
North than it was in the South. Instead, as Rothbard continues:</font>
<blockquote>
The Northern
war against slavery partook of fanatical millennialist fervor,
of a cheerful willingness to uproot institutions, to commit mayhem
and mass murder, to plunder and loot and destroy, all in the name
of high moral principle and the birth of a perfect world. The
Yankee fanatics were veritable Pattersonian humanitarians with
the guillotine: the Anabaptists, the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks,
of their era.</font>
</blockquote>
<t></t><t></t>
"Collective
salvation," as opposed to the individualistic salvation that
the Bible teaches, was what motivated the Yankees and their war
on the South. This of course is exactly what Glenn Beck has been
ranting and raving about recently when it is practiced by opponents
of the neocon establishment â€" the exact same establishment that
embraces the Lincolnite, Yankee millennialist fervor as one of its
defining characteristics. That's why the neocons constantly invoke
Lincoln's "all men are created equal" words from the Gettysburg
Address (via Jefferson's Declaration of Secession) to "justify"
their endless military meddling in over 100 countries of the world.
ALL men deserve "equal" liberty, they tell us, and it
is OUR job to invade, conquer, and occupy any nation on earth where
there is a lack of such liberty. </font>
America was
founded with the George Washington/Thomas Jefferson foreign policy
of commercial relationships with all nations, entangling alliances
with none. The neocon establishment, which is influential in both
major political parties, believes in just the opposite: "entangling
alliances" and endless military interventionism with as many
nations as possible, all in the name of some undefinable Great Moral
Cause, in the tradition of Dishonest Abe. </font>
Of course,
all of this high-handed talk about the Republican Party supposedly
being "the party of great moral ideas" is also a convenient
smokescreen for the economic greed that is its real motivation,
and has been ever since the party first gained power. As Rothbard
further explained: "On the economic level, the Republicans
[in 1860] adopted the Whig program of statism and big government:
protective tariffs, subsidies to big business, strong central government,
large-scale public works, and cheap credit spurred by government."
It hasn't changed much since.</font>
July
17, 2010</font>
Thomas
J. DiLorenzo [send him mail]
is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the
author of </font><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0761526463?ie=UTF8&tag=lewrockwell&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0761526463" target="_blank">The
Real Lincoln; </a></font></font><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307338428?ie=UTF8&tag=lewrockwell&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0307338428" target="_blank">Lincoln
Unmasked: What You're Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe</a>
and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400083311?ie=UTF8&tag=lewrockwell&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1400083311" target="_blank">How
Capitalism Saved America</a>. His latest book is <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307382842?ie=UTF8&tag=lewrockwell&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0307382842" target="_blank">Hamilton's
Curse: How Jefferson's Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution
â€" And What It Means for America Today</a>.</font>
Copyright
© 2010 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in
part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.</font>http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo190.html
