As I’ve mentioned before, the Civil War was not about slavery, it was about forcing states that legally and constitutionally chose to secede from the Union from exercising the freedom to do so.
Recently I’ve learned that even certain phrases we were taught we just never questioned because the phrase itself and the simplicity of its definition suggests that it does not require thought. We simply accept it. I don’t spend much time pondering the ethical validity or accuracy of phrases like, “low-interest loan,” “bring your own beer” or “buy one get one free.”
But how many times in your Government education have you read, heard or been taught about our “Civil War?” And over the course of your life, how many times have you heard the Civil War referred to as the “Civil War?”
A lot of times, right? Countless times. So many times from so many sources that the thought to even stop and think about what “Civil War” actually means doesn’t even occur to us.
So I will just make a simple statement of fact…
America never had a Civil War.
A Civil War, by definition, is when one or more factions of a nation attempt to break away from the other faction(s) and gain control of the whole. Note the bold part of the definition which makes all the difference and exposes the lie we were all taught in school. Do you ever remember being taught that the Southern States wanted to take over the whole country? No? Then I guess it wasn’t a Civil War.
An example of the true definition is found easily enough, just today, on Quartz discussing the Burundi protests in Africa where the country’s President Pierre Nkurunziza is running for a third term in violation of their constitution. Citizens are protesting and the government response is quickly descending into tyranny as they arrest dissenters, shut down radio stations and respond with violence. It is in this strife and revolt that the fears of a Civil War are being raised, which, as we see here, means that two factions are squaring off against each other for control of the entire country, not one faction just requesting freedom and autonomy from the other.
“If the United Nations, Western donors and the African Union don’t act quickly, and prepare to intervene if necessary, the tension could explode into a full-scale civil war, threatening the stability of Africa’s entire Great Lakes region,” write Nkundwa and Rosen.
Think of all the Civil Wars we were told about in Africa, South America and elsewhere, just like this example. What is the common element of those stories? That some “rebel” group is attempting to gain control of the country from those currently in power or those in power become the “rebel” group themselves attempting to seize control from the people as a whole. It is never about a rebel group trying to leave, or just not be part of the whole or form their own country. The correct use of the term Civil War in colloquial terms is simply, “Power Grab.”
So why are we taught about our particular war as a Civil War? Simple. To call it what it really was, the War of Secession, would be to admit by this self-defined phrase that the war was not fought about something as noble and altruistically heart warming as freeing the slaves; and you need something heart warming to justify 625,000 war related deaths. It is much harder to teach children to wrap themselves in the flag by saying they may need to go off one day and die to prevent someone from trying to leave the country.
It would also raise uncomfortable questions, like Lincoln’s multiple quotes about how the war had nothing to do with slavery, or the fact that advancements in technology would have in the long run most likely made the practice of maintaining humans as machinery way more expensive than just replacing them with actual machinery like combines (which continues today with ATM machines, self-checkouts, restaurant order kiosks), or that less than 5% of whites in the South actually had slaves, or that the Federal Government itself (the North) supported slavery with laws like the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, or that it would have been cheaper to solve slavery the way England did – by simply buying their freedom, and bonus – 625,000 lives saved. Or how about the tiny town of Town Line, NY that would teach children how and why people choose to organize and secede from Governments they disagree with. A town that legally seceded from the Union during the “Civil War” and was only readmitted in 1946 (If I lived there, I’d regret being readmitted at this point). Too many uncomfortable questions for Government-is-the-answer-to-everything approved educators that would teach way too much about constitutional rights, tyrannical government, secession, political sophists and the true value of citizens to their government, which is to say no value at all beyond what can be extracted from them in money or soldiering.
If you want good little soldiers to become good big soldiers ready to run in front of bullets on a politicians whim, you need them to believe that everything America has ever done has been done out of love. It’s that kind of brain washing that manufactured an entire generation of big soldiers that did not revolt, when they should have, as their Government forced them during the draft to become – against their will (as if citizens are no more than slaves) – bullet blocking meat machines in the military sausage grinder for other people’s wars.
In summary, the War of Secession was fought because the south wanted to maintain slavery and had elected to legally secede to that end, and the north wanted to maintain the Union and this was taught to us under the ruse of a Civil War to maintain the pretense that the war was all about freeing the slaves, a massive bold faced lie, that only thanks to the internet is this fact now reaching millions of people.
Add this to the raft of lies you have been told and the lies your children are currently being told in government schools, today, right now, this minute.
In the end, we should fight for our lives, for our families, for our friends, for our private property and for our freedom from each other, but not for a flag. Not for a government. Not for politicians. Not for bankers and corporations. Not for the U.N. and not for other people and their problems and their wars.
Like the moment of silence we hold for our veterans sent to die by the politicians from their air conditioned offices in Washington, let’s take just a brief moment to think of all the evils of Government and what life would be like without those evils…without Government.
I pledge allegiance, to the flag, of the United States of America…but I don’t know why I should.
Categories: Big Government, Government Failures, Statism
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