Thematic Continuities and American Destiny: From Lincoln to Obama

0:00Paul gave my talk that intellectual-sounding title. Mine was much more pedestrian when we first talked about this. But what I'm going to talk about is I'm going to start off talking about an essay written by the late Mel Bradford. And the essay was entitled, Lincoln, The Declaration and Secular Puritanism, and then colon, A Rhetoric for Continuing Revolution. And the argument that Mel Bradford made, He was a literary scholar and a friend of David Gordon's, among other words, and David has always had very high regard for Mel Bradford, who is one of his intellectual heroes. So this was a very learned man. And so what he's talking about is that Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, in which he tried to rewrite the Declaration of Independence or the meaning of the Declaration of Independence, became the ideological genesis of American military and foreign policy that has prevailed basically since 1863, since he made this sort of, this Gettysburg Address.

1:06In fact, Gary Wills, the left-wing pundit, wrote a whole book on the Gettysburg Address on what a clever subterfuge it was and how it has been used to subvert the Constitution, which Gary Wills thinks is a good thing. and so, anyway, that's sort of an advertisement for this. And anyway, especially the all men are created equal line from the declaration has been twisted and perverted to mean something different, I think, than what Thomas Jefferson would ever have intended it to mean, the author of the Declaration of Independence. And there's a whole industry of sorts that has been devoted to maintaining this distorted meaning of the declaration. and the West Coast Straussians led by Harry Jaffa, their whole reason for existing, I think, is to keep this up.

2:00Every time we get to the 4th of July, there's an article in the Wall Street Journal or someplace like that about the real meaning of the Declaration of Independence, as though Americans are too ignorant to read the document on their own and see what it says, and so they keep reminding us of the real meaning. and what was what is what is meant by the real meaning of this this this rhetoric of continuing revolution well the all men are created equal line means that it's the duty of americans has this is what has been turned into it's the duty of americans to stamp out all sin in the world wherever it may be found so that all men everywhere could share an equal freedom everywhere whether you're in new New Mexico, Alabama, or Iraq, anywhere.

2:45So that's why the Battle Hymn of the Republic, for example, which referred to the death of, the latest estimate of civil war deaths is as many as 850,000. For 100 years, 620,000 was a number. But it's been upgraded to as many as 850,000. And you can search it on the web. You can find this latest research. But this was referred to as, in the Battle Hymn of the Republic as the glory of the coming of the Lord. And it's this sort of thing that went a long way towards cementing in place this new vision of the role of America in foreign policy and being ruler of the world. Prior to this, Murray Rothbard wrote one of his essays about this topic and his essay entitled Just War.

3:32He points out the obvious fact that before this, American foreign policy was pretty much guided by the Washington-Jefferson philosophy of commercial relationships with all nations entangling alliances with none. And Murray Rothbard wrote this. He said, in those days, neutrality was considered not only justifiable, but a positive virtue. Imagine that, keeping our noses out of somebody's business. Who ever heard of such a thing? In the old days, quote, he kept us out of war was a great tribute to any political leader. Could you ever imagine Sean Hannity or saying something like this or Mark Levin? And quote, standing idly by while other nations warred with each other was a mark of high statesmanship.

4:24That was the old days, that was the old days. And he correctly pointed out also Rothbard did that interventionists, military interventionists were more correctly considered as propagandists for despotism, mass murder and perpetual war, if not spokesmen for special interest groups or agents of the merchants of death. And Murray says, this is scarcely a high ground to talk about that. But today this is all different, armed with this Lincolnian ideology, his restating of and the Declaration of Independence and the re-restating of it by his political heirs. We've gone into the era of perpetual war for perpetual peace where we're obligated to take up – this is Murray Rothbard again – where we're obligated to take up the sword and wage a perpetual war to force utopia on the entire world by guns, tanks and bombs.

5:21That's Murray Rothbard. It's gone a long way from the Jeffersonian-Washingtonian entangling alliances with none. Isabella Patterson called it the Humanitarians with a guillotine, and the humanitarian in theory is the terrorist in action, she wrote, which brings us to the latest rendition of this terrorist in action lingo, and it happens, one example of it is King Obama, I mean President Obama's speech recently before the United Nations on September 25th. This was after the American CIA chief in Benghazi was murdered. You've all read about that. They don't call him the CIA chief. They call him, I don't know, liaison to Libya, I think. But his name was Stevens, Chris Stevens. And Obama praised Stevens in his speech for having gone to Libya in Libya as his representative, and having quote, crafted a vision for a future for Libyans.

