When Lincoln cultists, especially the ones who have passed through the Claremont Institute’s GOP Propaganda mill, argue that the South did not have a right to secede (nor does any state, at any time, for any reason, according to Harry Jaffa), they also insist that the Republican Party of the 1860s had a “right” to stop the secession. This was done, of course, by killng 300,000 men, one out of every four of military age, maiming for life several times that number, killing thousands of civilians, burning down entire towns, and stealing tens of millions of dollars in personal property.
Nothing Jaffa has ever written on the subject, or which is repeated endlessly by all of Claremont’s “Lincoln fellows,” differs at all from the Republican Party Line as espoused by the Great Obfuscator himself. One of the Great One’s arguments was to compare the nation to a marriage, and to say that advocates of secession are comparable to believers in “free love.” Ha, ha, ha. It must have had great rhetorical effect — at least in some circles.
But here’s the kicker: Taking Abe’s (and the mocking bird Claremontistas’) analogy to its logical conclusion, if one partner in a relationship leaves another, then the other partner supposedly has a “right” to murder the wayward partner. Their argument is not just that one party to a contract cannot, by himself, break the contract (such as the one creating the voluntary union of the states). It is that the other party has a “right” to respond to the breaking of the contract by killing the other party.
Is there anything more immoral than a cabal of pseudo-intellectuals who devote their careers to dreaming up convoluted excuses for mass murder?
7:55 pm on October 18, 2006
