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Thread: Civil War war crimes denial

  1. #1

    Civil War war crimes denial

    The New Generation of Holocaust Deniers
    http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/11/t...crimes-denial/
    Thomas DiLorenzo (26 November 2014)

    “[F]rom the military policies of Sherman and Sheridan there lies but an easy step to the total war of the Nazis, the greatest affront to Western civilization since its founding.” – Richard M. Weaver, The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver, pp. 168-169.

    Having lied about secession, states’ rights, the origins of the Constitution, Lincoln, and just about everything having to do with the American “Civil War” for many generations, the Lincoln cult is now hard at work on its biggest lie of all: that General William Tecumseh Sherman’s famous “march to the sea” did not negatively affect Southern civilians or their property.

    In a November 14 New York Times article one Alan Blinder wrote of “an expanding body of more forgiving scholarship about the general’s behavior.” In its ten thousandth attempt (at least) to mentally “reconstruct” Southerners, the government-funded Georgia Historical Society, in cahoots with the Jimmy Carter Presidential Museum, recently paced a marker in Atlanta “near the picnic tables at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum” that is supposedly “a reassessment of Sherman” that has been “decades in the making” by the Lincoln cult.

    Sherman was not “gratuitously destructive,” says the marker. He only targeted “military infrastructure.” Of course, in reality Sherman considered every Southern person, every acre of Southern land, every house, every barn, every blade of grass, every farm animal, and even every family pet as part of the Confederacy’s “military infrastructure.” Honest historians have documented this in spades for the past 150 years. It is also documented beyond all doubt by the U.S. government’s own Official Records of the war.

    Nevertheless, the Lincoln cultists now dismiss the extraordinarily well-documented history of Sherman’s army’s pillaging, plundering, raping, and murdering of Southern civilians as “fables” and mere “family accounts of cruelty.” One source of such talk is John F. Marszalek, the executive director of the “Mississippi-based Ulysses S. Grant Association.” (A Grant museum in Mississippi is not unlike having a pro-Hitler Museum in Auschwitz, Poland). “The facts are coming out,” Marszalek ludicrously proclaimed to the Times. Sherman’s behavior “hastened . . . the reunification of the union,” the marker at the Jimmy Carter shrine absurdly announces. Yes, just as the German blitzkrieg “united” Germany with Poland and France during World War II, or how Soviet tanks “united” Eastern and Central Europe during the Cold War.

    It is child’s play to prove what a pack of liars this new generation of Holocaust deniers are. It does require a little effort, however, which is probably what the Deniers are depending on when they spread their lies in places like the picnic area at the Jimmy Carter shrine. For example, consider just a few of the facts taken from the U.S. War Department publication, War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, as discussed in Walter Brian Cisco’s outstanding work of scholarship, War Crimes Against Southern Civilians.

    From the Official Records, a Colonel Adin Underwood of Massachusetts described Sherman’s gratuitous bombing and burning of Atlanta after the Confederate Army had left the city as having burned to the ground “37 percent of the city” according to Sherman’s military engineers. This included many private homes and even churches.

    An Ohio infantryman is quoted as describing “an ocean of fire” all throughout Atlanta. Eventually, at least “two-thirds of Atlanta lay in ashes” according to the Official Records. A Major Nichols was told that “the holocaust devoured no fewer than five thousand buildings.”

    When Sherman’s chief military engineer, Captain O.M Poe, voiced dismay over seeing so many corpses of women and children in the streets of Atlanta, and informed Sherman that the day-and-night bombardment of the city was of no military significance, Sherman coldly called the corpses “a beautiful sight” that would quicken the ending of the war (Michael Fellman, Citizen Sherman, p. 184). There were approximately 4,000 private homes in Atlanta before Sherman’s bombing, with only around 400 left standing.

