Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
April 9, 2010

Liberals love to fudge history. For instance, they are enamored with the establishment version of the so-called Civil War and vociferously claim the war was about slavery and evil slaveocrats in the Deep South. In the process, they discard historical facts.

So when Pat Buchanan said on Chris Matthews’ Hardball the other day that Virginia did not secede from the Union over slavery but because the North insisted the state mobilize its militias and attack the Deep South, the libs went ballistic.

It was a classic case of race baiting of the sort Chris Matthews engages in continually in his ongoing effort to support authoritarian government – or rather the effort of his establishment handlers.

Buchanan made the comments during a discussion of Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell’s proclamation reinstating Confederate History Month. Libs are outraged that slavery was not mentioned in the proclamation that pays tribute to the sacrifices of Confederate soldiers.

The exchange between MSNBC’s bully Matthews and Buchanan occurred after Matthews asked why Virginia seceded.

“They wanted to be free of the Union,” Buchanan responded.

“They wanted to keep slaves,” Matthews insisted.

“Who was right in the Civil War?” Matthews then asked.

“I think in a way both sides were right,” Buchanan responded. “Lincoln had a right to save the Union. I think they [the South] had a right to go free.”

“Let’s not defend the right to slavery,” MSNBC political analyst Karen Finney said.

“Has Buchanan, who is certainly no stranger to racial controversy, finally stepped over the line?” asks Alan Colmes’ blog, Liberaland. “Should MSNBC disallow further commentary from this man?”

Should we disallow all political commentary that differs from that of Alan Colmes and is quite frankly at odds with history? Far too many libs – who consider constitutionalists rightwing domestic terrorists – think so and their demands to limit the discussion are becoming a deafening crescendo.

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However, if Buchanan had read up on his history, he would not have had to endure such ignorance.

The South seceded from the Union because the North had imposed punitive tariffs upon it. In 1828 the North began imposing agricultural tariffs on the Southern states to subsidize its industrial policies. “Thirty year later, with the South paying 87 percent of federal tariff revenue while having their livelihoods threatened by protectionist legislation, it became impossible for the two regions to be governed under the same regime. The South as a region was being reduced to a slave status, with the federal government as its master,” writes Lew Rockwell.

In 1860, Lincoln promised not to interfere with slavery, although he did pledge to “collect the duties and imposts” the government claimed.

Rockwell writes:

Before the war, Lincoln himself had pledged to leave slavery intact, to enforce the fugitive slaves laws, and to support an amendment that would forever guarantee slavery where it then existed. Neither did he lift a finger to repeal the anti-Negro laws that besotted all Northern states, Illinois in particular. Recall that the underground railroad ended, not in New York or Boston-since dropping off blacks in those states would have been restricted-but in Canada! The Confederate Constitution did, however, make possible the gradual elimination of slavery, a process that would have been made easier had the North not so severely restricted the movements of former slaves.

In fact, as Thomas J. Di Lorenzo notes, not only did Lincoln support the slavery forever amendment, but the amendment was his idea. He worked tirelessly on federal legislation that would outlaw the various personal liberty laws that existed in several Northern states.

Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was little more than a political trick. He admitted as much in a letter to Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase: “The original proclamation has no… legal justification, except as a military measure.” In other words, the Emancipation Proclamation was little more than war propaganda.

“No one mourns the passing of the slave system,” writes Thomas E. Woods, Jr.. “But those who can see nothing more than slavery at stake in this contest miss the insight of men like Lord Acton, who saw in this victory for centralization a defeat for the values of civilized life in the West. With the destruction of state sovereignty went both the main institutional restraint on the power of the federal government as well as the important moral example of a polity organized along different lines from those of the centralized states that would come to dominate the political landscape in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”

Chris Matthews and Alan Colmes are apologists for authoritarian federal power over the states and they are race baiting the opposition in order to circumvent the discussion. Unfortunately, Colmes’ assertion that Buchanan is a racist and should be barred from the network is indicative of those who support Obama and the Democrats and their unprecedented effort to eradicate the Constitution and its unambiguous limitations on the federal government, in particular the Tenth Amendment that restates the Constitution’s overriding principle of federalism by providing that powers not granted to the federal government are reserved to the states or the people.

Finally, Pat Buchanan is not doing any of us a favor by allowing the shill Matthews and his federal government worshiping guests (including the reprehensible Alan Colmes) to pillory him – and us – as racists and rightwing extremists who need their First Amendment checked at the door.

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