Francisco Ferrer

The recent work of Harvard historian Cystal Feimster shows that rape of both white and black women was not uncommon during the Union occupation of the South: "Whether they lived on large plantations or small farms, in towns, cities or in contraband camps, white and black women all over the American South experienced the sexual trauma of war . . . Southern women’s wartime diaries, court martial records, wartime general orders, military reports and letters written by women, soldiers, doctors, nurses and military chaplains leave little doubt that, as in most wars, rape and the threat of sexual violence figured large in the military campaigns that swept across the Southern landscape." Pullease! We are talking about Sherman's March to the Sea and this impossibly broadens everything out and would destroy the thread with this gigantic dog leg. You did the same thing with your first post here. If you are against the War Between the States--me too, me too! Now you can just say so. But that's also another thread. --Brant There has been no attempt to broaden the discussion, only to support my claim that violence against women was among the crimes that Sherman's troops in Georgia committed. Professor Feimster's argument is that the "threat of sexual violence and the fear of rape were common to Southern women and central to how they experienced the Civil War." Now, if such violent acts were common in the war torn South, then there is no reason to suppose that an exception was made by Sherman's men in occupied Georgia. In fact, Feimster specifically cites a Georgia case.

I understood that your complaint against anarchism was that it "has no *history.*" You wrote in Post #44, "The basic problem with anarchism as a valid political or scientific theory is that it has not fulfilled the requirement that you can point to it. You cant even point to a successful experimental model like a commune that I know of." Accordingly, I assumed that you would require the same "point to it" standard for your own pet theory, Constitutionalism, and asked you for an example of a successful instance of it. Yet the best you can come up with is the government that followed the Revolution of 1776? Seriously? "Constitutionalism" is "adherence to a system of constitutional government." But there has been no adherence of the U.S. government to its founding document--not even under its first president, who suppressed an insurrection without the approval of Congress, to which such power is exclusively delegated. The Congress shall have Power To ...provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.... Article I, Section 8, Clause 15 Thus your example fails to meet your own criterion for taking a political theory seriously. "You can't even point to a successful experimental model." The implied consent theory has been trashed frequently over the decades by better minds than mine, starting with Lysander Spooner. So quickly: Some men at the time of the nation's founding agreed to the establishment of government. Their consent is only binding upon themselves. They had no authority to bind third parties, including present day neighbors or future generations without their explicit consent. It is particularly odious for Implied Consenters to employ their theory in the defense of a government that has engaged in regular and wide-scale predations on individual rights. Raise your hands for the Fugitive Slave Clause. Or military conscription. Or the federal income tax. If we embraced implied consent, we'd have to insist that Obamacare is no violation of our rights. Living here implies consent to have our medical care socialized, right?

Delighted to hear it. Where did this recommendation appear?

The recent work of Harvard historian Cystal Feimster shows that rape of both white and black women was not uncommon during the Union occupation of the South: "Whether they lived on large plantations or small farms, in towns, cities or in contraband camps, white and black women all over the American South experienced the sexual trauma of war . . . Southern women’s wartime diaries, court martial records, wartime general orders, military reports and letters written by women, soldiers, doctors, nurses and military chaplains leave little doubt that, as in most wars, rape and the threat of sexual violence figured large in the military campaigns that swept across the Southern landscape."

No one said most of the indians died of anything but disease. What he said and what was done were mostly two different things. In Post #16 you wrote, "There were many horrible genocides but most seem to have been carried out by locals not the army." I foolishly jumped to the conclusion that "locals" meant the local human population, not the local community of pathogens. But apparently the germs were not mobilizing fast enough for Sherman's taste. Why else initiate over a thousand army attacks on Indian villages during winter months when the whole tribe, including children, were together? A good account of Sherman's solution to the Indian question can be found in John F. Marszalek, Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Sherman called for Indian killing. Indian killing was done. I fail to see the disconnect. True, there was not absolute extermination, but does Hitler get off the hook because some European Jews escaped the final solution?

What is your point Mr. "I live in the past and I will always be annoying about it?" I had forgotten that I had said that. It must have been so long ago even Google can't find it. As to my purpose here, I supposed that it had been made clear from the context of the thread: Sherman set out to kill not just armed combatants, but unarmed civilians as well. Perhaps one couldn't see it because the words kept getting in the way. I addressed this earlier. The war could have ended long before Appomattox had the North agreed to negotiate with the South.

