L. Neil Smith
L.Neil Smith is the libertarian movement's most prolific author, with more than twenty books to his credit. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.
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by L. Neil Smith
Pardon me for being so late to realize the obvious.
In my defense, I have a worse example. I once heard Cher admit on a TV talk show that she was a grown woman before she realized Mount Rushmore is not a natural phenomenon. She allowed as how she'd never really given the matter much thought before that. I assumed that was because she didn't have that much thought to give, to that or anything else.
Now I wonder.
I'll preface this by saying that I've spent the last year or two enjoying all of the historical revisionism about the War Between the States. I'd like to think I helped to kick it off with a column I wrote several years ago about Abraham Lincoln called "The American Lenin," but there are probably lots of writers who can make a similar claim.
In the years after that, we've seen a couple of astonishing books, Freeing Slaves, Enslaving Free Men by my old friend Jeffrey Rodgers Hummell, and The Real Lincoln by Thomas DiLorenzo who has a friend in me if he ever needs one. We've seen countless columns, too, by DiLorenzo and other Dixie Cup savers who hang out on a regular basis at LewRockwell.com. Thanks to them, we now have a clearer view of what the Late Unpleasantness was about, and what kind of a hairpin Saint Abraham was. I was all wrong about him. I should have compared him to Hitler.
Thanks to them, too, we're no longer confused when we see elderly Russians on TV who pine for the good old days of Uncle Joe Stalin. They don't know about the tens of millions he murdered; they don't want to know. He was a father figure they believe got them through the hardest of times. They don't want to be told that he created those times.
More than anything else, what we see most clearly now is that the War of Northern Aggression was simply another step (and it was far from the first) in the evolution of an Empire made all the more Evil because its subjects are eager (exactly like those elderly Russians and the subjects of most empires, I guess) to believe it's a force for good in the world, that it's centered on decency and freedom. But the fact is that, as soon as Abraham the Great's bluebellied hordes were finished sweeping across the Federal Empire's stubbornly resistant southern provinces, looting, pillaging, smashing, burning, and raping everyone and everything in their path, they turned their blood-spattered faces west, where another kind of human obstruction awaited them.
I just returned to northern Colorado from a road trip to Phoenix, via Flagstaff, the Barringer Crater (which is sort of like a visit to a shrine to me), Holbrook (good dinosaur museum), Gallup, Albuquerque (my second visit this year), Santa Fe, Raton, and about a billion and a half reservations, genuine Indian jewelry stores owned and operated by genuine Indians -- from India -- and casinos along the way. In Raton, I bought watches with tooled silver Navajo and Zuni watchbands for my wife and daughter, and a very plain but elegant silver belt buckle for myself
Except for their design values, forms and colors that I grew up with and have enjoyed all my life, and their craftsmanship in precious metals, turquoise, coral, lapis, onyx, and so on, (which, I've heard it said, they learned from Mexican silversmiths), I admit I've never been enthusiastic about the whole Indian schtick. It always seemed to me a cause of much more interest to the socialists who call themselves liberals. I've even met a legendary Indian "leader" or two, and wasn't impressed. The most famous of the lot reminded me too much of Jesse Jackson.
(That, parenthetically, is why I've always wanted to write a novel entitled The Steamcoach Pillagers, a horse opera set in my own North American Confederacy's 19th century, where, thanks to Albert Gallatin, you had to be as ethical and decent to Indians [the hero is a Lakota sheriff] -- and to pretty Chinese schoolmarms -- as you did to anyone else.)
But as usual, I've digressed. Before I went to Phoenix, via Grand Junction, Telluride, and Cortez, PBS began rerunning Ken Burns' "The Civil War." That ten-year-old series is dismayingly conventional -- meaning wrong -- in its interpretation of history. But it offers so much detail (Lincoln's worshippers are always inclined to boast of his innumerable murderous atrocities and other despicable acts as if they were accomplishments) it's easy to see what an immoral and brutal war it was, and what immoral and brutal men Lincoln and his thug-generals were.
This century would have hanged them all as war criminals.
At more or less the same time, I also saw a couple of interesting documentaries. One was about the Santa Fe Railroad's late, lamented Super Chief, a luxury liner of the land, bearing southwestern names and decorative motifs. One of the Pullman cars was called Acoma, after the famous "cloud city," and the intimate and luxurious dining room was named for that quintessentially southwestern stone, turquoise. The other documentary told of the decades-long creation of the Crazy Horse monument in the Black Hills. Somehow, all of this percolated together in my head until, as I say, I was struck by a bolt of the blindingly obvious:
Robert E. Lee, who struggled in vain for five bloody years to preserve the Constitution and the American way of life as the Founding Fathers conceived it, and Crazy Horse, who struggled equally in vain to prevent the expansion of the vile Federal Empire, were on the same side!
Okay, like I said, Mount Rushmore. But that insight, belated and obvious as it was, led me to another. Out here in Flyover Country, we are often plagued by rich eastern tourists, usually liberals, usually women, who revel in Indian blankets, Indian pottery, Indian "squash blossom" jewelry -- of course they call it "Native American" -- but who would claim, if asked, to detest the sight of a Confederate flag. Apparently it's morally acceptable to resist imperialist colonial expansion if your ancestors hail from Siberia, but not if you're from Virginia.
Me, I wish they'd get their damn causes straight. If you admire Crazy Horse, then you have no choice but to admire Robert E. Lee. It's true, the South had slavery (although many southern leaders, including Lee and Jefferson Davis, hated the institution and wanted to end it).But the Indians had their bad points, too: they considered stealing (especially horses) a virtue and enjoyed torturing and scalping people.
Likewise, if you despise George Armstrong Custer, you must despise Lincoln, and for exactly the same reasons you claim to despise Hitler. They, each one, are forebears of today's American Boot On Your Neck Party -- you know, the crooked outfit that falsely claims to be two parties?
What's more, I've been struck recently by another parallel. The British did the same kinds of evil things to the Scots that the Union did to the South and the Indians. They rounded up folks who had herded big red shaggy cattle for centuries and dragged them to the rocky seashore. When the Scots wanted to know what they were supposed to do for a living, the warm, loveable Brits told them they could harvest seaweed. So throw in William Wallace with Robert E. Lee and Crazy Horse, and put the King in the same column as Custer, Lincoln, and Hitler.
All of this is good practice for making sense of what's going on today. If a leader calmly plots the murders of thousands of innocent men, women, and children, on a largely manufactured pretext, to increase his power and wealth and that of and his cronies, does he belong in the same group as Robert E. Lee, Crazy Horse, and William Wallace?
Hardly.
To begin with there was George the First, Father of his Country. Then George the Second, who puked on the Japanese prime minister. And now, just like the Founding Fathers, we have George the Third to deal with. He belongs in the same group as Lincoln, Hitler, and the English king.
