by
Thomas J. DiLorenzo

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by Thomas DiLorenzo: Propagandist
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“Lincoln
as political strategist is front and center in Steven Spielberg’s
new film. He trades votes, dangles patronage, hedges principles
and tiptoes on the brink of deceit. He pleads, cajoles and threatens.”

~ David Von
Drehle, “Lincoln
to the Rescue: What the Master Politician of 1862 Can Teach the
Presidential Hopefuls of 2012” (Time magazine, Nov.
5, 2012)

“Lincoln
was a master politician, which means that he was a consummate conniver,
manipulator, and liar.”

~ Murray N.
Rothbard, “Two
Just Wars: 1776 and 1861“

Steven Spielberg
must have grown a Pinocchio-sized nose when he announced recently
that his forthcoming movie about Lincoln, based on the book Team
of Rivals by the confessed plagiarist Doris Kearns-Goodwin,
was not a political movie since it will be released after the election
(See my LewRockwell.com review of Goodwin’s book entitled “A
Plagiarist’s Contribution to Lincoln Idolatry“). Time
magazine let the cat out of Spielberg’s bag in its November 5 issue,
which is a glowing tribute to politics, politicians, big government,
and most of all, to the legend of Abraham Lincoln.

A picture of
actor Daniel Day-Lewis portraying Lincoln is on the cover with the
headline, “What Would Lincoln Do?” The issue includes
a long-winded essay by Lincoln historian/cultist David Von Dehle;
a “viewers guide” by the dishonest Doris Kearns Goodwin;
and a story of “How Daniel Day-Lewis Became Lincoln.”

The purpose
of the Lincoln legend has always been to assert that our “salvation”
lies in politics, not in God. Lincoln is our secular “god,”
and our rulers will never let us forget it. That is why the U.S.
government has spent millions over the past several years on the
publication of dozens of books, conferences, movies, documentaries,
plays, etc. to commemorate Abe’s 200^th birthday (That
was 2009 and the “celebration” is still going strong).
That is the purpose of the upcoming Spielberg movie and its celebration
in Time and elsewhere.

Truth and
Lies About Politics and Politicians

In his Time
essay David Von Drehele continues the century-and-a-half long deification
of Lincoln (the worst kind of blasphemy) by celebrating what a lying,
conniving, politician he was. He approvingly quotes Lincoln’s law
partner, William Herndon, as having said that Lincoln was the “mostly
secretive man that ever existed.” One wonders why he had to
be so “secretive” if what he was doing was in “the
public interest,” as we are constantly told.

Lincoln was
first and foremost a sleazy, small-minded, patronage politician
from Illinois. As Drehle writes, he always paid “small-minded
attention to politics” and “spent dozens of hours each
week painstakingly distributing the rapidly growing number of federal
jobs at his disposal.” Even when the Confederates were racking
up battlefield victory after victory, and threatening to capture
Washington, D.C., Lincoln “nevertheless devoted huge blocks
of time to selecting tax collectors authorized by the first internal-revenue
act.”

He did all
of this, says Drehle, to gain support for “holding the union
together.” Wrong, Mr. Drehle. He did this to destroy
the voluntary union of the founding fathers and replace it
with an imperialistic empire. The idea of a voluntary union is apparently
one of those “principles” that Drehle is so happy that
Lincoln “hedged” on. He threatened war over tariff tax
collection in his first inaugural address, and then followed through
with his threat after duping the Confederates into firing the first
shot at Fort Sumter (where no one was harmed, let alone killed,
save one horse).

Lincoln is
also worshipped in Time for having “hedged principles”
and “tiptoed on the brink of deceit” by committing treason
by invading the Southern states (Article 3, Section 3 of the U.S.
Constitution defines treason as “only levying war upon the
states . . . ” which of course is exactly what Lincoln did.
Other hedging of principles about which we are supposed to be thrilled
is his illegal suspension of Habeas Corpus, mass imprisonment of
tens of thousands of Northern political critics without due process;
the shutting down of hundreds of opposition newspapers; censorship
of the mails; confiscation of firearms; rigging of elections; deportation
of an opposition party congressman (Clement L. Vallandigham); illegally
orchestrating the secession of West Virginia, the last slave state
to enter the union; and worse.

