[This was written last night and queued up for today before I discovered the TNR's expose of Ron Paul's old writings, thus it's a few hours out of date, and redundant to what I've written there. Apologies.]

Forgive me for this, Ryan. I don't mean to embarrass you, BUT...

Ryan is a regular at this blog; I've never met him in person, but he's quite dear to me nonetheless: I'm just a dilettante (albeit a convincing-sounding one) on 98% of the topics I comment on here (most the stuff I'd be considered an expert on would bore you) -- so he goes to these blogs with REAL civil war experts, Gnostics, or what have you an tries to get them to comment on what I've written.

(a) That's pretty daunting, (b) that's one of the things that impressed me about Ryan, and is a sign of someone who seeks Truth, which I highly value, and (c) in line with that last remark, if I'm wrong, I want to know it, because I also would prefer not to wander around being confused about things.

Okay, enough embarrassing my guests (this is pledge drive week, in which I pledge to drive away my readership by embarrassing them individually) -- but I found this response to Ryan's query amusing:

All I will say is that I am vehemently opposed to neo-Confedrates in any form, and Rep. Paul’s comments demonstrate that he is firmly in that camp, meaning that I have lost any respect I might have had for him. I certainly would never vote for him after that.

Woah. Pretty harsh.

On the other hand, having tried to read some background material to support the various arguments he and his supporters (Thomas DiLorenzo) tend to echo, I can understand a bit why he might say that.

A test of bigotry against some nation (the US, Israel, Burkina Faso) or group is to see whether some standard is being applied unevenly. And there's a lot of that going on among the "libertarians" who support these arguments.

It's true, for example, that Lincoln shut down opposition groups and papers, imprisoned critics and suspected traitors, etc. Thomas DiLorenzo will tell you all about that. But he won't mention that the Confederacy did the same thing, and even moreso, considering that Confederate citizens had to have passports to move around, unlike those in the North.

As far as I've seen the criticism is only applied to Lincoln, never to Jefferson Davis.

Likewise, they are quick to imply that Lincoln undermined the Constitution. Undoubtedly, this must be true as the Constitution itself, besides the parts of it we still venerate today, held that slavery was legal, that people could be property, and was interpreted as construing that all the Territories (areas which were not yet states) were, by default, slave-holding areas.

But of course the Confederacy wanted to change the Constitution as well, and wrote their own. Lincoln argued that states didn't have the right to secede, the Confederacy Constitution said they did. The Confederacy also explicitly enshrined slavery forever (rather than just tolerating it), gave the executive MORE power (by giving him a line-item veto) and a somewhat weaker Congress.

You see criticism of one, but not the other.

And of course, Lincoln is blamed for starting the war (he was president at the time), but a major sticking-point for the South was his mere election, and, I soon learned, they been threatening to take Fort Sumter by force well before Lincoln took office. And they did, after all, fire the first shot. Yet strangely, only Lincoln is implicated in the conflict. Not the voters who put him into office, not Southern politicians and even Cabinet members who wanted the South to strike the North first, and certainly Jefferson Davis, who actually ordered hostilities to begin.

Lincoln is criticized severely for not having arranged a slave buy-out, but nobody in the South is criticized for failing to suggest one either. (Which, in my view, confirms my suspicion nobody, including Southerners, thought the idea would have assuaged the South.)

The individual contentions aren't wholly wrong, but they don't lead to the narrative which arises: that Lincoln was "fascist" who single-handed started the war (always implied to be against the will of the North and South) in order to do away with the US Constitution he hated and enshrine his freedom-hating Republican party in power forever.

And the Confederacy...

... is almost entire absent from these narratives. Heck, they didn't even choose to attack Sumter -- that was Lincoln's fault and they had no choice. They're offstage somewhere, or an unaccountable force of nature, like wind, rain, or Hamas terrorists. The slaveholders, the people who hung abolitionists, the VP who explicitly declared the cornerstone of the new nation was the enslavement of black-skinned people...

Missing in action. Never heard of 'em.

("Well, of course we deplore them, but anyway, about Lincoln...")

They play as much role as the attacking nations in the Six Days War play in an antisemite's narrative of the history of Israel.

In truth, I don't think Ron Paul and friends are neo-confederates. But if you listen to their narrative very long, you'll learn what bothers them:

- The US government (meaning as it is, not as it should be)
- "Neocons"
- The "Likud Party" in Israel
- "Christojihadists" (from Lew Rockwell's web site)
- "Republicans" - esp. who support our international allies, most especially
- Israel

I'm a social and fiscal conservative. I think the US government IS too big, and is not often helpful to us. But I think, for example, Saudi Arabia, Belgium, the UK government, or China is far, far worse, and wouldn't criticize us exclusively while giving the others a pass. I think giving foreign aid is frequently (not always) a waste, but I don't think it makes us culpable for the 9/11 attacks -- and certainly not less, rhetorically, than al Qaeda, as Ron has it.

So Lincoln hatred is just a proxy for hating the modern Republican party. Likewise, it's a litmus test which shows how much they're willing to overlook (slavery! and historical facts!) in order to get at their main target (Lincoln, who stands in as a proxy for big-government Republicans). I don't for a moment imagine that the US is the same thing as the US government, but in their zeal to (correctly) criticize the US government for being too big, they are as "blame America first" as any leftist.

And it's telling that they're now turning to the left to get much their intellectual ammo, if you can call it that.

They say that history is written by the victors. On the left (and apparently now among many libertarians) that's not true: The history is written by, and in favor of, every petty nasty group of two-bit thugs and losers in history, including the Confederacy. As long as you are working to make sure the US has no moral legitimacy (and thus political influence) in the world, it's all fair game.

Update: The jig is up, the news is out... I was too charitable here: it turns out that Ron Paul and associates DO support the idea the union should split up into many smaller nations -- a not-too-uncommon belief among white (and other types of racial) supremacists.