6:26So think about that, an American president sends some guy to Libya to craft their future for them. And then in the same speech Obama then goes on to boast of all the recent military aggressions by America, in the name of humanitarianism of course, included Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, in Yemen and Libya, and while threatening future wars with Syria and Iran, he said this, quote, we again declare that the regime of Bashar al-Assad must come to an end. That was President Obama talking to the United Nations. And so then came the justification for this. After threatening, after praising himself and his predecessor for all these wars and threatening two more wars, then came the justification for these two more wars that he hopes to get into. This is President Obama again. We have taken these positions because we believe that freedom and self-determination are not unique to one culture. These are not simply American values or Western values, they are universal values. And even as there will be huge challenges

7:34that come with a transition to democracy, I am convinced that ultimately government of the people, by the people and for the people, have you heard that before somewhere, is more are likely to bring about the stability, prosperity and individual opportunity that serve as a basis for peace in our world. Mel Bradford could not have written that better if he would have written up sort of a plagiaristic, you know, imaginary speech to bolster his point about the perversion of the Declaration of Independence, the all men are created equal line in the Declaration of Independence to justify terrorism and mass murder in the name of Humanitarianism, he then, Obama then promised even more perpetual war for more perpetual peace by saying this, quote, America will never retreat from the world.

8:23No government or company, no school or NGO will be confident working in any country where its people are endangered. Our citizens must be secure and our efforts must be welcomed. So, any country, anywhere where Americans might step foot for a minute is fair game for our bombs, is how I interpret that to mean. And again, don't forget, he literally quoted Abe Lincoln, all of the people by the people, and so forth. And Lincoln himself, by the way, plagiarized that from Daniel Webster, just as a footnote. Even that wasn't original with him. And he made another speech saying something very similar, his second inaugural address.

9:09He touched on, you know, this whole idea has come to be called American exceptionalism. That's what the neocons, of course, like to call this. And here's what President Obama said in his second inaugural address. What makes us exceptional, what makes us American, is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago. So he's just proving Mel Bradford's point. And he says, today we continue a never-ending journey to bridge the meaning of those words in the Declaration with the realities of our time. And then he goes on to say, through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword, we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half slave and half free. So there he is comparing himself to Abe Lincoln again and invoking the same rhetoric, the The Rhetoric of Continuing Revolution What more do you need to be convinced that this certainly is the rhetoric of continuing revolution?

10:08And moving along in the same address, the second inaugural address, Obama says, We will support democracy from Asia to Africa, from the Americas to the Middle East, because our interests and our conscience compel us to act on behalf of those who long for freedom. That's why I suppose there's a popular bumper sticker that I've seen that says you'd better behave or we will impose democracy on your country. Maybe they should sell it downstairs. But this is almost like a Monty Python skit, this speech, the second inaugural address of Barack Obama.

10:54Mel Bradford was not the first to recognize how this game has been played for a long, long time. Another man who recognized this was Robert Penn Warren, the novelist, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, Robert Penn Warren. In 1961, Time Magazine asked him to write a book on the legacy of the Civil War. It was the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War. So he wrote this little book called The Legacy of the Civil War. And he touched on the same theme that Mel Bradford wrote about in quite a few places, not just that one article that I mentioned at the beginning of this talk. And here's one of the things that Robert Penn Warren said. He said a major theme of his book, The Legacy of the Civil War, it's a little green book, it's still in print, you could buy it for about a dollar, I think.

11:45He says, well, it left the North, which is to say the government, because the Republican The Republican Party monopolized the federal government basically until Woodrow Wilson became president in 1913. You had the Grover Cleveland years, but the Democrats were not totally successful even then during the Grover Cleveland administrations. But that whole period from 1865 to 1912 was almost entirely dominated by the Republican Party, which was the Party of the North, of course. He says, a war left with the North with a treasury of virtue, the northerner with his treasury of virtue feels redeemed by history. He has in his pocket not a papal indulgence peddled by some wandering pardoner of the Middle Ages, but an indulgence, a plenary indulgence for all sins past, present and future.

