Conservative belief in War  

War doesn’t change minds or hearts, it just reduces their numbers.It is difficult to believe that anyone could think that military force can change hearts and minds.However, many conservatives believe that the Middle-East wars will change hearts and minds. The idea that a war can force people to support a particular way of thinking is complete fantasy, but that doesn’t stop some conservatives from believing it.Many conservatives know that war does not change hearts and minds, but they nonetheless support the war.These conservatives simply want the enemy dead as in, “The only good Muslim is a dead Muslim”.  

At the end of the Civil War, ravaged Confederate soldiers returned home from the war. The war was “over” in that there were no generals directing these soldiers where to fight. However, individually the majority of the soldiers were not defeated. Physically they had been removed from the battle field, but the fight was not taken out of them. Dixie did not accept defeat; she regrouped and became a solid voting block that undid the progress made by the North during the war when the conservative South was away from Congress.  

All those horrible, bloody battles and incredible feats of heroism in the Civil War did not in any way change the minds of the conservative South.It seems a mystery then as to why conservatives today are willing to believe that a war in the Middle-East will change the minds and hearts of the Muslim world.The truth of course is that conservatives have no interest in changing minds and hearts; they simply want revenge.Confucius said, “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.”So long as they feel safe and protected, vengeful conservatives are happy to fill graves with bodies from either side.Unfortunately, these conservatives never feel safe and protected.  

The Conservative belief in a weak Federal Government  

Conservatives prefer a weak or small federal government because conservatives support the capitalistic belief that the desires of the individual outweigh the greater good of the whole of society.This leads conservatives to view compromise as weakness.Conservatives believe that the best method to get their way is to hold their breath like a spoiled child.If this doesn’t work they pick-up their marbles and go home like they did in 1860 when they seceded from the Union.This lead to “The war of Northern Aggression” so named by Southerners because the North simply would not let the South have its own selfish way.  

The Southern slave owners wanted no government regulation upon their business of which their slaves were an integral part. The North’s claim that “Slavery was immoral” was dismissed by the slave owners as poppycock. Slave owners saw no moral injustice in slavery, it was just business. The South viewed the North as wanting to disrupt and interfere with its way of making a living. This was a very personal threat.  

Because one state cannot impose its will upon another, the North wanted the federal government to police the South and abolish slavery.Naturally then the South championed “State’s Rights” as a means to get their own way.The South also pushed for a weak federal government to fend off the North’s personal threat to their livelihood. The country became divided over how much say the federal government should have in State’s Rights. The North believed that slavery was a national embarrassment and pushed for a strong federal government that would abolish slavery. The South believed that they had a right to run their business as they saw fit and their property (slaves) were an integral part of that business. Abolition would therefore ruin their business. To protect their property and their business, slave holders sought the protection of their state government from federal regulation.  

Our country is once again strongly divided over how much control the federal government should have over business. Once again conservatives want the federal government to leave businesses alone.Even after solid proof that unregulated public corporations will run amuck and destroy the economy, conservatives refuse to push for federal regulations. Conservatives hold fast to a bizarre belief that the only way to control selfish greed is through self control.Some conservatives believe that “Christian values” are a better check on selfish greed than government regulations. If all of our CEOs would just behave as “Good Christians”, selfish greed would not plunge the economy into ruin. Conservatives seem to believe that government regulations would block a CEO’s ability to act in, “A good Christian manner”.  

This view is similar to the old slave master’s belief that it was up to the slave master to treat the slaves well.They believed, or more accurately rationalized, that obedience to God’s will would make them good slave owners.This completely ignored the fact they still enslaved people.Slave owners needed cheap labor to turn a profit.Therefore, they used every means to justify deregulation of slavery including God, the Bible, individualism and State’s Rights.Today, public corporations who are bound by the nature of Wall Street to make a profit at all cost, need deregulation to allow them to turn a profit by any means necessary. Therefore, people who support a “free-market” system use every means to justify deregulation including God, the Bible, individualism and State’s Rights.  

In the depths of the Civil War President Lincoln worried over the amount of control corporations were gaining because the federal government was small and weak.  

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes
me to tremble for the safety of my country.As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless, Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864; letter to Col. William F. Elkins.  

Those that believe that the individual is more important than the whole will never understand the need for a strong federal government to regulate selfish greed; even selfish greed that is so strong that it can justify slavery and enthrone corporations as masters of our economy.    

Sugar-coating selfishness  

John Kenneth Galbraith said, “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”The Old South conservatives tried to sugar coat their selfish need to enslave people by claiming to be superior to Blacks.The slave owners shamelessly justifyied slavery with their religion.Today conservatives sugar coat selfish greed with that old American chestnut, “Rugged individualism”.Rugged individualism means the ability and desire to run roughshod over anyone that stands in the way of your quest to make money by any means necessary.  