    Sherman left a paper trail that was obviously intended to cover his murderous tracks, but at times he issued direct orders to murder civilians. Bothered by his inability to apprehend Confederate snipers who had been shooting at his railroad trains, he sent the following order to a General Louis D. Watkins: “Cannot you send over about Fairmount and Adairsville, burn ten or twelve houses of known secessionists, kill a few at random, and let them know it will be repeated every time a train is fired on . . ?” (John Walters, Merchant of Terror: General Sherman and Total War, p. 137). In order to carry out such war crimes, Sherman biographer Lee Kennett writes of how “the New York regiments were . . . filled with big city criminals and foreigners fresh from the jails of the Old World.” It took a special kind of “soldier” to carry out Sherman’s war crimes. (Lee Kennett, Marching Through Georgia, p. 279).

    The Official Records also record how federal soldiers extorted money from Southern civilians by demanding “insurance” payments to avoid having their homes ransacked and burned down. A Major James Austin Connolly is quoted in the following way in response to reports that Southerners were hiding their valuables from thieving U.S. Army soldiers:

    “Let them do it if they dare. We’ll burn every house, barn, church, and everything else we come to; we’ll leave their families homeless without food; their towns will all be destroyed and nothing but the most complete desolation will be found in our track.“

    The Official Records also write of how Northern reporters associated with Republican Party newspapers often accompanied Sherman’s “bummers” as they were called, and then entertained the folks up North with tales of their raping, pillaging, plundering, burning, and murdering. One Northern reporter is quoted s saying of Sherman’s rampaging looters:

    “If the spoil were ample, the depradators were satisfied, and went off in peace; if not, everything was destroyed . . . . Hogs were bayoneted to bleed; chickens, geese, and turkeys knocked over and hung in garlands . . . cows and calves . . . are shot . . . . the furniture [of private homes] is smashed to pieces, music is pounded out of . . . pianos with the ends of muskets.”

    Another federal soldier is quoted as saying “I rather feel sorry for some of the women who cried and begged so piteously for the soldiers to leave them a little,” but nevertheless, “extermination [of the civilian population] is our only means now.”

    When Sherman reached Hardeeville, South Carolina, one of his bummers is quoted in the Official Records as saying that “In a few hours a town of half century’s growth is thus leveled to the ground.” This even included a church where “First the pulpit and the seats were torn out . . . . Many axes were at work.” This is undoubtedly an example of what the Lincoln cult means when they refer to “military infrastructure.”

    One of Sherman’s degradations was known as his “war on dogs.” A U.S. Army Colonel is quoted in the Official Records as saying, “We were determined that no dogs should escape . . . we exterminate all. The dogs were easily killed. All we had to do was to bayonet them.”

    By the time Sherman was done with South Carolina, one of his officers boasted in the Official Records that “We have . . . burnt one city, the capital, and most of the villages on our route as well as most barns, outbuildings and dwelling houses, and every house that escaped fire has been pillaged.” This was no “family myth,” as the Lincoln cult shamelessly claims, but the words of a senior officer in Sherman’s army.

    Sherman’s “march to the sea” was nothing new: he had been waging total war on the civilian population of the South for years. In 1862 he ordered the complete destruction through fire of the town of Randolph, Tennessee, near Memphis. Around that time, Sherman wrote a letter to his wife saying that “extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least part of the trouble, but the people” in general, was his intention. (Cited in John Walters, Merchant of Terror, p. 61).

    In 1863 Sherman ordered the systematic bombardment of Jackson, Mississippi every five minutes, day and night. The city was sacked, looted, and destroyed, after which Sherman boasted in a letter to Grant that “the [civilian] inhabitants are subjugated. They cry aloud for mercy. The land is devastated for 30 miles around.” (Cited in Walters, Merchant of Terror, p. 101). He also boasted of the complete destruction of Meridian, Mississippi: “For five days, ten thousand of our men worked hard and with a will, in that work of destruction, with axes, sledges, crowbars, clawbars, and with fire, and I have no hesitation in pronouncing the work well done. Meridian . . . no longer exists.” (Walters, Merchant of Terror, p. 116). This, too, took place after the Confederate Army was long gone from the area.

