America Lost the Civil War With The Lincoln War State

[publius]

Killed on a Good Friday, his work done, the man with a plan became a palindrome. His victory cut short by an actor playing Brutus, in his death dissolved the new Union, the New American Order his will had carved out of the States. This thread will explore my musings on the Occult and Secular America that followed. An alternate history for Democrats and Republicans and Patriots alike, for Paultards, Otards and those challenged as retards. A disscusion I hope that gets to look into the connections of ideas. One thing that strikes me is shouting Hurrah for Jefferson Davis or not praying for Abraham Lincoln is a jail sentence solid, yes indeedy, some got six months, some got one solid..."

A free for all all night dope and beer session on the beach in Tahiti inside the transit camp barbed wire enclaves constructed by the free thinkers housed there previously.

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!


O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

[publius]

So using tools developed in the 20th century we can think about the 19th century. One tool we can use is philosophy. "Heidegger rejects Cassirer’s solution to the predicament of passive enthrallment to technology, viz. a willing embrace of technological destiny by legislating ethical rational goals to direct the deployment of technology. Heidegger sees this hope as illusory since this project leaves us firmly within the grip of enframing. We would just be adding on another layer of representation, planning and calculation. But this is still technological thinking. We remain within the “invisible shade” of technology, something which remains incalculable." http://heidegger.an-archos.com/archive/ ... vos-debate

[American Dream]

So where do moral objections to institutional slavery fit into this, in your book?

Please note that I'm not inquiring as to the motivations of the Lincoln Administration back then, but rather, to how people of conscience might view those happenings from a principled moral framework, today.

[publius]

I am unsure how to respond clearly. My personal morality regarding slavery is not the issue. I will say that slavery in the racist context of the 19th century white male Agricultural South was for purposes of labor and probably status and display. Labor conditions in the 19th century in Europe and the Americas varied from slavery, to serfdom, to agricultural labor as quasi-chattel, share croppers, orphan children, big city kids swept off the street etc. From a Christian viewpoint this traffic in human beings such as slavery likely could only be justified by a doctrine of bringing the merits of Christian civilization to the heathen. A more developed Chrstian morality would be opposed to slavery per se. A truly deepened Christian viewpoint probably would crusade against the normal labor conditions of Agricultural and Industrial workers across the world.

To suggest the Civil War was principally fought over liberation of black slaves is incorrect as I have demonstrated on the Paul thread. Two masters cannot be in one house. Either governments of the States are equal to that of the Federal government or they are not. If they are not, then the brute force used by Lincoln is a continuity of Executive Branch State power as understood by the Constitution making him Commander-in-Chief. He lawfully went to a total war footing without permission of Congress to put down an insurrection that threatened the power of the recently seated Federal government to control finances. If these States left the Federal union he was threatened with losing other states or portions of those states to secession. HE, Lincoln, would lose his "China."
The man who cost the union, or the man who lost the union, a truly uneviable position for a political animal.

However, I add also that it is likely that Slavery would have within 20 years vanished had there been no Civil War. The moral trend was against Slavery despite racism being deeply entrenched. I am using philosophy to discuss the technology because I think we are still embeded in that movement.
What follows Post-Post Modernism? Modernism. The new is always modern.

[American Dream]

My personal morality regarding slavery is not the issue.

[publius]

States of Exception are always modern. Lincoln had a State of Exception and did what he could with the technology of the day to prosecute the modern industrial war that left 2 million soldiers dead and created a police state with Lincoln as President Tyrant.
====

Two months after the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration, in the midst of what it perceived to be a state of emergency, authorized the indefinite detention of noncitizens suspected of terrorist activities and their subsequent trials by a military commission. Here, distinguished Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben uses such circumstances to argue that this unusual extension of power, or "state of exception," has historically been an underexamined and powerful strategy that has the potential to transform democracies into totalitarian states.

The sequel to Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, State of Exception is the first book to theorize the state of exception in historical and philosophical context. In Agamben's view, the majority of legal scholars and policymakers in Europe as well as the United States have wrongly rejected the necessity of such a theory, claiming instead that the state of exception is a pragmatic question. Agamben argues here that the state of exception, which was meant to be a provisional measure, became in the course of the twentieth century a working paradigm of government. Writing nothing less than the history of the state of exception in its various national contexts throughout Western Europe and the United States, Agamben uses the work of Carl Schmitt as a foil for his reflections as well as that of Derrida, Benjamin, and Arendt.

Synopsis:
Distinguished Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben examines the unusual extensions of executive power seized during states of emergency, a historically underexamined and powerful strategy that has the potential to transform democracies into totalitarian states.

About the Author
Giorgio Agamben is professor of aesthetics at the University of Verona. He is the author of ten previous books, including the prequel to this one, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Kevin Attell is a writer and translator living in Berkeley, California. He is the translator of Agamben's The Open: Man and Animal.

Table of Contents
Translator's Note
1. The State of Exception as a Paradigm of Government

2. Force-of-Law

3. Iustitium

4. Gigantomachy Concerning a Void

5. Feast, Mourning, Anomie

6. Auctoritas and Potestas

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2009/he ... 80809.html for a very good summary of the text.

[American Dream]

[publius]

Humans are in perpetual bondage and some are in it from choice. I do not frame the Civil War in terms of a desire by the Federal government to liberate black people from human bondage in the South.
Slavery is not the burning moral issue that kills two million men and lays a country to waste. I do not own slaves or seek to own slaves, nor live in a nation where slavery is allowed under law. The issue simply Lincoln ocupying the American State of Exception. And he occupies a different Presidency in a different time than Adams of the Alien and Sedition Acts who also had his State of Exception.

