The Lincoln Cult Attacks Ron Paul

On October 10 the online History News Network expressed its disapproval (yet again) of a statement that Ron Paul made several years ago regarding the American “Civil War.”  In a television interview Ron Paul expressed disagreement with the new, politically-correct legend that slavery was the one and only cause of the Civil War.  The long-simmering conflict over states’ rights versus consolidation and nationalism was the main problem, he said.  So the History News Network highlighted an article by one Dale Schlundt, an adjunct professor at Northwest Vista College, on “Why People Like Ron Paul Falsely Believe Slavery Wasn’t the Cause of the Civil War.”  Schlundt is very upset that someone with such a large audience and who allegedly “did not study the Civil War in depth” would say such a thing.  He says that he starts each semester of his history class with a video of Ron Paul’s television interview on the subject, and then spends considerable class time belly-aching about it.

Of course, the reason why “people like Ron Paul” believe that there were multiple causes of the “Civil War,” as with all other wars in human history, is that they have studied the subject in depth, unlike Dale Schlundt, and do not rely simply on the latest politically-correct platitudes.  For example, they are familiar with the book, The Causes of the Civil War by Kenneth Stampp, a former president of the American Historical Association. This widely-used that time.  People like Dale Schlundt, on the other hand, are either ignorant of these plain historical facts, or they dishonestly hide them from their students.

“People like Ron Paul” also understand that secession does not necessitate war.  The issue of why the Southern states seceded is entirely separate from the question of why there was a war.  Lincoln himself was very clear on why there was a war:  By his actions he proved that his war aim was to destroy the voluntary union of the founding fathers and replace it with a coerced, Soviet-style union held together by mass murder, mayhem, the bombing and burning of entire cities, the rape, pillage, and plunder of the civilian population, and everlasting threats of doing the same should any state in the future contemplate leaving Lincoln’s “mystical” union.

When people like Ron Paul cite the decades-long conflict over states’ rights versus nationalism as a cause of the war, they are saying that the Southern states, like the New England Federalists before them, believed that the union was voluntary and that they had a right of freedom of association and of secession.  The Republican Party, on the other hand, insisted that the union was never voluntary, and was a one-way venus flytrap from which no state, and no citizen, could ever escape for any reason. Lincoln’s regime “proved” its theory of the union to be “correct” at the cost of as many as 850,000 dead Americans according to the latest research.

The post The Lincoln Cult Attacks Ron Paul appeared first on LewRockwell.