    James McPherson estimated that some 50,000 Southern civilians perished during the War to Prevent Southern Independence, but the true figure is probably much higher. Sherman himself boasted of how his “bummers” destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of private property and walked off with hundreds of millions of dollars more. There are thousands of pictures of the burned out Southern landscape in the wake of Sherman’s “march” in addition to all the Official Records that record his war crimes.

    But of course in war, the victors are never prosecuted. This probably explains why Sherman – and all the other Union Army top command, including Lincoln himself, became more and more murderous when it came to Southern civilians in the latter years of the war. They all understood that if the South was victorious, it would have been well within its rights to hang all of them as war criminals.

    In the past, before the Lincoln cult commenced its current campaign to whitewash Sherman’s reputation, some cultists admitted this. Sherman biographer Lee Kennett wrote that “had the Confederates somehow won, had their victory put them in position to bring their chief opponents before some sort of tribunal, they would have found themselves justified . . . in stringing up President Lincoln and the entire Union high command for violation of the laws of war, specifically for waging war against noncombatants.” (Lee Kennett, Marching Through Georgia, p. 286). This proves that the Lincoln cultists know these facts but are once again doing everything they can to confuse and misinform the American public about their own country’s history. As such, it is not an exaggeration to label them as the new generation of holocaust deniers.


    "The New Generation of Holocaust Deniers" by Thomas DiLorenzo is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
    The Bastiat Collection · FREE PDF · FREE EPUB · PAPER
    Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850)

    • "When law and morality are in contradiction to each other, the citizen finds himself in the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense, or of losing his respect for the law."
      -- The Law (p. 54)
    • "Government is that great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
      -- Government (p. 99)
    • "[W]ar is always begun in the interest of the few, and at the expense of the many."
      -- Economic Sophisms - Second Series (p. 312)
    • "There are two principles that can never be reconciled - Liberty and Constraint."
      -- Harmonies of Political Economy - Book One (p. 447)

    · tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito ·



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  3. #2
    For every propaganda there will be an equal and opposite propaganda.

    Sherman's March to the Sea was an interesting thing. Up to that point, most of the Civil War was a fight over key rail junctions, followed by a degradation of forces as the general who won the rail junction spread out his troops by leaving many behind to guard that rail line. Seems odd to modern sensibilities, but rail with its ability to move reinforcements in fast and provide supplies was completely revolutionary in warfare, and is one of the things that makes the American Civil War among the most innovative wars in history. Sherman got sick of degrading his forces to guard his supply lines, however, and the March to the Sea is a real departure--a departure from modernity.

    Yeah, he and his men 'lived off the land'--and burned Atlanta, too. Does that a holocaust make? Hardly.
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    We believe our lying eyes...

  4. #3
    Total war eh?







    We're the $#@!ing masters. Sherman would be proud.

  5. #4
    Quote Originally Posted by acptulsa View Post
    Yeah, he and his men 'lived off the land'--and burned Atlanta, too. Does that a holocaust make? Hardly.
    http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/holocaust

    holocaust, noun
    1. a great or complete devastation or destruction, especially by fire.
    2. a sacrifice completely consumed by fire; burnt offering.
    3. (usu. initial capital letter) the systematic mass slaughter of European Jews in Nazi concentration camps during World War II (usu. preceded by the).
    4. any mass slaughter or reckless destruction of life.

  6. #5
    Perhaps if Lee had behaved as Sherman did when Lee moved up through Pennsylvania, the war might have gone the other way.
    Quote Originally Posted by timosman View Post
    This is getting silly.
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    It started silly.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Philhelm
    I part ways with "libertarianism" when it transitions from ideology grounded in logic into self-defeating autism for the sake of ideological purity.

  7. #6
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    For further reading, try War Crimes Against Southern Civilians by Walter Cisco

    In a letter to Grant, Sherman admitted that he was guilty of crimes. "The amount of plundering, burning, and stealing done by our own army makes me ashamed of it. I would quit the service if I could for I fear we are drifting toward vandalism....Thus you and I and every commander must go through the war justly chargeable of crimes at which we blush."
    Equality is a false god.

