The Most Embarrassing Presidency

Barack Obama is, without question, the most embarrassing president of my lifetime – and that is saying something, since my life so far has encompassed 10 presidencies, some of which have brought a lot of embarrassment to the nation. Even Richard Nixon, with his Watergate scandal, Jimmy Carter, with his malaise, and Bill Clinton, with his lewd behavior in the Oval Office, could not top this president for pure, unadulterated disgrace.

Of course, in Obama’s case, it is not a matter of personal scandal like it was for Clinton. By telling the world a year ago that he was drawing a red line in the hot desert sands of Syria – that red line being the use of chemical weapons – he created the debacle that currently threatens to engulf the Middle East. He blustered at the time that if the regime of Bashar al-Assad crosses that red line, there will be a price to pay. No one yet knows what that price will be, but from the current discussion, it appears that it will involve the destruction of at least three camels, four sheep, a half-dozen goats and an abandoned aspirin factory. That oughta show ‘em!

What it will do, in all likelihood, is unify the Islamic crazies in the Middle East and turn Assad into a regional hero, emboldening him to attack Israel secure in the knowledge that the United States has no stomach for a wider war.

Congressional offices on Capitol Hill are reporting phone calls coming in at a rate of more than 200 to 1 against approving Obama’s plan to attack Syria. Republican and Democrats alike are being bombarded with negative responses from their constituents. Still, there are those among the insulated legislative class – John McCain, Lindsay Graham, John Boehner, etc. – who have not gotten the message that the American people are about as enthusiastic about Obama’s proposed war plans as they are about undergoing a quadruple root canal. In fact the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted to approve a resolution to allow Obama to use force.

Meanwhile, Facebook postings from members of our military are appearing with sentiments like this: “I didn’t join the Marine Corps to fight for al-Qaeda in a Syrian civil war.”

Yet there was the ever-arrogant Barack Obama, standing at the podium in Stockholm on Wednesday, embarrassing himself yet again (and, by extension, the fools who elected him) by announcing in response to a reporter’s question about his crumbling credibility, “I didn’t set a red line. The world set a red line.”

Obama is a symbol of much of today’s generation, which accepts no responsibility for anything. Therefore, when something goes wrong among his cockamamie plans, it must be someone else’s fault. Usually, of course, it would be George Bush’s fault, but even Obama couldn’t bring himself to tell that one again, not in this case. No, this time it’s the whole world’s fault. And Congress. And America. It’s American credibility that will suffer, he told the world, not his. Unbelievable.

The questions that need to be asked are these: What is the national security interest of the United States of America in attacking Syria? Will our intervention accomplish anything more than assuaging the ego of an arrogant president who has no knowledge of military matters? Will the consequences for the wider region, and for the interests of the United States, be improved if we attack Syria? And the most frightening question: have we elected a president who so admires Islam and so hates Israel that he would deliberately aid al-Qaeda while provoking a brutal Arab tyrant to attack our tiny but crucial ally?

I fear the answers to these questions are as follows: none; no; no; and, unfortunately, yes.

The Intellectual Stupidity of Liberalism

It is time to utterly stomp the canard that both the left and right have an equally compelling world-view and record. For anyone with even a modicum of honesty, knowledge and observational faculty has deduced that modern Liberalism is a paper tiger which has utterly failed in every actual historic application. Further, the more modern liberal theory is applied, the worse the failure.

Consider along these lines the spectacular failures of the USSR, Cuba, China’s communist regime, North Korea, etc. In fact, there is no country which committed itself to a major socialist or communist makeover that did not thereafter implode. Further, when Liberalism is applied to other areas of inquiry, the outcome is equally bad—such as so called “family planning,” etc. So if liberalism is failure incarnate, why the perpetual slavering supplication of its blind, deaf and dumb followers? Therein lies the mystery.

The problem of identifying liberalism is both linguistic and historical. The term liberal was used up until about a hundred years ago to describe the world-view of the Founders and other chief Enlightenment figures committed to Liberty like John Locke. It is, in brief, a spirited defense of Life, Liberty and Property and an opposition to an all-encompassing state. As socialists and Marxists strove to be taken more seriously, they fell upon the strategy of re-branding their movement. Banished were references to collectivism and other totalitarian theories, and in the place of these leftists began to refer to themselves as “Liberals.”

Today’s liberalism connotes a radically different scheme from the classical variety. Liberalism, in its current modern sense, embodies several main facets most closely associated with socialism and Marxism. First, individual rights are best subsumed and extinguished under the state’s rights. Second, private property is sacrificed for the good of “the People.” Third, religious expression in public forums is discouraged as anti-theistic naturalism takes its place. Fourth, collectivist social enterprises are encouraged. Fifth, humanism as a broad philosophical stream replaces tradition and religious expression. In essence, modern liberalism is almost indistinguishable from totalitarian collectivism.

Whether one accepts that the Bill of Rights was founded based on the bible or the philosophy, we must accept that our modern world is hopelessly confused regarding belief systems. This can be explained by examining how the Christian world-view that once dominated the West has shriveled down, allowing Liberalism, which lacks a true core, to expand. To put the problem into its most elementary form, on one side you have the Ten Commandments, which allow no violations. On the other side is any number of humanistic tracts which have no core set of rules. Therefore, anything is possible under a humanistic regime. 