Lincoln's Federal modernity pre-figures European fascism. Fascism is corporatism. The Good Friday murder of Lincoln was for the creation of a CORPORATE UNITED STATES. The Hegelian Absolute State arises with Lincoln fighting the Civil War. The State apparatus now is the Exception. The men who administer the State, the bureaucrats, the experts, the Mandarin Class now move sovereignity away from participation in decision making by substituting ritual approval.

[Wombaticus Rex]

[publius]

Heidegger on the Notion of Dasein as Habited Body
The general misunderstanding of Heidegger's negation of body arises from the different meanings associated with the term 'body'. Body can be understood from ...
www.ajol.info/index.php/ipjp/article/view/64932/52655 - Cached - Similar

Culture theory is useful in the dim sum bar. Heidigger seems so 19th century American in a way but still Herr Professor. A useful philosopher occupying several domains of interest simultaneously.

[Hammer of Los]

...

I always rather liked Heidegger.

The continental phenomenologists were not without merit.

Of course, Wittgenstein was one of a kind, eh VK?

But I also recall a fondness for Soren Kierkegaard;

"Purity of heart is to will one thing."

Why not try to act for the benefit of all by manifesting the higher will instead of the finite mortal will?

"Not my will but Thy will be done," is a powerful mantra.

Pure Mind.

Pure Land.

That is my doctrine.

Well, until I devise a better one.

Er, this was a thread on philosophy, right?

Sorry to ramble off topic!

Slavery bad!

End Wage Slavery!

End human trafficking!

God bless AD.

etc.


ps Sorry I don't have time to worry too much about the historical circumstances of the American Civil War. Tempus Fugit!

...

[publius]

My mother's family pioneered Kentucky with Daniel Boone. My mother was born in 1918. In Bremen, Kentucky. To the best of my knowledge the Civil War was a non-event in my family.

In the Civil War of America murdering Abraham Lincoln radically altered the outcome of the War.

I also like Kirkegaard.

[swindled69]

What the hell is the point of a thread on slavery when as you sit and write witty lines on your computer, your a slave yourself.


We all are, in one way or the other and if you don't think so your a slave and brainwashed.

[vanlose kid]

...

I always rather liked Heidegger.

The continental phenomenologists were not without merit.

Of course, Wittgenstein was one of a kind, eh VK?

But I also recall a fondness for Soren Kierkegaard;

"Purity of heart is to will one thing."

Why not try to act for the benefit of all by manifesting the higher will instead of the finite mortal will?

"Not my will but Thy will be done," is a powerful mantra.

Pure Mind.

Pure Land.

That is my doctrine.

Well, until I devise a better one.

Er, this was a thread on philosophy, right?

Sorry to ramble off topic!

Slavery bad!

End Wage Slavery!

End human trafficking!

God bless AD.

etc.


ps Sorry I don't have time to worry too much about the historical circumstances of the American Civil War. Tempus Fugit!

...

Sein und Zeit is an amazing work.

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common occurence in the vk household:

vk: Wittgenstein says bla bla bla bla.

vk's better half: yeah, well Heidegger said that here and better!

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"To be sure, I can imagine what Heidegger means by being and anxiety. Man feels an urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the astonishment that anything at all exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer whatsoever. Anything we might say is a priori bound to be mere nonsense. Nevertheless we do run up against the limits of language. Kierkegaard too saw that there is this running up against something and he referred to it in a fairly similar way (as running up against paradox). This running up against the limits of language is ethics. I think it is definitely important to put an end to all the claptrap about ethics -- whether intuitive knowledge exists, whether value exists, whether the good is definable. In ethics we are always making the attempt to say something that cannot be said, something that does not and never will touch the essence of the matter. It is a priori certain that whatever definition of the good may be given -- it will always be merely a misunderstanding to say that the essential thing, that what is really meant, corresponds to what is expressed (Moore). But the inclination, the running up against something, indicates something. St. Augustine knew that already when he said: What, you swine, you want not to talk nonsense! Go ahead and talk nonsense, it does not matter!" -- Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle (Blackwell 1979) p. 68-69.

this is sort of related to what you, me, slomo, Willow, and barra were on about in a different thread.

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i agree with publius re the money aspect of the civil war. it has to factor in. i find it hard to believe that .gov was in it for purely or even marginally humane reasons. that they stoked up and made use of those sentiments and its proponents is nothing new. "freedom, democracy, bla bla bla" is an old trick still in current use.

hope and change? hope does not bring change. change does. who needs hope?

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[vanlose kid]

also, there is merit to this, which is to say publius is not alone in thinking this:

...

However, I add also that it is likely that Slavery would have within 20 years vanished had there been no Civil War. The moral trend was against Slavery despite racism being deeply entrenched....

wish i could find the book, but there was an "alternative" (bad word really since it wasn't alternative so much as repressed) history book published by semiotexte (i think, i'll try to dig it up, can't even remember the title at the mo) in the nineties that i've read about maroons, slaves, irish and black rebellions, freed-slaves as owners and businessmen in Nola and other places who were driven out and lost what they had after the war etc., in the south, ishmaelites in the midwest etc., that spoke of the same things. union history is the history of the victor (axiomatic, really, kind of like the history of WWII). one could reasonably argue that the civil war in some ways pushed the development back. there's also that fact that the north had a need of free and cheap labor that could be filled by the emancipated.

in sum, lincoln's war was not a "just war" of emancipation, and the image of it as one is a bit... can't find the word.

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