Libertarians and the Confederate Battle Flag...

…..By calling for the eradication of the Confederate battle flag from public places the Cato Institute, the NAACP, and the Southern Poverty Law Center are saying that we should destroy the most enduring symbol of opposition to centralized governmental power and tyranny, a symbol that to this day is a part of secession movements around the world, from Quebec to Northern Italy.

Thomas DiLorenzo, Illinois – crop (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

No one was a more articulate and outspoken abolitionist than the great libertarian legal philosopher Lysander Spooner of Massachusetts. But in 1870 Spooner wrote that “all these cries of having ‘abolished slavery,’ of having ‘saved the country,’ of having ‘preserved the union,’ of establishing a ‘government of consent,’ and of ‘maintaining the national honor’ are all gross, shameless, transparent cheats — so transparent that they ought to deceive no one.”

The great historian of liberty, Lord Acton, wrote to Robert E. Lee on November 4, 1866, that “I saw in States Rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of he sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy. . . . I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo.”

Disavowing the views of these great libertarian scholars, Boaz apparently prefers the interpretations of history given by Kwesi Mfume, Al Sharpton, and Morris Dees.

Some 620,000 Americans died in Lincoln’s war, at a time when the population of the U.S. was about 30 million. Standardized for today’s population, that would be roughly the equivalent of 5 million American deaths in a four-year war — 100 times the number of Americans who died in the ten-year Vietnam conflict.

On the other hand, dozens of other countries during the nineteenth century ended slavery peacefully through compensated emancipation. The death of some 300,000 Southerners, most of whom believed they were giving their lives for the causes of liberty, independence, and self government, is apparently of no concern to Boaz. He is only concerned about the purported sensitivities of American blacks, but shows no concern whatsoever for the descendants of hundreds of thousands of brave men who had nothing to do with slavery and who gave their lives for what Professor McPherson characterized as “deeply felt convictions.”

In war, the victors always get to write the history. A century of federal government propaganda about the causes and effects of the War for Southern Independence has been so effective that even the Cato Institute has apparently fallen victim to it.

April 19, 2001

Thomas J. DiLorenzo is Professor of Economics at Loyola College in Maryland.

Copyright 2001 LewRockwell.com

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via Libertarians and the Confederate Battle Flag.

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