The most trenchant and undeniable characteristic of socialism is its record of failure. Examples abound to prove this point.

The State: State liberalism is everywhere characterized by high tax regimes, government-influenced economies, welfare state bureaucracy and high underemployment. America, in its current slow-motion collapse, perfectly displays these particular issues. The problem is government debt, Deficits, a continuing recession, and underemployment as essential problems, all related to poor policy. The crisis in America is simply an expose’ of the failures of liberalism. Productive workers do not want to toil so that healthy persons can exist on welfare. Further, cuts in work hours and increased social programs only add to the problem. And the high taxes needed to fund a welfare state sap the spending power of workers and block private investment. With over 11.1% unemployment in Europe, Portugal at 17.7%, Spain at 27.2%, and Greece at 27.4%, no wonder their house of cards is falling. As one writer at Guardian says,

"Prior to the great crisis of 2007, the governments of the European Community (according to its official statistical service Eurostat) spent 47% of GDP, against 19% for the US federal government. In 2009, government spending as a share of GDP rose to 51% in Europe, and to 36% in the US with the Obama stimulus plan."

The Politics: Political liberalism is every bit as noxious as as any other kind. Political Liberalism represents the keeping of power at the cost of every other societal good. This is because in Liberalism, there is no higher good than power itself. A classic example is how Joe Stalin kept power in the USSR by blaming others for his own mistakes—continually murdering anyone whom he deemed a threat. As one writer states in Pravda,

"When Stalin collectivized the peasant farmers, they were utterly demoralized. By 1932, more than 12 million of them had flooded Russian cities, hoping to flee the oppressive realities of collectivization and “dekulakization.” Their influx into the cities threatened to destabilize the rationing system that Stalin instituted in 1929. The number of people holding ration cards grew from 26 million in 1929 to nearly 40 million in 1932.

As a Marxist, Stalin would not consider, even for a moment, that the socialization of agriculture was itself responsible for the decreased productivity of Russian farms and factories. Instead he identified the class enemy as the culprit, and increased the purges of those accused of trying to “sabotage” his socialist plans. In particular, he condemned the kulaks and “kulak helpers,” mass numbers of whom he ordered his henchmen to execute, sentence to slave labor camps in Siberia, or otherwise deport to remote regions of the country. It was the camps that Stalin created for this purpose—the infamous Gulag archipelago—that inspired Hitler to create concentration camps for the Jews."

Stalin might seem an extreme example, and yet he was simply following leftism, much like Mao and Lenin, as well—who all revered Karl Marx, godfather of today’s liberalism.

The Social Aspect: Liberalism as a sociological “scientific” concern has failed spectacularly, according to the NY Times:

"It’s an open secret in my discipline: in terms of accurate political predictions (the field’s benchmark for what counts as science), my colleagues have failed spectacularly and wasted colossal amounts of time and money. The most obvious example may be political scientists’ insistence, during the cold war, that the Soviet Union would persist as a nuclear threat to the United States. In 1993, in the journal International Security, for example, the cold war historian John Lewis Gaddis wrote that the demise of the Soviet Union was “of such importance that no approach to the study of international relations claiming both foresight and competence should have failed to see it coming.” And yet, he noted, “None actually did so.”

The Science: The reputation of “science” itself has been wildly undermined by liberalism so eager to be constantly proved right against its “enemies.” A prominent recent example has been the failure of “science” to accurately portray Global Warming. In fact, the godfather of Global Warming doomsday warnings himself has recently changed his tune. After several remarkable warming hoaxes have been revealed, one site reports:

1. Minimal global warming over the last 130 to 160 years: about half a degree Celsius per century.
2. No statistically significant global warming in the last 14 to 17 years.
3. Global cooling in the last 9 to 13 years.

 

So no science can prove what isn’t happening. The NY Times reported on a scientist who lied to get into the mailing list of an anti-Global Warming group so he could then spread the “truth” about them: Scientist Is Reinstated After Deceit.

"A scientist who posed as a board member of a conservative organization to gain access to its confidential information has been reinstated as president of the Pacific Institute, the environmental research organization that he founded in California. An independent inquiry had confirmed the account offered by the scientist, Peter Gleick, of the false pretenses under which he obtained documents of the Heartland Institute in Feb."

Needless to say, true theories don’t need “scientists” who lie to “prove” them accurate.
 
The Family: Liberal Malthusian “family planning” policy has absolutely destroyed individuals and families in the West. For example, abortion has kept 55 million more Americans from being born and caused tens of trillions in lost tax revenue for the US. The NY Times reports about China’s vicious forced abortion policy in early 2012:

"Graphic photos posted on the Internet showed a 23-year-old woman named Feng Jianmei lying in a hospital bed with the remains of the fetus, soaked in blood. The story received widespread attention online, and a few days ago it was the most popular topic on Weibo, China’s Twitter.

The woman’s husband said family planning officials in Shaanxi Province forced his wife to abort her second child after the couple were told that they had violated the nation’s one-child policy. The couple had been ordered to pay a $6,300 fine if they wanted to go ahead with the pregnancy. When they failed to pay, Ms. Feng was beaten and given an injection that induced a late-term abortion, the couple said".

