There is a popular myth in the United States that the American Civil War was fought primarily over slavery. This is news to anyone who has examined the conflict from across the pond, and also would have been news the people who actually fought in it. Most wars are fought primarily over resources, and are therefore economic in nature, even great ideological struggles such the Thirty Years’ War or the Great Patriotic War. The American Civil War was the result of a mismanaged secession crisis brought about by terrible economic policies, and was fought primarily over states’ rights, of which slavery was only one of about half a dozen.
As most of you already know, I was born in Russia, a country which sided with the Union during the American Civil War, the reason for which was rather mundane: Britain and France – Russia’s enemies at that time – sided with the Confederacy. Britain, as you probably already know, did more than any other European country on the abolition front, and the British Royal Navy is almost single-handedly responsible for shutting down the Atlantic slave trade. Why did the British support the Confederacy then? No real reason other than undermining the United States as a unified nation, truth be told. The French had entirely different reasons for supporting the Confederacy, but regardless of the motive, splitting the US in half would have been an enormous economic boon for Europe… and we’d probably all be better off today if that had been the case.
So, why am I talking about a conflict in which I have virtually no interest, particularly since the Crimean War of 1853-1856 featured just as many technological innovations such as explosive shells, railways, telegraph communication, steamships and even ironclads? Well, this post requires some context. RazörFist made a video titled Abraham Lincoln: American Dictator, which I highly recommend you watch. Some time afterward, Vlogging Through History made a two–and-a-half part reaction to it, which you might want to watch as well. Doing so will eat up three hours of your time, but context is required.
Done watching? Smashing, let’s continue. Something that I noticed early on into VTH’s “rebuttal,” if you could call it that, is that he takes more issue with RazörFist’s style than anything else. As I alluded when I wrote In Excusationem Profana, obsessing over a person’s vernacular is usually an indication that the detractor has no real argument. Look, I get it, the rageaholic shtick isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and maybe I’m a bit biased for having a similar style myself (right down to the belts I like to wear), but you need to keep two things in mind: first, the Rageaholic is an online persona, and second, RazörFist doesn’t make scripted videos. This is one respect in which we deviate; I cannot make unscripted videos to save my life, and when I finally have time to start making videos again, I’ll likely use these articles as scripts. Nonetheless, there is a reason that I love the quote “style prevails over substance only when there is no substance.” The reason that I put “rebuttal” in quotes is because VTH never once refuted the core premise of RazörFist’s video, the best he did was nit-pick mistakes, some of which weren’t even mistakes, for example:
1 – As was pointed out numerous times in the comments section, Abraham Lincoln did attend Henry Clay’s funeral, not just memorial events at later dates. Some assert that he was also the one who delivered the eulogy, but I don’t have a source to either confirm or debunk that… Wikipedia doesn’t count.
2 – Woodrow Wilson may have been a southerner, but he wasn’t a southern academic, he studied at and eventually became president of Princeton University in New Jersey. He was both a southerner and northern academic.
3 – While it is true that no violent uprising of liberated slaves took place as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation, it was a perfectly legitimate fear at that time, given that the Haitian Revolution was still in living memory. The intent behind the EP wasn’t to incite massacres of southern women, it was to frighten the Confederate Army into retreating and re-deploying to prevent any such revolts. The EP was nothing more than a brilliant bit of war propaganda, and as any Russian will tell you, never underestimate the power of propaganda.
4 – When RazörFist mentioned that Abraham Lincoln was an atheist, he was sarcastically referring to another popular myth; any student of history knows that Lincoln wasn’t an atheist (though he wasn’t necessarily a Christian, either), and VTH rattled off several of Lincoln’s quotes to prove this. This allows me to perfectly segue into talking about a person whom VTH would be much more helpful in responding to: Aron Ra.
Aron Ra has spoken numerous times on the subject of distoriography, or as he calls it, “Orwellian revisionism” (I will explain why “revisionism” is an unfairly-maligned word in another article) in Texas public schools. I won’t deny that he has some valid points – assuming that everything he says about the Texas GOP platform is actually true – but teaching that the Civil War was fought solely over slavery and that Abraham Lincoln was an atheist are not among them. Aron Ra claims that he would have been a “proud Republican” during the days of Barry Goldwater, and RazörFist once described himself as a “Goldwater Republican,” which is why I really want to get these two long-haired leather-bedecked fellows together in the same room. The problem is that one of them acts like a crazy motherfucker, the other one actually is a crazy motherfucker.
Let’s make one thing crystal clear: RazörFist has extremely libertarian (note lack of capitalisation) leanings, whereas Aron Ra is anything but a libertarian. I will eventually write a longer article going through all my issues with Ra at some point, since this article was just an unscheduled, off-the-cuff rant inspired by VTH’s pearl-clutching, but for now, there are some things you need to know about Ra, mostly based around the fact that when he says that he wants smaller government, he is lying. Here’s how we know:
1 – Ra’s first (and usually only) solution to every problem in society is government action.
2 – Ra is anti-gun, and doesn’t have the slightest understanding of the Second Amendment. He apparently thinks that the “real left” is pro-gun (citing Karl Marx, of course), and only centrists are gun-grabbers, despite being a self-admitted leftist.
3 – Ra was (and to an extent, still is) pro-lockdown and pro-mandate.
4 – Ra is opposed to homeschooling, and to an extent, private schooling as well.
5 – Ra has repeatedly expressed nothing but disdain for rural areas, small towns, and people who make things for a living… other than Elon Musk, whom he hasn’t mentioned at all (as far as I know) since Musk said “take the red pill” on Twitter.
Aron Ra is also so far to the left, much farther to the left than either June Lapine or Jimmy Dore, that there is no way he would belong to any political party other than the CPUSA if he were to travel back in time to the 1950s. Personally, I would characterise him as little more than a delirious double-thinker… otherwise known as a Trotskiist. Speaking of communists, I think I know where he got the idea that Abraham Lincoln was an atheist.
Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the founder of American Atheists, is reported to have expressed a desire to defect to the Soviet Union, and only became an atheist activist in the US after the Soviets denied her entry… twice. Considering the true nature of the Soviet Union, I can make a few guesses as to why that was. Most Americans who aligned with the Communist Party back then had no idea what life in the USSR was actually like. To be fair, virtually no-one outside of the USSR at that time knew what life there was actually like, despite the public testimony of defectors such as Anna Rosenbaum (later known as Ayn Rand). O’Hair, however, had quite a history of outlandish claims and history denial, including a mild form of Holocaust denial. For this reason, I suspect that the myth of Abraham Lincoln’s atheism originates with her, though I was unable to find any information to confirm this. Certainly, the atheist members of the Cult of Lincoln like to believe that he secretly didn’t believe in any god, but for every one of them, you will find a Christian member of that cult who asserts that Lincoln was definitely a believer, he simply wasn’t a member of any church.
Ra has, over the years, transitioned from saying that Lincoln was “possibly” an atheist to asserting that he definitely was. Does he know something that we don’t? I suspect not, as with pretty much every belief that he holds, his roof is no longer sliding, it’s fucking gone. I think it’s only a matter of time before he becomes an evolution-denier… and one could argue that he already has.
While I hate e-drama, I won’t hesitate to start some if it means getting to the truth of a matter. It is for that reason that I attack religious fundamentalists, secular ideologues, and utterly unaligned serial liars alike. It is for that very same reason that I would love to see a three-way discussion between RazörFist, Aron Ra, and Vlogging Through History. That would be a shit-show worthy of remembrance.
Sasha V's Sesquipedalian Soliloquies 