12:36So whatever we have done or will do is moral by virtue of the fact that it is we who are doing it. that's the idea. That's American exceptionalism. He referred to this as a moral narcissism, but he said it is a poor basis for national policy, but nevertheless it is the justification for our crusades of 1917 to 1918 and 1941 to 1945 and our diplomacy of righteousness with the slogan of unconditional surrender and universal spiritual rehabilitation for others. Not for us, for others. So that's the goal of American foreign policy, the spiritual rehabilitation of other people everywhere, as Obama says, people everywhere, the whole planet.

13:22You know, Murray Rothbard used to joke that he used to say, you know, why doesn't the US government just bomb all the other countries at once and get it all over with and then leave us alone? And it seems as though they're doing that. That's what they're trying to do. And so, Robert Penn Warren goes on to say that, you know, to be the most virtuous humans ever to inhabit the planet requires forgetting many facts, many facts. And so, what he's saying is that, you know, the Lincoln regime started this and, you know, to this day we have all the presidents, Bush, Obama, always quoting Abe Lincoln and his words to justify this. But we have to forget history in order to go along with this game, we have to forget real history.

14:11Here's what Robert Penn Warren says we need to forget about this idea that we are the most virtuous people on earth. It is forgotten that the Republican platform of 1860 pledged protection to the institution of slavery where it existed and that the Republicans were ready in 1861 to guarantee slavery in the South as bait for a return to the Union. It is forgotten that in July 1861 both Houses of Congress, by an almost unanimous vote, affirmed that the war was waged not to interfere with the institutions of any state, but only to maintain the Union. It is forgotten that the Emancipation Proclamation was limited and provisional. Slavery was to be abolished only in the seceded states and only if they did not return to the Union before the 1st of the next January.

14:58It must also be forgotten that most northern states refused to adopt Negro suffrage and that Lincoln was a white supremacist, he was a man of his time. He goes on to say, the war appears, according to this doctrine of the treasury of virtue, as a consciously undertaken crusade, so full of righteousness that there is enough overplus stored in heaven, like the deeds of the saints, to take care of all small failings and oversights of the descendants of the Crusaders, certainly into the present generation. So much virtue has been built up, but we have to forget all this real history. He says, in the generation to come, that region, he's talking about the North, would no longer after the war, after the Civil War, would no longer furnish the nation with teachers and men of letters, but with a mongrel breed of politicians obsessed with profiteering through their political connections.

15:50He's talking about the New England politicians, and if you want to read more about this, I I recommend an essay called The Yankee Problem in America by Clyde Wilson, where he points out that not all northerners in that period of history were Yankees. He says a Yankee is a particular type of person. And Clyde Wilson said that Hillary Clinton would be a museum quality specimen of a Yankee. And so, and of course, thank God not all northerners from northern states were like Hillary Clinton. And so continuing on a little bit with Robert Penn Warren, he believes that most Americans are content with all of these lies about their own history. He calls them the results of the manipulations of propaganda specialists and their sometimes unhistorical history.

16:36Harry Jaffa, call your office, I would say. And so Robert Penn Warren and Mel Bradford were both certainly attuned to the link between this idea, This rewriting of the Declaration of Independence and the repetition of this idea and its construction of this notion of American exceptionalism through all these years and how it has always served. It always comes back to serve as the rationale for military aggression, which always has some sort of hidden economic agenda behind it, to be sure, and as Randolph Bourne wrote in his famous essay, War is the Health of the State, all wars are pretty much created by a couple of dozen people who get together in a room and they call themselves statesmen.

17:26And they negotiate and they stir up trouble and they start a war. And then after once the war has started, it's pretty easy to get the bourgeoisie in line to support the war because it becomes their war, even if they have no idea why the war is being fought because after all it was created by this few dozen people in a room, you know, of the Statesman of the World. And so he was attuned to that also. And I think that's the point I wanted to make for now. My time is almost up. And I just wanted to link the rhetoric of continuing revolution to modern day events. And so being aware of this, be on the lookout for this, the next time the American military bombs some forlorn country out of the blue, I guarantee you we'll have our politicians comparing themselves to Abe Lincoln within 24 hours.

18:18And at that point, we're all supposed to say, oh, okay, good job, USA, start chanting USA when you hear that. And my time is up. Thank you very much.