Further, liberalized policies on sex and single parenthood are tearing society asunder. The NY Times reports over 50% of children born to women 30 and under are to single mothers. This is the largest cause of poverty, according to experts, but just the tip of the iceberg according to statistics on fatherlessness:

• 63% of youth suicides are fatherless.
• 90% of all homeless and runaway children are fatherless.
• 85% of all children exhibiting behavioral disorders are fatherless.
• 80% of rapist motivated by displaced anger are fatherless.
• 71% of all high school dropouts are fatherless.
• 85% of all youths sitting in prisons grew up fatherless.   

These statistics of children from fatherless homes show they are:

• 5 times more likely to commit suicide
• 32 times more likely to run away
• 20 times more likely to have behavioral disorders
• 14 times more likely to commit rape
• 9 times more likely to drop out of high school
• 20 times more likely to end up in prison

 
The Economy: The ongoing problem in America’s economy after the world’s great Keynesian spending proves that such programs always fail, not sometimes, but always.. Says Reason magazine:

"The president’s 2009 stimulus program was a massively expensive bust. President Obama’s top economic advisor Larry Summers said funds must be “targeted” at resources idled by the recession, the interventions must be “temporary,” and they needed to “timely,” or injected quickly into the economy. None of that turned out to be true. “Even if you were to believe that government spending can trigger economic growth,” says Veronique de Rugy, “the money is never spent in a way that’s consistent with the conditions laid out by the Keynesians for it to be efficient.”

If Liberalism is “true” in some important sense, how can it possibly be the basis for such frequent and wholly unmitigated failure? This question answers itself.

Black History: The Grand Distortion

How many Americans know that the first slave owner in America was a black tobacco farmer? How many Americans are aware that thousands of free blacks in the South were, themselves, slave owners? How many know there were 440,000 free American Negros in 1860, more than half of whom chose to live in the South?

Answer: Very few.

Embedded in the minds of Americans is a grand distortion of black history.

Our perception depends largely on activists in Hollywood and revisionists in academia. Add those who parrot Hollywood and academia and you have a broad swath of ignorance prevailing in America.

 
Did you know the following about black history in America?


• The first slave owner in American history was black.

Anthony Johnson came to the American colonies in August, 1619 as an indentured servant. In 1623 Johnson had completed his indenture and was recognized as a free negro. In 1651 he acquired 250 acres of land in Virginia, later adding another 250 acres; a sizable holding at the time.

John Casor, a black indentured servant employed by Johnson, became what historians have long considered to be America's first slave. His enslavement resulted from a legal dispute between Johnson and Robert Parker. Parker was a white colonist who employed Casor while Casor was still indentured to Johnson. Johnson sued Parker in Northampton Court in 1654. The court  upheld Johnson's right to hold Casor as a slave on March 8, 1655. The court found:

The court seriously consideringe and maturely weighing the premisses, doe fynde that the saide Mr. Robert Parker most unjustly keepeth the said Negro from Anthony Johnson his master ... It is therefore the Judgement of the Court and ordered That the said John Casor Negro forthwith returne unto the service of the said master Anthony Johnson, And that Mr. Robert Parker make payment of all charges in the suit.

Five years later, in 1670, the colonial assembly passed legislation permitting blacks and Indians the right to own slaves of their own race, but prohibiting them from owning White slaves. [Source]

(In July, 2012, supporters of Barack Obama considered it politically advantageous to advance the notion that John Punch was the first slave of African descent in the American colonies. Obama is suspected of being a descendant of Punch through Obama's maternal lineage.)




• Free blacks commonly owned black slaves in the antebellum South.

Henry Louis Gates of the White House 'Beer Summit' fame said, "This is the dirtiest secret in African American history. A surprisingly high percentage of free Negros in the South owned slaves themselves." [Source]

There were thousands of black slave owners in the South.

"In 1830 there were 3,775 such slaveholders in the South who owned 12,740 black slaves, with 80% of them located in Louisiana, South Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland. There were economic differences between free blacks of the Upper South and Deep South, with the latter fewer in number, but wealthier and typically of mixed race. Half of the black slaveholders lived in cities rather than the countryside, with most in New Orleans and Charleston."

Historians John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger wrote:

"A large majority of profit-oriented free black slaveholders resided in the Lower South. For the most part, they were persons of mixed racial origin, often women who cohabited or were mistresses of white men, or mulatto men ... . Provided land and slaves by whites, they owned farms and plantations, worked their hands in the rice, cotton, and sugar fields, and like their white contemporaries were troubled with runaways."

Historian Ira Berlin wrote:

"In slave societies, nearly everyone – free and slave – aspired to enter the slave holding class, and upon occasion some former slaves rose into slaveholders’ ranks. Their acceptance was grudging, as they carried the stigma of bondage in their lineage and, in the case of American slavery, color in their skin."

To write extensively about blacks who owned slaves in the antebellum South would require a library of full volumes. Black slave owners: free Black slave masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860 By Larry Koger is one such volume. 

Koger tells of Richard Holloway, Sr., a black carpenter who purchased his African cousins as slave labor. Cato was the name of one of his slaves. Cato remained in Holloway's possession throughout the 1830s and '40s, according to Koger, until he was sold to his son, Richard Holloway, Jr., in 1845. Cato died in 1851 and the younger Holloway replaced him with the purchase of a 16 -year-old black male.

Koger says there were ten black slave owners in Charleston City, SC in 1830.

In 1860 the largest slave owner in South Carolina was William Ellison, a black plantation owner.