    Armatissimi e Liberissimi

  8. #7
    MURDERED 750,000-to save

    the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
    All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.
    -Albert Camus

  9. #8
    I'm convinced that unless you are actually talking about the nazi holocaust, you can't use the word denier anymore...it's too loaded
    I too have been a close observer of the doings of the Bank of the United States...When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank...You are a den of vipers and thieves. I have determined to rout you out, and by the Eternal, I will rout you out!

    Andrew Jackson, 1834



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  11. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by willwash View Post
    I'm convinced that unless you are actually talking about the nazi holocaust, you can't use the word denier anymore...it's too loaded
    So that would make you a denier denier, then.

  12. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by acptulsa View Post
    For every propaganda there will be an equal and opposite propaganda.

    Sherman's March to the Sea was an interesting thing. Up to that point, most of the Civil War was a fight over key rail junctions, followed by a degradation of forces as the general who won the rail junction spread out his troops by leaving many behind to guard that rail line. Seems odd to modern sensibilities, but
    rail with its ability to move reinforcements in fast and provide supplies was completely revolutionary in warfare, and is one of the things that makes the American Civil War among the most innovative wars in history. Sherman got sick of degrading his forces to guard his supply lines, however, and the
    March to the Sea is a real departure--a departure from modernity.

    Yeah, he and his men 'lived off the land'--and burned Atlanta, too. Does that a holocaust make? Hardly.
    For various reasons Wolf, Hansell and even LeMay had difficulty with high altitude precision bombing, among them the jet stream. The excuse for the fire bombing on May 10, 1945 of Tokyo and all subsequent raids was cottage industries employed in the Japanese economy coupled with the ineffectiveness of targeting strategic industries. LeMay knew most of the city was made of wood and he knew it would burn. Total war achieves the ends, the ends being replacing the authority of a state. Non combatants suffer the most in total war, I imagine it's little consolation who gains or retains power for those who endure such means.
    Quote Originally Posted by BuddyRey View Post
    Do you think it's a coincidence that the most cherished standard of the Ron Paul campaign was a sign highlighting the word "love" inside the word "revolution"? A revolution not based on love is a revolution doomed to failure. So, at the risk of sounding corny, I just wanted to let you know that, wherever you stand on any of these hot-button issues, and even if we might have exchanged bitter words or harsh sentiments in the past, I love each and every one of you - no exceptions!

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    Peace.

  13. #11
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    Quote Originally Posted by otherone View Post
    MURDERED 750,000-to save

    the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
    And yet he is considered by millions of Americans to be the greatest President.
    Equality is a false god.

    Armatissimi e Liberissimi

  14. #12
    Quote Originally Posted by Rifleman View Post
    And yet he is considered by millions of Americans to be the greatest President.
    History tends to be written by the winners.
    Quote Originally Posted by Torchbearer
    what works can never be discussed online. there is only one language the government understands, and until the people start speaking it by the magazine full... things will remain the same.
    Hear/buy my music here "government is the enemy of liberty"-RP Support me on Patreon here Ephesians 6:12

  15. #13
    Why They Raped, Pillaged, and Plundered: General Sherman’s Professed Hatred of Self Government
    http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/12/t...and-plundered/
    Thomas DiLorenzo (04 December 2014)

    November and December of this year mark the 150th anniversary of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s famous “march to the sea” at the end of the War to Prevent Southern Independence. The Lincoln cult – especially its hyper-warmongering neocon branch – has been holding conferences, celebrations, and commemorations while continuing to rewrite history to suit its statist biases. Business as usual, in other words. But they are not the only ones writing about the event. Historian Karen Stokes has published South Carolina Civilians in Sherman’s Path: Stories of Courage Amid Civil War Destruction that contains a great deal of very telling information about Sherman’s motivation in waging total war on the civilian population of South Carolina.

    Stokes begins by quoting a letter that Sherman wrote to General Henry Halleck shortly before invading all-but-defenseless South Carolina: “[T]he whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to wreak vengeance upon South Carolina.” In another message a few weeks later, Sherman reiterated to Halleck that “The whole army is crazy to be turned loose in [South] Carolina.”

