[Peace-discuss] Accepting the lie about the causes of wars

[C. G. Estabrook]

Dickens' insight is another example of the truth of the maxim that the poets 
always get there first.

And Denson's view is given specificity by the leading revisionist (radical) 
historian of the last (or so) generation (reading whom was a revelation to me, 
lo those many years ago), William Appleman Williams (1921-90).

The *effect* of Lincoln’s policy was certainly to establish a much more powerful 
central government in the United States. Hence the old line that the Civil War 
was about a verb: “the United States is” vs. “the United States are.”

But the *cause* of the war was the conflict between two ruling groups who 
exploited labor differently — by slavery in the South, by the wage-contract in 
the North.  And Lincoln recognized that quite well -- notably in his "house 
divided" speech and, even more specifically, in his first State of the Union 
Address, 3 December 1861. The Northern and Southern elites came into conflict 
after the Mexican War and the vast increase of US territory that followed it.

    "Both groups wanted to control the western half of the continent, and the 
Northern agrarians became increasingly anti-slavery as they faced the prospect 
of competing against a forced-labor system. But favoring free soil did not mean 
agitating to free the black man. The majority of Western farmers were not 
abolitionists ... Their objective was to exclude both the white planter and the 
black [workers] from the trans-Mississippi marketplace. That goal, and the 
attitude which produced it, gave Abraham Lincoln his victory over the 
abolitionist element in the newly rising Republican party." --W. A. Williams, 
"The Roots of the Modern American Empire" (1969), p. 10.

The Radical Republicans (and Lincoln) were not necessarily abolitionist and only 
adventitiously democratic. They just wanted the trans-Mississippi empire farmed 
with wage-labor, not slave-labor. (Hence the central Republican party plank was 
“no extension of slavery.”)  --CGE


E. Wayne Johnson wrote:
> "The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious
> humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern 
> states."  -Charles Dickens
> 
> Historian John V. Denson writes-
> 
> Rarely do any governments, or the politicians, intellectuals and news media
> who support their wars, tell the truth about the real motives for the wars.
> After all, the citizens must be convinced either that their safety is being
> protected from an aggressor or that the war serves some noble purpose,
> because it’s the citizens who fight, die and pay the taxes. The Orwellian
> historians have falsified the true purposes or motives behind most of
> America’s wars, and have instead given us glorified accounts designed to
> mislead the public in order to justify the sacrifices the people have made.
> 
> All wars, whether won or lost, tend to centralize and increase the power into
> the national government, increase the debts and taxes and diminish the civil
> liberties of the citizens. It is time we begin to see through the myths and
> false propaganda about American wars so that we can prevent future wars.
> Americans have a strong tendency to accept as true the false wartime
> propaganda which now appears in the history books and which is repeated by
> politicians and intellectuals to the effect that all of America’s wars have
> been just, necessary and noble.
> 
> This tendency of the Americans to accept this false propaganda tends to 
> prevent them from questioning the alleged reasons for current wars. There is
> also a strong tendency by Americans to measure a person’s patriotism by how
> much that person supports an American war rather than how much the person
> supports the concept of American freedom and the ideas of our Founders, which
> includes a noninterventionist foreign policy
> 
> It is time that Americans learn the truth about the real reasons behind our
> wars, and particularly, the War Between the States, because of the price that
> we have paid in the long-term loss of liberty in that war. The deaths of over
> 600,000 American young men in that war is not exactly inconsequential. This
> high death total is more than the total of all the deaths of American
> soldiers in all the other wars America has fought.
> 
> 
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