Again, to account for all black-owned slave in the South would require a volume of books.
[Source] [Source] [Source]

The ratio of free blacks owning black slaves in 1830 was 25 to 1, expressed as 25:1. In other words there was about one black-owned black slave for every 25 free blacks living in the United States in 1830.

In 1830 there were about 319,599 free blacks living in the United States. That same year there were 12,740 slaves owned by blacks

The ratio of free blacks owning slaves, then, is 319,599:12,740. That is reduced to 25:1.

The ratio for whites was about 6:1. Whites were about four times more likely to own slaves than blacks. Though the proportionate number of whites owning slaves was greater than blacks owning slaves, the fact that any blacks owned slaves, let alone a 25:1 ratio, is problematic to revisionists.

Widespread black-on-black slavery is, quite frankly, an embarrassment to revisionists and multiculturalists. They prefer a false narrative in which a culture of whip-snapping white plantation owners damned their hordes of slaves to long hours of picking cotton in the hot Dixie sun.

Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915, by Loren Schweninger is available, in part, on Google books [source].



• In 1860 about half of all free Negros chose to live in the South.

The 1860 census reveals there were 440,000 free blacks living in America. About half of those resided in the South, even though they were free to move to the North. [Source]


• Blacks owning black slaves was even common in the pre-war North.

Black-on-black slavery was not unique to Southern states.

Koger informs us that in 1830 New York City recorded eight black slave holders who owned a total of 17 black slaves. The total number of slaves owned by blacks in 1830 was more than 10,000 according to the federal census of 1830; and that includes only four states: Louisiana, Maryland, South Carolina and Virginia. In addition there were "black master in every state where slavery existed," Koger says.

There is no record, to my knowledge, of a slave ship disembarking in a Southern port. All blacks slaves from Africa were delivered to ports in the North and transported to the South.


• Without black African slave owners there would have been no slavery in America.

Henry Louis Gates of the White House 'Beer Summit' fame enraged his base in 2010 by strongly opposing reparations to blacks. According to Gates the slave trade was almost wholly the result of black slave owners selling their human wares to Europeans.

He wrote:

"While we are all familiar with the role played by the United States and the European colonial powers like Britain, France, Holland, Portugal and Spain, there is very little discussion of the role Africans themselves played. And that role, it turns out, was a considerable one, especially for the slave-trading kingdoms of western and central Africa. These included the Akan of the kingdom of Asante in what is now Ghana, the Fon of Dahomey (now Benin), the Mbundu of Ndongo in modern Angola and the Kongo of today’s Congo, among several others."

"The historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University estimate that 90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders. The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred." [Emphasis added]

The notion of White European raiding parties descending on unsuspecting African villages is a gross distortion of reality. Not only does the historical record argue against White raiding parties, but such parties would have been costly and inefficient compared to purchasing Africans already held in slavery. White slave traders would not endure the risk related to such incursions. Furthermore, Africans already held as slaves would be less willing to resist, particularly among those whose African owners were brutal and abusive enemies. [Source: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game, Henry Louis Gates, The New York Times April 22, 2010]

Gates noted on another occasion that the importance of David Livingstone's disappearance into black Africa was significant because White people never ventured beyond the coasts. The prospect of disease and other unanticipated dangers compelled them not to embark on slave-hunting expeditions.

According to the report of Joseph Cinque's testimony in court, New York Journal of Commerce (10th January, 1840), the leader of the famed Amistad slave ship rebellion was originally taken captive by Africans, not Europeans.

It is widely rumored that Cinque, himself, became a slave trader after his return to Africa. [source]


 • Beating black slaves in the South was extremely uncommon.

In 1838 Harriet Martineau visited New Orleans where she heard tales of a particularly abusive slave owner. At issue was slave owner Delphine LaLaurie who resided in a mansion at 1140 Royal Street. "Martineau reported that public rumors about LaLaurie's mistreatment of her slaves were sufficiently widespread that a local lawyer was dispatched to Royal Street to remind LaLaurie of the laws relevant to the upkeep of slaves." The attorney found no evidence of wrong doing.

Nonetheless, LaLaurie was forced to forfeit nine slaves after a subsequent investigation found her guilty of slave abuse.

It was later rumored that one of LaLaurie slaves intentionally set fire to the mansion to draw attention to ongoing abuse. Bystanders forced entry to squelch the fire and discovered "seven slaves, more or less horribly mutilated ... suspended by the neck, with their limbs apparently stretched and torn from one extremity to the other."

Tales of the abuse quickly spread throughout New Orleans. An angry mob of White residents descended on the mansion and "demolished and destroyed everything upon which they could lay their hands."

LaLaurie fled the mob violence, escaping to Mobile, Alabama and then to Paris.

What we learn from the historical LaLaurie episode is that:

1. Laws protecting slaves from abuse were enforced.
2. White residents did not tolerate owners who abused their slaves.
[Sources: Wikipedia | NOLA | cogitz ]


• The legacy of runaway slaves is over stated

When discussing the Underground Railroad, Black historian Henry Louis Gates affirms that there were not millions of black slaves who escaped to the North. Over multiple generations he suspects there were fewer than 50,000 runaway slaves, including those who left for a night out and then returned home.