After the Civil War, after Lincoln promised, “Malice toward none”, the conservatives in the South were by no means “defeated”.Like Rush Limbaugh of today, John Wilkes Booth thought that the President was so left-leaning that the President was a danger to the country’s survival.Booth was as confident as Limbaugh that the majority of the country backed his view. Booth was so confident in his view that he thought if he killed Lincoln he would be hailed a hero. The point is that the conservative leaders in the post Civil War South were no less defeated than today’s Republicans even after being soundly defeated in 2008.  

The same Old-South conservatives who had: supported secession, supported the war, supported state’s rights and supported deregulation of slavery directed their efforts at molding the South into a solid voting block.The South became a force that could not be reasoned with, that would not compromise and that could not be defeated.  The Republican Party today has molded itself into a similar solid voting block that cannot be reasoned with and will not compromise and will not be defeated.  

The Old South elected conservatives and sent them to Washington to undo Lincoln’s “progressive movement”.It worked.Without starting another civil war the Southern conservative movement undid Lincoln’s Reconstruction plan for the South.Jim Crow “laws” were established; former slaves did not get forty acres and a mule; blacks and other non-whites were prevented from voting; and eventually the US Supreme Court ruled into law the conservative concept of “Separate, but equal” which in truth meant “separate and unequal.”Blacks were re-enslaved as “convict workers,” whipped and tortured to meet daily quotas for US corporations that stand as shining examples of US capitalism “at its best”, (Blackmon.)  

People can needlessly debate whether or not Lincoln was a liberal, but compared to the solid South, Lincoln was progressive.Without a doubt, the solid South successfully defeated Lincoln’s “progressive movement” of Restoration.In the long run the South won the “War of Northern Aggression.”  

Today, the Solid Republican Party is successfully defeating President’s Obama’s so-called progressive movement.The Old Solid South used white people’s fear of blacks to win their war against progress and establish the ridiculous concept of white supremacy. Today’s Solid Republican Party uses people’s fear of socialism and fear of change to win their war against progress as they try to keep in place the ridiculous deregulation laws that lead to world-wide economic disaster.  

Today’s Solid Republican Party uses religion to shamelessly justify the selfish greed of deregulation. They believe that Jesus’ parable about the talents (Matthew 25: 14-30) is God’s blessing on a free market system devoid of regulation. Yet, they ignore the fact that God struck dead Ananias and Sapphira in the fifth book of Acts for not following the communal code set down by God for the early church.Conservatives believe that greed is good and why not? Remember, this is the same conservative group that comes from the reminants of the Old South that found Biblical justification for: salvery, Jim Crow, separate-but-equal and lynchings.  

It was no coincidence that the South’s triumph over Reconstruction was known as Redemption, and the leaders of this fight known as Redeemers. And Christianity was unique among the world’s religions in promulgating the idea that Negroes, the children of Ham, were beings of darkness, as Ham and his children were cursed by Noah, who declared that “a Servant of servants shall he be unto his people.” Walter White, the long time executive secretary of the NAACP, wrote in 1929, “It is exceedingly doubtful if lynching could possibly exist under any other religion than Christianity….No person who is familiar with the Bible-beating, acrobatic, fanatical preachers of hell-fire in the South, and who has seen the orgies of emotion created by them, can doubt for a moment that dangerous passions are released which contribute to emotional instability and play a part in lynchings,” Dray, p 80.  

I have never understood why so many Americans fall under the spell of “fanatical preachers of hellfire” like Rush Limbaugh of today and the Grand Wizards of the Old South, but it is certainly true that Americans, mainly white Americans, become emotionally unstable and demand a return to a mythological past that doesn’t exist.It truly saddens me that Christianity was used to justify the mistreatment of blacks in the US and that Christianity is used to justify capitalistic greed.

Conservatives like Pam Geller want Americans to “Wake-up” to America’s slide away from its conservative past. I simply wonder if Americans will ever wake-up to the realities of the wickness of their conservative past.If they do wake-up to the realities of their conservative past will they still hasten a return to such vile wickedness? The cries for: war, deregulation and rugged individualism suggest that conservatives desperately long to return to the days of the Old South and white supremacy.I wish that they would leave God out of their argument for a return to these terrible days; it is impossible that God could want a return to such wickedness.As Mahatma Gandhi said, “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”    

References  

Blackmon, Douglas. Slavery by Another Name. The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Random House, 2008.

Dray, Phillip. At the Hands of Persons Unknown. New York: Random, 2002.