Unfortunately, Sherman made war on virtually all Plains Indians, not just Comanches. He wrote to Grant, "We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children." Using Sheridan as his field commander, Sherman ordered attacks on the Kiowas, the Lakota and Cheyenne. He also used the army to destroy buffalo herds to deprive the Plains Indians of their chief economic resource. If most of the Indians died at the hands of locals, it's not because Sherman didn't try to do it with army bullets,

The purposeful destruction of crops, the killing of livestock (that Union soldiers could not consume), the burning of residences, mills, granaries, stores, and warehouses ensured that thousands of non-combatant men, women and children would die in the months after the March to the Sea. And let us not forget the countless rapes and beatings that Sherman turned a blind eye to. We have no precise numbers because there were no number-takers in this wasteland. If only it were true that there had been no bite after the bark. And there was certainly both boast and follow through with regard to Sherman's post-war treatment of American Indians: "The more Indians we can kill this year the fewer we will need to kill the next, because the more I see of the Indians the more convinced I become that they must either all be killed or be maintained as a species of pauper. Their attempts at civilization is ridiculous. " --William Tecumseh Sherman

I think it was more practical than that. Sherman wanted to shorten the war. The only way to do that was to wreck the economy of the Confederacy which he did. Aside from burning houses and fields he had railway track ripped up, heated in fire and wrapped around trees. They were called Sherman's neckties. His objective was to lay the confederacy militarily and economically prostrate and that is what he did. Within a year of his famous (infamous) March through Georgia the war was finished. The effects were so profound that even today, while you are reading this there are Southrons who still curse Sherman's name. Ba'al Chatzaf Lincoln's goal was not shortening the war (he refused to make any compromises with Confederate emissaries) but unconditional surrender. In fact, those words were thought to be what the initials in Grant's name stood for.

Yes, I read the Hanson pieces, both of which confirm that Sherman's intention was the "Extermination, not of soldiers alone, . . but the [southern] people." Quoth Hanson (who apparently never met a war he didn't love): "His purposes were threefold: to punish the plantation class, the small minority of Confederates who owned slaves, as the culprits for the war; to destroy the Southern economy and remind the general population, as Sherman put it, 'that war and individual ruin were now to be synonymous.'”

Thank you. I'd forgotten what a pleasure it was to read Reisman's cold, implacable logic.

Especially among Union generals, Sherman represented the return of the "civilized world" to total war, the disappearance of any discrimination between combatants and non-combatants. Sherman wrote that his goal was "Extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least part of the trouble, but the [southern] people." (Letter of July 31, 1862 to his wife from his Collected Works) In this sense Sherman is the perfect Übermensch, the man who is freed from the standard Christian concern for the lives of others. The Übermensch makes his own morality.

FF: "...a few..." - some hard number please. Pick any number between two and two hundred. But by saying a "few years" and not "a generation," I've lowered the bar for finding that Holy Grail, the unsullied, still virginal constitution. By all means use cheeseburgers if you wish, provided that you can find a constitution that prohibited its government from ordering them.

So it is logical to advocate only political systems that we can point to historically? Then where in history do you point, Mr. Taylor, when you wish to suggest something other than the status quo? If it's Constitutionalism you want, kindly point to a span of more than a few years when government men were held in check by a mere scrap of paper.

Jules Troy wrote, "Talk to anyone that had been out of Iran since the revolution and they all reminisce about the days while the shah was there and how beautiful it was." I have talked to some of the old pro-Pahlavi Persians. For them SAVAK was beautiful. (The "Greatest Generation" of Russians who fought under Stalin thought the same about the KGB.) For the old Persians the difference between the hell on earth of the current Islamic regime and the beauty of the Shah's rule was that somebody else's son was the one getting the cattle prod.

I read the USGS report: "The future of Florida’s moderate potential for undiscovered resources may be limited by environmental and political controls that discourage oil and gas exploration and development within the South Florida Basin." I thought that's why we have the drill-baby-drillers. To go on talk radio and bash the environmentalists and politicians getting in the way.

Obama is embarrassing. Everyone knows that is not how a U.S. president should greet Saudi royalty.

I imagine there are a few who reminisce about the good old days of SAVAK, nail extractions, cattle prods in the rectum, and acid in the nostrils.

Ever notice how the "Drill, baby, drill" fire-breathers never talk about the potential deposits off the coast of swing state Florida?