For generations there were thousands of black slaves who lived on properties adjacent to free states. Few bothered to hop the farm fence or cross the river to freedom. The Ohio River, for example, was a shallow river prior to the extensive construction of damns. The Indiana Dept. of Natural Resources notes that the river was shallow enough during hot summer months to be be traversed by wading across [source]. It was never a dangerous impediment to slaves serious about escaping to the North.

There were no border fences built to retain hordes of runaway slaves. They simply weren't needed.


• Blacks voluntarily fought for the Confederacy

Black Confederate troops were featured are the cover of Harper's Weekly in 1863 and numerous photographs of blacks in Confederate uniforms are accessible on the Internet.

The first military conscription (draft) in American history was enacted on April 16, 1862 by the Confederacy to boost the army's shortage of manpower. Even though Negros were not drafted except as noncombatants until March 1865, many volunteered. Blacks voluntarily formed a regiment in North Carolina, for example. 

Harper's Weekly January 10, 1863
Picture Title: Rebel Negro Pickets
as Seen Through a Field Glass

The May 10, 1862 edition of Harper's Weekly is one of numerous historical records. It provides this  account: "The correspondent of the New York Herald, in one of its late numbers, reports that the rebels had a regiment of mounted negroes, armed with sabres, at Manassas, and that some five hundred Union prisoners taken at Bull Run were escorted to their filthy prison by a regiment of black men.”

83% of Richmond's male slave population volunteered for duty.

Frederick Douglas famously noted, “There are at the present moment many Colored men in the Confederate Army doing duty not only as cooks, servants and laborers, but real soldiers, having musket on their shoulders, and bullets in their pockets, ready to shoot down any loyal troops and do all that soldiers may do to destroy the Federal government and build up that of the… rebels.” [Source]

The revisionists imagery of a White Southern army is further dismissed by Brigadier General Stand Watie, a full-blood Cherokee Indian and principle chief of the Cherokee nation. After the Cherokee Nation voted to support the Confederacy, Watie was placed in command of the First Indian Brigade of the Army of the Trans-Mississippi that included Cherokee, Seminole and Osage infantry. [Source]


• Slaves were allowed to own, earn and save money

Black slaves frequently purchased their own freedom. Seldom asked is, "Where did they get the money?"

Historians ignore the fact that black slaves had the freedom to earn money and save it as private property. 

The May 3, 1861 edition of the Vindicator and reprinted from the Richmond Dispatch reported that a black slave wished to donate his savings to help equip black Confederate volunteers. 

"In our neighboring city of Petersburg, two hundred free negroes offered for any work that might be assigned to them, either to fight under white officers, dig ditches, or any thing that could show their desire to serve Old Virginia. In the same city, a negro hackman came to his master, and with tears in his eyes, insisted that he should accept all his savings, $100, to help equip the volunteers. The free negroes of Chesterfield have made a similar proposition. Such is the spirit among bond and free, throughout the whole of the State. Those who calculate on a different state of things, will soon discover their mistake."

$100 in 1860 would be worth almost $2,500 in 2012. 


• America's first black military officers served for the Confederacy

In 1861 about 1,500 free blacks in New Orleans answered Gov. Thomas Overton Moore's call to serve the Confederate army. The new enlistees were garnered at a meeting called by ten prominent black residents. About 2,000 blacks attended the meeting on April 22, located at the Catholic Institute. The new regiment was formed  May 2.

Considering there were about 10,000 free blacks of both genders and all ages living in the Louisiana in 1861, the large number of black enlistees speaks to the loyalty of blacks to the Confederacy. It can be estimated that as many as half of all free black males between the ages of 15 and 50 enlisted. 

The governor appointed three white officers to oversee the regiment. They were accompanied by three black officers appointed from the regiment. These became the first black military officers in American history. 

The regiment saw no action and, as was common in the Confederacy, the soldiers necessarily procured  their own firearms and uniforms. It is apparent that free blacks living in the South were permitted to own and carry firearms. 

Historians claim that about ten percent of the regiment defected to the North after the regiment was disbanded.


• Mutiny by black soldiers occurred in the U.S. military.

The two most notorious black mutinies were in Houston (1917) and Townsville, Australia (1942).

The latter mutiny was marred by black soldiers turning machine guns on their commanding officers. Australian troops were summoned to quash the rebellion. When serving in the U.S. Congress, Lyndon Johnson was sent to Townsville to investigate the uprising. The Townsville mutiny remained censored from American history until early 2012 when papers of the late president were reviewed.
[Source] [Source] [Source]


• About one-third of lynching victims were white.

There were 4,743 victims of lynching between 1882 and 1968.  Of those 1,297 were white and 3,446 were black.

Lynchings occurred in 44 states. There were more whites than blacks lynched in 25 of those 44 states.

The Department of Justice informs us that each year there are an estimated 8,000 to 9,000 black-on-black homicides. Using 8,500 as a mean, there are as many black-on-black homicides every five months as there were blacks killed during the 86-year lynching era.
[source] 


• The Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in the Confederacy

It is commonly known, but seldom acknowledged, that the Emancipation Proclamation only applied to slaves living in most of the Confederacy. From the Union's perspective, therefore, slavery was legal in parts of the North but not in most of the South. The concept of a slavery-free Union fighting a slave-legal South is an inversion of reality from the North's perspective. The Union considered the South legally free while the North was not. 

