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http://mises.org/daily/6419/American-Exceptionalism-From-Gettysburg-to-Damascus
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http://mises.org/daily/6419/American-Exceptionalism-From-Gettysburg-to-DamascusProfessor Bradford was not alone in recognizing the catastrophic implications of Lincoln’s “rhetoric of continuing revolution.” In 1960, Life magazine invited the Pulitzer prize-winning poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren (author of All the King’s Men and nineteen other novels) to record his thoughts on the meaning of the American “Civil War” for the 1961 centennial of the war. He produced a short book entitled The Legacy of the Civil War, a major theme of which is that the war left the North, which is to say, the Republican Party, with what it perceived to be “a treasury of virtue.” This is the “psychological heritage” left to the North, wrote Robert Penn Warren. “The Northerner, with his Treasury of Virtue, feels redeemed by history. ... He has in his pocket not a papal indulgence peddled by some wandering pardoner of the Middle Ages, but an indulgence, a plenary indulgence, for all sins, past, present, and future ....”
This “plenary indulgence for all sins” would allow the U.S. government to conduct a twenty-five year campaign of ethnic genocide against the Plains Indians commencing just three months after Lee’s surrender; to plunder the South for more than a decade with heavy taxes and debt during “Reconstruction”; to murder more than 200,000 Filipinos who opposed being ruled by an American empire after having jettisoned the Spanish empire; and enter the European war “to make the world safe for democracy.” This “moral narcissism,” wrote Robert Penn Warren, is “a poor basis for national policy” but is the “justification” for “our crusades of 1917-1918 and 1941-1945 and our diplomacy of righteousness, with the slogan of unconditional surrender and universal spiritual rehabilitation for others.”
It must also be forgotten, wrote Robert Penn Warren, that most Northern states “refused to adopt Negro suffrage” after the war. It must be forgotten that Lincoln, “at Charlestown, Illinois, in 1858, formally affirmed in one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates that: “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.”
In other words, so-called “American Exceptionalism” is based on a mountain of lies. The lies, however, create a situation whereby “the man of righteousness tends to be so sure of his own motives that he does not need to inspect consequences.” Thus, when the U.S. military bombs a city in a foreign land that results in the death of dozens or hundreds of innocent civilians, it is nevertheless a virtuous act by virtue of the fact that it was done by virtuous Americans.
“The effect of the conviction of virtue,” moreover, “is to make us lie automatically and awkwardly ... and then in trying to justify the lie, lie to ourselves and transmute the lie into a kind of superior truth.” Most Americans are content in living this Big Lie, said Warren, for they “are prepared to see the Civil War as a fountainhead of our power and prestige among the nations.”
The so-called Neo-conservatives who own the Republican Party have been the chief proponents of Lincoln’s rhetoric of continuing revolution. Their financial benefactors even finance “think tanks” such as the Claremont Institute to keep repeating over and over again in books, articles, and on the internet the above-mentioned historical lies. The Democratic Party is not much different. For example, in a September 25, 2012 speech before the United Nations President Obama eulogized the American “representative” to Libya, Chris Stevens, who had been murdered. He praised Stevens for going to Libya as his representative and having “crafted a vision for a future” for Libyans. It’s hard to imagine anything further from the Washington/Jefferson foreign policy philosophy than the notion that it is the duty of an American president to “craft a vision for the future” for people in Libya, of all places.
Obama then boasted of all the recent military aggressions in the name of humanitarianism, including wars and bombings in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Yemen, and Libya, while threatening future military intervention in Syria and Iran. “We again declare that the regime of Bashar al-Assad must come to an end” in Syria, he pronounced. Then came the classic Lincolnian rhetoric-of-continuing-revolution “justification,” for endless military interventionism, complete with a direct quote from the Declaration of Independence:
We have taken these positions because we believe that freedom and self determination are not unique to one culture. These are not simply American values or Western values — they are universal values. And even as there will be huge challenges that come with a transition to democracy, I am convinced that ultimately government of the people, by the people, and for the people is more likely to bring about the stability, prosperity, and individual opportunity that serve as a basis for peace in our world.
Obama then promised more never-ending war by declaring that “America will never retreat from the world” and that “No government or company; no school or NGO will be confident working in a country where its people are endangered.” Wherever there is “danger” anywhere in the world, the U.S. military reserves the right to bomb, invade, occupy, and conquer, in other words. (One is tempted to suggest such interventions, then, in Chicago, Washington, D.C., Miami, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, etc., where there are indeed some very dangerous neighborhoods.)