I read an unexpected explanation recently, of why America went fruity with regulation. Large trusts (railroads, steel, oil, communication) in the Gilded Age found that scale cut into their profits and that small independents had better profitability. Rockefeller, Morgan and Carnegie apparently lobbied for government regulation and rate-setting, not unlike James Taggart and Orren Boyle in fiction. I haven't verified it with primary research, but it sounds plausible. Broadcasters and cable operators love their license to print money. New Deal and Great Society welfare programs started small, like income tax did (1% declared on a postcard-size form). Oh, the thesis that late 19th century regulation came at the behest of major players in American industry in order to avoid competition is well researched and documented. See especially the work of Gabriel Kolko (who died last May): Railroads and Regulation, 1877–1916. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965. .The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916. New York, NY: The Free Press, 1963.Unfortunately Rand's romantic vision of the American industrialist as persecuted Atlas blinded many of her followers to the historical reality.

It is no less true of so-called limited government. How else to explain how a nation that Rand called "the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world" turned into a Safety Net State which is rapidly approaching the tipping point where welfare recipients exceed in every precinct the voting numbers of the net producers?

In the absence of an explanation from Childs himself, wondering about his repudiation of anarchism is pointless. Perhaps Childs was in recruitment mode and didn't want to scare Middle America away from liberty. Childs, after all, is the one who famously said to an audience of libertarians, "If lying helps, I say lie." Yes, Galileo did change his mind, but only in response to recorded observations which contradicted earlier views. Yet so far no one has provided the first clue about what Childs might have observed, discovered or reconsidered to change his endorsement of anarchism. And without such evidence, Child's renunciation carries no more weight than moaning, "Oh, I just got tired of being against the state." As for Greenspan, until this moment I had no idea that anyone except a few leftists believed that his term as Fed Chairman had any relationship with a return to laissez-faire capitalism. What exactly did he do at the Fed to get us back on the gold standard (which he praised in "Gold and Freedom")? How did keeping interest rates below the rate of inflation for two years get us back to responsible government? If his term as Chairman contradicted nothing he wrote in the 1966 essay, then why did he admit to the U.S. House Financial Services Committee that he was wrong about predictions of dire consequences for the fiat U.S. dollar?

Why is it problematic? Since we don't know what logical demonstration (if any) led Childs to change his mind about anarcho-capitalism, it hardly follows that his original argument is questionable. For comparison, consider that Alan Greenspan is a former supporter of laissez-faire capitalism. Do his present views make the 1966 essay "Gold and Economic Freedom" "problematic at best"?

Nice cherry picking. I just watched a fine C-Span show this weekend of a classroom lecture at the Air Force Academy which discussed whether the Japanese were indeed ready to surrender. They were not, or they would have. Their imports due to the "blockade" were about 35% of what existed in 1943 and yet they were functioning. Men were dieing every day in the Pacific while the Japanese were not surrendering and not one of those American soldiers lives were worth waiting another day. The US Air Force was literally running out of targets to hit on the four (4) main islands of Japan. The death toll in the fire bombings of Tokyo dwarfed the deaths in either Hiroshima, or, Nagasaki. Were they "humane?" Frankly, we were the only country who should have used Atomic weaponry because we do have the moral clarity to make those decisions. One thought is that their use was a "shot across the bow" of Stalin's vicious criminal regime which exceeded the numbers of dead of Hitler's criminal regime. This was an easy decision. A... Cherry picking it is not. I didn't argue that all generals opposed the use of A-bombs. My contention, clearly stated, is that the American military leadership was not of one mind on their necessity. The idea that those weapons saved months of fighting and more war casualties is an article of faith recycled every year on the anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's worth pointing out that some high ranking generals and admirals strongly disagreed.

The U.S. military was hardly unanimous on the necessity of atomic weapons: "I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon." --Dwight D. Eisenhower, Newsweek (11 November 1963) http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dwight_D._Eisenhower "It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons." --Adm. William D. Leahy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_D._Leahy "When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor." Norman Cousins, The Pathology of Power, pg. 65, 70-71. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-mitchell/countdown-to-hiroshima-fo_b_3707531.html "I submit that it was the wrong decision. It was wrong on strategic grounds. And it was wrong on humanitarian grounds." --Adm, Ellis M. Zacharias http://ussslcca25.com/zach12.htm