The Union slave states of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware were not affected by the proclamation. Slavery remained legal in Tennessee, that state being under Union control at the time the proclamation was enacted. New Orleans and thirteen Louisiana parishes were likewise exempted. 

The Emancipation Proclamation actually freed about 20,000 slaves when it went into effect on January 1, 1863. Those were slaves living in certain Confederate regions controlled by the North. 

From the Union's perspective 500,000 slaves in Union states and 300,000 slaves in exempted Southern areas were legally unaffected by the Emancipation Proclamation at the time it was enacted.

Individualism versus Collectivism

The citizens of a free society keep political power to a minimum and jealously protect individual rights. As a result a free society undermines legal privilege by removing the threat of aggression against upstarts of all kinds and preserves their autonomy. It offers the only lasting path to social progress and personal improvement for all people including those who, perhaps owing to accident of birth, may be the least well-off in society.  The desire to understand how individual actions can promote the general welfare led Adam Smith to develop a theory of the free society based on the complementary forces of sympathy and self-interest.

Adam Smith on Selfishness and Sympathy

In his 1759 book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith wrote:

"How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner."

For Smith, our ability to imagine ourselves in the place of others–sympathy–is the key to understanding why we morally approve and wish to reward or morally disapprove and wish to punish others, as well as ourselves, for particular actions.

"And hence it is, that to feel much for others and little for ourselves, that to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature; and can alone produce among mankind that harmony of sentiments and passions in which consists their whole grace and propriety. As to love our neighbour as we love ourselves is the great law of Christianity, so it is the great precept of nature to love ourselves only as we love our neighbour, or what comes to the same thing, as our neighbour is capable of loving us."

So in a sense, while self-interest is like an accelerator for social progress in a free society, sympathy is the brake that helps us drive even faster.

True Individualism Is Not Narrow Selfishness

Trying to preserve our individual rights to life, liberty, and property–the essentials of individualism–need not imply selfishness in the narrow sense. We can use the fruits of our freedom to help others as well as ourselves–and we do. (And evidently it makes us happier.)

But the equating of individualism with narrow selfishness persists in no small part because libertarians themselves sometimes profess an overly narrow form of individualism–one that has a “rugged, me-first attitude” at its core. (I’ve written and spoken about this before.) While I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with that view or the lifestyle it implies as far as it goes, the problem is that it doesn’t really get very far. Social, economic, and cultural development depends on the evolution of complex social networks among vast numbers of people, and they have a hard time forming under an atomistic kind of individualism.

F.A. Hayek writes in his important essay “Individualism: True and False” (pdf): “. . . the belief that individualism approves and encourages human selfishness is one of the main reasons why so many people dislike it. . . .”

Thus, in an article published in the New York Times just before Independence Day, called “The Downside of Liberty,” Kurt Anderson laments:

"What has happened politically, economically, culturally and socially since the sea change of the late ’60s isn’t contradictory or incongruous. It’s all of a piece. For hippies and bohemians as for businesspeople and investors, extreme individualism has been triumphant. Selfishness won."

The author raises points that may be worth pursuing another time. But what is relevant here is the equation, again, of individualism with narrow selfishness. He’s wrong, of course. But I can understand why he and others might think that way, given what people on “our side” sometimes say. A cramped individualism lends itself to the notion that libertarians, insofar as we prize individualism, must indeed be antisocial.

(Now I also think that nothing is more effective in displacing Smithian sympathy with narrow selfishness than threats against our freedoms, or when, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, “a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations . . . evinces a Design to reduce [the people] under absolute Despotism. . . .” So trying to use political power to make us less selfish–though, say, takings and income redistribution–may have the opposite effect.)

True Individualism Is Pro-Social

What does individualism in the tradition of Adam Smith mean? Here is F.A. Hayek again in the same essay:

"What, then, are the essential characteristics of true individualism? The first thing that should be said is that it is primarily a theory of society, an attempt to understand the forces which determine the social life of man, and only in the second instance a set of political maxims derived from this view of society."

In other words, individualism is a way of seeing and understanding how we live together. Individualism is about how best to promote social cooperation. That is,

". . . there is no other way toward an understanding of social phenomena but through our understanding of individual actions directed toward other people and guided by their expected behavior."

What then is the correct meaning of selfishness in the context of individualism?

"If we put it concisely by saying that people are and ought to be guided in their actions by their interests and desires, this will at once be misunderstood or distorted into the false contention that they are or ought to be exclusively guided by their personal needs or selfish interests, while what we mean is that they ought to be allowed to strive for whatever they think desirable."

(All emphases are in the original.)

True individualism, then, is the opposite of paternalism in that it respects each and every person’s ability to make and evaluate her own decisions. That includes decisions on whether and under what circumstances to ask for or to give help, and what kind of help to ask for or to give, as well as whether that help was effective or not.

As a result in the history of mankind there has been no greater engine than liberty and individualism (rightly understood) for lifting the material lives of even the very poorest, as this popular video by Hans Rosling, professor of international health, brilliantly illustrates.

Now, there is a kind of broad selfishness which is indeed an essential part of individualism that, as Hayek says, is often misunderstood. He explains:

"The true basis of his [the individualist’s] argument is that nobody can know who knows best and that the only way by which we can find out is through a social process in which everybody is allowed to try and see what he can do."