    A New York newspaperman who was “embedded” with Sherman’s army (to use a contemporary term) wrote that “There can be no denial of the assertion that the feeling among the troops was one of extreme bitterness towards the people of the State of South Carolina.” The Philadelphia Inquirer cheered on as Sherman’s army raped, pillaged, burned, and plundered through the state, calling South Carolina “that accursed hotbed of treason.”

    In a January 31, 1864 letter to Major R.M. Sawyer, Sherman explained the reason why he hated the South in general, and South Carolina in particular, so much. The war, he said “was the result of a false political doctrine that any and every people have a right to self-government.” In the same letter Sherman referred to states’ rights, freedom of conscience, and freedom of the press as “trash” that had “deluded the Southern people into war.”

    Sherman’s subordinates expressed similar opinions. In 1865 Major George W. Nichols published a book about his exploits during Sherman’s “march” in which he describing South Carolinians as “the scum, the lower dregs of civilization” who are “not Americans; they are merely South Carolinians.” General Carl Schurz is quoted by Stokes as remarking that “South Carolina – the state which was looked upon by the Northern soldier as the principal instigator” of the war was “deserving of special punishment.”

    All of this is so telling because it reveals that neither Sherman, nor his subordinate officers, nor the average “soldier” in his army, were motivated by anything having to do with slavery. South Carolina suffered more than any other state at the hands of Sherman’s raping, looting, plundering, murdering, and house-burning army because that is where the secession movement started. It was NOT because there were more slaves there than in other states, or because of anything else related to slavery. It was because South Carolinians, even more than other Southerners, did not believe in uncompromising obedience to the central state.

    Shortly after the war ended some prominent Northerners began to pour into South Carolina to revel in the scenes of destruction (and to steal whatever they could). The goofy Brooklyn, New York, Reverend Henry Ward Beecher went on one such excursion and gave a speech while standing under a giant U.S. flag in Charleston in which he declared:

    “Let no man misread the meaning of this unfolding flag! It says, ‘GOVERNMENT hath returned hither.’ It proclaims in the name of vindicated government, peace and protection to loyalty; humiliations and pains to traitors. This is the flag of sovereignty. The nation, not the States, is sovereign. Restored to authority, this flag commands, not supplicates . . . . There may be pardon [for former Confederates], but no concession . . . . The only condition of submission is to submit!”

    In other words, the purpose of the war was to “prove” once and for all the false nationalist theory that the states were never sovereign; they did not ratify the Constitution, as explained in Article 7; the constitution created them; that the states never delegated certain powers to the central government in the Constitution (Article 1, Section 8); and that the central government is to have unlimited “supremacy” over all individuals and institutions.

    This was the nationalist superstition about the American founding, first fabricated by Alexander Hamilton and repeated by successive generations of nationalist/consolodationist/mercantilist despots such as John Marshall, Joseph Story, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln.

    This is why Sherman and his army reveled so much in their brutalization of defenseless South Carolinian women and children and the looting and destruction of their property. And they bragged about it for the rest of their lives. Much of the boasting is catalogued in South Carolina Civilians in Sherman’s Path. Stokes quotes a General Charles Van Wyck as writing that “nearly every house on our line of march has been destroyed.” An “embedded” New York reporter named David P. Conyngham is quoted as described one South Carolina town after observing “the smoking ruins of the town, to tall, black chimneys looking down upon it like funeral mutes” with “old women and children, hopeless, helpless, almost frenzied, wandering amidst the desolation.” The book contains dozens of other eye-witness accounts by Union Army soldiers and Southern civilians of the burning down of entire cities and towns, rape, robbery, and wanton destruction of all varieties of private property, all of it occurring after the Confederate Army had vacated. All to prove once and for all, to South Carolinians and all other Americans, North and South, that federalism and self-government was a “delusion,” to quote General Sherman himself.


    "Why They Raped, Pillaged, and Plundered: General Sherman’s Professed Hatred of Self Government" by Thomas DiLorenzo is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0



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