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In Stalin’s Russia, genetics and
cybernetics were treated as the cat’s paw of imperialism and officially
branded as “whores”. But it was another branch of Soviet science,
history, that was a far more deserving candidate to bear that not
exactly honorific moniker. Russian historians loyally served the regime,
meeting its propaganda needs in full compliance with a thesis propounded
by the titular head of the Soviet school of history, Mikhail Pokrovsky:
“History is the present telescoped into the past.” Some American
liberals have been faithfully following Pokrovsky’s precept, reinventing
the past in keeping with the progressive view of the world.
Since white guilt vis-à-vis blacks has been harnessed by the left as the
central mobilizing principle of the creeping American revolution, the
racial test has been turned into the chief - nay, the only - criterion
for evaluating the probity of any social or political figure - and not
just of the present, but of the past as well.
The Founding Fathers are being torn down by the progressives from their
honorable place in the annals of America’s history for one overriding
reason: almost all of them were slave owners. Their entire service to
the country, their sacrifices, the enormous risks they consciously took
for the sake of freedom - all of this, in the progressive view, pales
into insignificance next to the Founding Fathers’ deadly sin of racism.
Granted, they might have treated their slaves well and some of them even
set them free. But what good was it considering that they viewed blacks
as inferior beings? And even though their racist views were the only
fare in the marketplace of ideas of the day shared by 100 percent of
their contemporaries, the progressives refuse to recognize it as a
mitigating circumstance. The court of history appropriated by its
present-day progressive avatars has passed its harsh verdict on the
Founding Fathers: guilty!
One would think it the height of ludicrous incongruity to invoke today’s
standards while judging the character of people who lived two centuries
ago, but all appeals to reason shatter against the stony dogmatism of
the adepts of progressive justice. To them, racism is the basest of all
sins, and the sinners should be damned from here to eternity.
All attempts to dissuade the diehard adherents of this absurd notion by
appealing to their common sense are doomed to failure. But if rational
arguments are incapable of persuading the implacable foes of racism,
maybe, just maybe, they might succumb to their own twisted logic? Why
not use their racial yardstick on a hero from the progressive Pantheon -
say, the man who has gone down in history as the Great Emancipator.
Let’s put Abraham Lincoln under the progressive microscope.
On September 22, 1862, President Lincoln published the Emancipation
Proclamation declaring that as of January 1, 1863, all slaves would be
set free… in the 10 states of the Confederation which were “in rebellion
against the United States”. The slaves in the states that, willingly or
unwillingly, were not part of the Confederacy, such as Kentucky,
Maryland or Delaware, were to remain in chains. The hypocrisy of the
Emancipation Proclamation was so blatant that even Lincoln's loyal
secretary of state, William Seward, sarcastically observed, "We show our
sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them
and holding them in bondage where we can set them free."
Moreover, if, according to the progressive version of history, abolition
of slavery was the cause of the Civil War, why didn’t Lincoln free the
slaves right off the bat? Why did he wait for many months and only did
it when the war took a bad turn for the Union and, more important, when
the superpowers of the day, Great Britain and France, were about to
recognize the Confederacy and come to its aid? Viewed realistically,
abolition of slavery was by any measure a stratagem in pursuit of a
purely pragmatic goal: to win over the British and French public opinion
and scare away the Confederacy’s potential allies whose assistance might
have had a crucial effect on the outcome of the war. It was a brilliant
and highly successful tactical move.
As a matter of fact, the President never tried to hide his real
objective. He wrote: "I view the matter [Emancipation Proclamation] as a
practical war measure, to be decided upon according to the advantages or
disadvantages it may offer to the suppression of the rebellion." And
here is another confession of the Great Emancipator: "I will also
concede that emancipation would help us in Europe, and convince them
that we are incited by something more than ambition." Lincoln had every
reason to fret over the Europeans’ suspicions of his intentions. The Old
World largely (ironically, with the exception of that bastion of
reaction, Russia) sided with the Confederacy which was viewed as a
victim of a predatory North driven by greed.
At that time the U.S. federal budget was fed exclusively by excise taxes
and tariffs. The only two items profitably exported by the United States
were cotton and tobacco cultivated almost entirely in the states of the
Confederacy. Meanwhile, the Southerners chafed under the punitive
tariffs introduced by Washington to protect America’s fledgling
manufacturing industries which were unable, without government support,
to compete with the far more advanced European producers. And so to add
insult to injury, while supporting the federal treasury, the Southerners
were forced to buy domestic manufactured goods of inferior quality at
exorbitant prices.
To let the South go would have meant serious financial troubles for the
North. That’s the primary reason why Lincoln was obsessed with keeping
the rebellious South within the Union. As a matter of fact, he was quite
candid about it. In August 1862, he responded to Horace Greeley, the
influential editor of the New York Tribune, who published an open letter
to the president, calling on him to free the slaves in order to weaken
the Confederacy. In his letter, Lincoln stated in so many words that his
main goal was to preserve the Union and he was prepared to take any
course of action with respect to slavery which would be conducive to
achieving the sought-for outcome, whether freeing all, some or none of
the slaves. “I would save the Union.
I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution,” wrote Lincoln.
Can there be a clearer statement of his priorities than this: “My
paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not
either to save or destroy slavery.” While in principle against slavery,
Lincoln, a smart politician that he was, never allowed his personal
views to interfere with his political interests or idealism to triumph
over expedience. When two of his generals freed slaves in some Southern
areas, the president reimposed slavery. G.K. Chesterton with his
customary wit described the dichotomy of Lincoln’s views: "He loved to
repeat that slavery was intolerable while he tolerated it, and to prove
that something ought to be done while it was impossible to do it...."
O.K., so Lincoln was an astute master politician and did whatever his
political objectives demanded. But what about his personal attitude
toward the blacks? Alas, he left no doubt as to his disdain for the
slaves and his firm belief in the inferiority of the black race. Here is
his famous quote from a debate with Sen. Steven Douglas from “The
National Park Service web site’s “Lincoln Home Historical Site’s Page”
entitled: “Fourth Debate Charleston Illinois:”
“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing
about in any way the social and political equality of the white and
black races, [applause]-that I am not nor ever have been in favor of
making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold
office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition
to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black
races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together
on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot
so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of
superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of
having the superior position assigned to the white race.”
Sounds pretty unambiguous to me. And so it did to Lerone Bennett Jr.,
executive editor of Ebony and author of several books on
African-American history. He scathingly criticized Lincoln in 1968 in an
article he published in his magazine titled ''Was Abe Lincoln a White
Supremacist?'' “His answer was a resounding Yes – ruefully writes The
New York Times. - Lincoln believed blacks inferior to whites, Bennett
insisted; he supported segregation in the North, told darky jokes and
used the N-word in public and private, reluctantly embraced Emancipation
halfway through the Civil War only after Congress enacted it and slaves
voted with their feet for freedom by escaping to Union lines, and
persisted to the end of his life in the belief that ''deportation'' of
blacks was the best solution to the race problems that would follow.”
To sum it up, Lincoln was an
out-and-out racist. Actually, as the flagship mouthpiece of the liberal
left put it, quite correctly, he “did share the racial prejudices of his
time and place.” But so did the Founding Fathers, didn’t they? And if
liberals view them as bigoted miscreants and want to put them on trial
for the crime of racism, Lincoln definitely merits a prominent place in
the dock. After all, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
Otherwise, the accusers would be guilty of another grave sin in their
own playbook: disparate treatment.
©V.Volsky |