That social process is competition in markets free from political privilege and legal barriers. Competition of this kind is a discovery procedure in which people look for ways, via sympathy, to mutually benefit one another.  It doesn’t lead to utopian perfection, but to consistent improvement in the general welfare and in individual self-actualization.

Individualism is a tried-and-true way of promoting social cooperation, not a call to shun it.

The Liberal's "Urban Myth" of the "Southern Strategy"

If one were to search the Internet with the phrase “southern strategy” you would find that it has become the linchpin of the liberal claim of Republican racism. Liberal politicians, mainstream media, pundits and bloggers all suggest that the GOP, starting with Richard Nixon, had a strategy to win southern states by appealing to the anti-civil rights sentiment of the southern whites. That this strategy was used to win the affections of disaffected white racist with an appeal to “states rights.”  Makes sense, right?

Worse than the myth and the cliché is the outright lie, the utter fabrication with malice aforethought, and my nominee for the worst of them is the popular but indefensible belief that the two major U.S. political parties somehow “switched places” vis-à-vis protecting the rights of black Americans, a development believed to be roughly concurrent with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the rise of Richard Nixon. That Republicans have let Democrats get away with this mountebank is a symptom of their political fecklessness, and in letting them get away with it the GOP has allowed itself to be cut off rhetorically from a pantheon of Republican political heroes, from Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass to Susan B. Anthony, who represent an expression of conservative ideals as true and relevant today as it was in the 19th century. Perhaps even worse, the Democrats have been allowed to rhetorically bury their Bull Connors, their longstanding affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan, and their pitiless opposition to practically every major piece of civil-rights legislation for a century.

If the parties had in some meaningful way flipped on civil rights, one would expect that to show up in the electoral results in the years following the Democrats’ 1964 about-face on the issue. Nothing of the sort happened: Of the 21 Democratic senators who opposed the 1964 act, only one would ever change parties. Nor did the segregationist constituencies that elected these Democrats throw them out in favor of Republicans: The remaining 20 continued to be elected as Democrats or were replaced by Democrats. It was, on average, nearly a quarter of a century before those seats went Republican. If southern rednecks ditched the Democrats because of a civil-rights law passed in 1964, it is strange that they waited until the late 1980s and early 1990s to do so.

First, 1968, as the Vietnam War approached its high-water mark and the antiwar movement was starting to roll:

Nixon picked up some of the states of the Old Confederacy, largely because of their pro-military tradition and support for the war. “Wallace,” for those of you born yesterday, was Democrat George Wallace, a rabid segregationist who founded the American Independent Party and ran for president on its ticket. He won 13 percent of the popular vote, and carried five states in the Deep South for a total of 46 electoral votes.

Four years later, Nixon faced the first modern Democratic Party presidential candidate, George McGovern, who ran on a “Come Home, America” platform, and on whose campaign many of today’s radicals cut their teeth. Two items of note: Missouri Senator Tom Eagleton was McGovern’s first running mate, who got dumped by the Compassion Party after it came out that he had been hospitalized for clinical depression and had undergone shock therapy. The other is McGovern’s extensive quote from “This Land is Your Land,” a hit for Peter, Paul and Mary written by the communist fellow-traveler, Woody Guthrie.

The Nixon White House is endlessly denounced for a “Southern Strategy” that captured all 11 states of the Old Confederacy in 1972. But Nixon’s vice president was a pro-civil rights governor, Spiro Agnew of Maryland, who had defeated George P. Mahoney, a Democrat who ran in 1966 on his opposition to open housing. In the six presidential elections in which Wilson and FDR topped the ticket, Democrats carried all 11 Southern states every time.

Outside of Missouri, Deep South states were the only ones Adlai Stevenson carried in 1956. The sainted Adlai balanced both his tickets with Dixiecrats: John Sparkman of Alabama and Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. Liberal hypocrisy is exceeded only by liberal amnesia about who kept them in power from 1933 to 1968.

Richard Nixon kicked off his historic comeback in 1966 with a column on the South by Pat Buchanan that declared we would build our Republican Party on a foundation of states rights, human rights, small government and a strong national defense, and leave it to the “party of Maddox, Mahoney and Wallace to squeeze the last ounces of political juice out of the rotting fruit of racial injustice.” 

In that ’66 campaign, Nixon – who had been thanked personally by Dr. King for his help in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1957 – endorsed all Republicans, except members of the John Birch Society.

In 1968, Nixon chose Spiro Agnew for vice president. Why? Agnew had routed George (“Your home is your castle!”) Mahoney for governor of Maryland but had also criticized civil-rights leaders who failed to condemn the riots that erupted after the assassination of King. The Agnew of 1968 was both pro-civil rights and pro-law and order.

When the ’68 campaign began, Nixon was at 42 percent, Humphrey at 29 percent, Wallace at 22 percent. When it ended, Nixon and Humphrey were tied at 43 percent, with Wallace at 13 percent. The 9 percent of the national vote that had been peeled off from Wallace had gone to Humphrey.

Between 1969 and 1974, Nixon – who believed that blacks had gotten a raw deal in America and wanted to extend a helping hand:

• raised the civil rights enforcement budget 800 percent; 
• doubled the budget for black colleges;
• appointed more blacks to federal posts and high positions than any president, including LBJ;
• adopted the Philadelphia Plan mandating quotas for blacks in unions, and for black scholars in colleges and universities;
• invented “Black Capitalism” (the Office of Minority Business Enterprise), raised U.S. purchases from black businesses from $9 million to $153 million, increased small business loans to minorities 1,000 percent, increased U.S. deposits in minority-owned banks 4,000 percent;
• raised the share of Southern schools that were desegregated from 10 percent to 70 percent. Wrote the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1975, “It has only been since 1968 that substantial reduction of racial segregation has taken place in the South.