Lincoln’s
Greatest Failure

Lincoln was
indeed a master politician, as described in the quote at the top
of this article by Murray Rothbard. As such, his greatest failure
was that he did not use his famous political skills to do what all
the rest of the world did about slavery and end it peacefully.
This includes all of the Northern states as well as Great Britain,
Spain, France, Denmark, Sweden, The Netherlands, and all other countries
where slavery existed in the nineteenth century (See Greatest
Emancipations by Jim Powell, along with Slavery
in New York published by the New York Historical Society;
Disowning
Slavery by Joanne Pope-Melish; and the Web site, “Slavery
in the North”).

Instead of
working diligently to end slavery peacefully in the British tradition,
Lincoln’s unprincipled, deceitful, threatening, and dictatorial
behavior that is so heavily praised by Spielberg, Goodwin, Drehle,
and Time, led to the death of more than 800,000 Americans
according to brand new estimates of “Civil War” deaths,
along with the maiming for life of more than twice that number.
Standardizing for today’s population, that would be the equivalent
of more than 8 million American deaths in a four-year war.

But not to
worry. As Drehle soothingly informs us, Lincoln’s conniving, manipulating,
and deceitful behavior is what enabled him to sign “the visionary
bills that created the transcontinental railroad, the modern fiscal
system, the homesteading movement, and the nation’s land-grant universities.”
“Never has there been a moment in history when so much was
all compressed into a little time, Drehle quotes one political contemporary
of Lincoln’s as having said. The domestic policies of the Lincoln
administration were labeled The New Deal, a phrase that would be
plagiarized by FDR seventy years later.

The government-subsidized
transcontinental railroads were colossally inefficient and led to
the biggest corruption scandal in history up to that point; and
the “modern fiscal system” in the form of the National
Currency Acts and Legal Tender Acts nationalized the money supply,
leading to endless monetary manipulation and boom-and-bust cycles
caused by subsequent generations of wily politicians like Lincoln.
Most of the land given away under the Homestead Act went to large
corporate supporters of the Republican Party in the mining, railroad,
forestry, and other industries as historian Ludwell Johnson showed;
and the land-grant acts opened the door to the effective nationalization
and politicization of higher education along with the plague of
political correctness. Hurrah for Lincoln!

The fact that
the Republican Party was able to railroad the country into the old
Whig Party mercantilist political agenda of corporate welfare, protectionist
tariffs, and a nationalized monetary system gives the lie to the
story told by Doris Kearns-Goodwin and Steven Spielberg that Lincoln
was such an unmatched genius when it came to politics. Once the
Southern Democrats left the union, thereby forfeiting any right
to say anything about the extension of slavery into the Territories
– THE big slavery issue of the 1860 election – the Republican
Party had the ability to do whatever it wanted, regardless of Lincoln’s
input.

Most of the
major problems with American society today, from poverty and unemployment
to crime, declining standards of living, and more, are caused by
the politicization of society that has been relentlessly ongoing
for generations and which is celebrated and deified by leftists
like Steven Spielberg and Doris Kearns-Goodwin. They keep dragging
out the rotted stench of Lincoln’s corpse disguised by professional
actors, makeup artists, and cinematography to keep the booboisie
dumb and happy and uneducated about their own history.

If America’s
founders were alive today, many of them would throw tomatoes at
the screen upon viewing Spielberg’s upcoming movie about Lincoln.
Thomas Jefferson would likely throw the first “pitch”
since he believed that government needed to be “bound by the
chains of the Constitution,” so untrustworthy were politicians
and politics. In his Farewell Address George Washington reminded
Americans that politicians are, as a rule, “cunning, ambitious,
and unprincipled men”; and Thomas Paine wrote that government
was “a necessary evil,” at best. This is exactly the opposite
view of the infantile rantings of Time magazine and Spielberg’s
Lincoln movie.

November
1, 2012

Thomas
J. DiLorenzo [send him mail]
is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the
author of The
Real Lincoln; Lincoln
Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe
and How
Capitalism Saved America. His latest book is Hamilton’s
Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution
– And What It Means for America Today. His latest book is
Organized
Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government.

Copyright
© 2012 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in
part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

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