The charge that we built our Republican coalition on race is a lie. Nixon routed the left because it had shown itself incompetent to win or end a war into which it had plunged the United States and too befuddled or cowardly to denounce the rioters burning our cities or the brats rampaging on our campuses.

Nixon led America out of a dismal decade and was rewarded with a 49-state landslide. By one estimate, he carried 18 percent of the black vote in 1972 and 25 percent in the South. No Republican has since matched that. So the next time a liberal tries to repeat the Thurmond myth, show him the maps -- and make the Democrats own their history. They don't like it much, and who could blame them?

Thinking Through Our Syrian Options

On the lead-up to a likely strike against Syria by the United States, there are some things most of us can agree on.

One is that Bashar al-Assad is a malevolent figure. Two, a de minimis strike–one that 
is mostly symbolic and does nothing to alter the course of the war–is worse than doing nothing. And three, President Obama has handled the Syrian situation with staggering incompetence.

The list of mistakes by Mr. Obama includes, but is by no means limited to, declaring two years ago that Assad must go (and doing nothing to achieve that end); declaring one year ago that if Syria used chemical weapons it would be crossing a “red line” that would constitute a “game changer” (Assad crossed the “red line,” for months nothing happened, and whatever Obama does, he’s made it clear it will not constitute a “game changer”); signaling to our enemies, in advance, the details of our expected operation–thereby making a strike, if it occurs, the most telegraphed and reluctant military action in American history; doing a miserable job building a coalition to support a military strike (Obama’s “coalition of the willing” might include all of two nations); doing a miserable job building support among the American people (they are decidedly unenthusiastic about a military intervention in Syria); and signaling he was going to bypass congressional authorization for military use of force before reversing course and declaring on Saturday that he would seek authorization–but only after Congress returns from its summer recess (thereby sending the message to Congress, the American public, and the world that there’s no real urgency to a strike, despite the secretary of state saying that what Syria has done is “morally obscene”). This is Keystone Cops material. 


That said, where there is a real difference of opinion, including among conservatives, is who used the chemical weapons and whether an effective show of force that would alter the balance of power in Syria would be worthwhile.

Some military analysts, like (retired) General Jack Keane, believe the more moderate and secular rebel forces (like the Free Syrian Army) are in fairly strong shape and, if given the training and arms they need, could emerge as a powerful force in a post-Assad Syria. Others, like Colonel Ralph Peters, believe the rebel forces that are strongest in Syria right now and most likely to emerge as dominant in a post-Assad Syria are al-Qaeda affiliates like Jabhat al-Nusra. I will admit it’s unclear to me–and I suspect fairly unclear to almost everyone else–what would happen if Assad left the scene. Which makes knowing what to do, and what to counsel, difficult.

So what is the best outcome we can reasonable hope for? What is the worst outcome we should be most prepared for? What are the odds of each one happening? How likely, and in what ways, will Syria retaliate? How reliable is the FSA? Is Jabhat al-Nusra (an al-Qaeda affiliate) “generally acknowledged to be the most effective force fighting al-Assad,” in the words of CNN’s Peter Bergen? If the (relatively) moderate rebels did receive the aid they need, what are their chances of success? And what would success look like? Taking control of Syria (which is hardly likely)? Taking control of parts of Syria? Participating in a coalition government? Comprised of whom?

These are just some of the difficult, and largely unknowable, questions one has to ask prior to endorsing a military strike.

There would be a significant cost to doing nothing in Syria. There could be significant benefits if we act militarily (including delivering a damaging blow to Syria’s sponsor states, Iran and Russia, as well as to Hezbollah). And it’s also possible that things could be worse–from the standpoint of America, Israel and the region–if Assad is attacked and/or overthrown and jihadists emerge in a dominant position. “The hard truth is that the fires in Syria will blaze for some time to come,” according to Ambassador Ryan Crocker. “Like a major forest fire, the most we can do is hope to contain it.”

In all of this I’m reminded of what Henry Kissinger wrote in his memoir White House Years:

Statesmanship requires above all a sense of nuance and proportion, the ability to perceive the essential among a mass of apparent facts, and an intuition as to which of many equally plausible hypotheses about the future is likely to prove true.

Barack Obama has no such perception and intuition; he has proved to be singularly inept at such presidential decision-making. But we cannot unwind what has happened. We are where we are. Syria is a nation that has been ripped apart. The window for a useful American intervention has closed. And even if it hasn’t, it would require a strategic thinker and statesman of remarkable skill to deal with a dozen moving parts, all which need to be carefully calibrated, in order to help Syria heal; in order for a stable, non-sectarian and non-virulent regime to emerge.

It’s much clearer to me what we shouldn’t do than what we now should do. I suppose that’s sometimes where we find ourselves living in this most untidy world. And when it comes to predicting the course of events and anticipating various contingencies, especially in the Middle East, modesty is probably more appropriate than certitude. No matter how you slice it, it's a lose-lose proposition.