What if Thanksgiving exposes the Government?

What if Thanksgiving Exposes the Government?

http://tenthamendmentcenter.com/2013/11/27/what-if-thanksgiving-exposes-the-government/?doing_wp_cron=1385647675.9945390224456787109375#.UpdbnuuRJTY

Andrew Napalitano

What if another Thanksgiving Day is upon us and because of the government we have less to be thankful for than we did at the last one? What if at every Thanksgiving liberty is weakened and the government is strengthened? What if Thanksgiving’s warm and breezy seduction of gratitude is just the government’s way of inducing us to think we should be grateful for it?

What if we don’t owe the government any thanks for anything? What if the government owes us back all the freedom and property it has stolen from us? What if the government has produced nothing and owns nothing, save what it has coerced us to give it? What if the courts have ruled that the government can lie and cheat with impunity in order to acquire our property or assault our freedoms?

What if the government lies and cheats regularly to enhance its own wealth and power? What if the government claims that its power comes from the consent of the governed? What if no one consented to the government’s spying and lying except those who personally and directly benefit from it?

What if the government is afraid to tell us all it is doing to us for fear we might vote it out of office? What if that vote would change nothing? What if the spying and lying continued no matter who ran the government? What if those who spy and lie don’t lose their jobs no matter how they lie or upon whom they spy or who gets elected?

What if this holiday of turkey and football and family is the modern-day version of bread and circuses? What if bread and circuses — which Roman emperors gave to the mobs to keep them sated — _are just the government’s way today of keeping us _sated at the end of every November? What if the government expects us to give thanks to it for letting us have Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday off?

What if the president thinks he’s a king? What if he claims the power to kill people outside the Constitution? What if some of these people were your sisters or neighbors or friends? What if he thinks he’s so smart that he knows what choices we should make? What if he makes those choices for us?

What if we each have the natural right to choose how to care for our own bodies, but he has used the coercive powers of the law to tell us how to do so? What if that law compelled all persons to pay for more health insurance than they needed or wanted or could afford?

What if the president deceived dupes in Congress into voting for that law? What if the president deceived millions of Americans into supporting that law? What if the president forced you to pay for a health insurance policy that funded killing babies in their mothers’ wombs?

What if the president knows what you want and need because his spies have captured your every telephone call, text and email? What if the Declaration of Independence says that our rights are personal, inalienable and come from God? What if the Constitution says that among our inalienable rights are the right to be left alone and the right to be different?

What if the president took an oath to uphold the Declaration and the Constitution but believes in neither? What if he believes that our rights come from the collective consent of our neighbors, whom he can influence, or, worse yet, from the government, which he can control? What if he believes that he can invade our right to be left alone by spying on us and lying to us and destroy our right to be different by killing us? What if he actually did all these things?

What if only individuals foolish enough to do so give up their own rights but cannot give up the rights of those of us who refuse to surrender them? What if the government can only constitutionally take away personal freedoms when a jury has convicted someone of a crime? What if the government thinks it can take our rights away by ordinary legislation or by presidential fiat? What if it has done so?

What if someone who once worked for the government knew all this and risked life and limb to tell us about it? What if the government at first denied that it lies to and spies upon all Americans? What if it demonized the whistle blower? What if it chased him to the ends of the Earth because he revealed awful truths? What if everything Edward Snowden revealed about the government turned out to be true?

What if it is the personal courage and constitutional fidelity of Edward Snowden for which we should be thankful? What if the government hates and fears our freedoms just as it hates and fears the revelation of the awful truths Snowden possesses?

What if our thanks are due primarily to the Author of our freedoms, who made us in His image and likeness, and to those who have exercised those freedoms to seek and reveal the truth? What if it is the truth, and not the government, that will keep us free?

What if we have the right to pursue happiness no matter what the government says? What if we have the right to be unique no matter what the government wants? What if the freedom to seek the truth will bring us happiness?

What if that freedom which is still ours is a just cause for a happy Thanksgiving, after all?

We always have the News Crows to tell us how our country should be run like Detroit.

News Hawk wrote:We always have the News Crows to tell us how our country should be run like Detroit.

Happy Thanksgiving there, Harm

Someday we'll have to meet up in town for a drink.

Nationalize Everything – Even Thanksgiving

By Thomas DiLorenzo

November 28, 2013

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/11/thomas-dilorenzo/lincoln-nationalized-thanksgiving/

“Nationalize as much as possible” to “make men love their country before their states. All private interests, all local interests, all banking interests, the interests of individuals, everything, should be subordinate now to the interest of the Government.”

–Senator John Sherman, 1863 (Cited in Heather Cox Richardson, The Greatest Nation on the Earth, p. 87

George Washington issued the first Thanksgiving Proclamation on October 3, 1789 as a way of celebrating the newly-ratified Constitution. He distributed his proclamation to the governors of the states and suggested that they participate in the celebration, which the states all did in their own ways for many years. The federal government was not yet a centralized, consolidated, monopolistic, central-planning bureaucracy, so Washington’s proclamation was no more than a suggestion offered to the citizens of the free and independent states.

Thanksgiving did not become a national holiday until Lincoln nationalized all the state Thanksgiving celebrations by issuing a proclamation written by Secretary of State William Seward (according to Lincoln’s White House secretary, John Nicolay) on October 3, 1863. Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation is a masterpiece of lies, deceptions, and false propaganda that would have impressed any twentieth-century tyrant.

In order to keep the Northern public sufficiently frightened and paranoid (and hence supportive of the war), the Seward/Lincoln Thanksgiving Proclamation announced that the war “seemed to foreign States to invite and provoke their aggression.” In reality, no foreign state would ever have considered invading a country across a large ocean that had just assembled one of the largest and best-equipped armies in the history of the world. In fact, at the end of the war many British politicians and opinion makers were terrified that Sherman would cross the Atlantic and invade England as punishment for trading with the Confederacy during the war.

The most absurd claim made in Lincoln’s proclamation is that “order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theater of military conflict.” This was three months after some fifteen thousand U.S. Army soldiers were ordered to leave the Gettysburg battlefield and march to New York City to put down the New York City Draft riots, which they did by murdering hundreds, if not thousands, of draft protesters by shooting them down in the streets (See Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots). Colonel Arthur B. Fremantle, a British government emissary to the Confederate Army, was making his way back to England via New York at the time and described the scene in his book, Three Months in the Southern States:

“The reports of outrages, hangings, and murder, were now most alarming, the terror and anxiety were universal. All shops were shut; all carriages and omnibuses had ceased running. No colored man or woman was visible or safe in the streets, or even in his own dwelling. Telegraphs were cut, and railroad tracks torn up.”

Violent mobs roamed the streets for days, wrote Freemantle, attacking the police and especially affluent Republicans who were able to buy their way out of the enslaving draft law for $300. Such was the Seward/Lincoln idea of “harmony.” The fact that there was a massive desertion crisis in the Union Army (See Ella Lonn, Desertion During the Civil War), along with hundreds of thousands of draft evaders, also proves the absurdity of the claim that “harmony has prevailed” in the Northern States.

The notion that “the laws have been respected” is equally absurd, since Lincoln had illegally suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus and imprisoned tens of thousands of Northern citizens without due process on the mere suspicion of criticizing himself or the government (See Freedom Under Lincoln by Dean Sprague and Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln by James Randall). Hundreds of Northern newspapers were shut down by Republican Party thugs in a gross assault on freedom of the press. Lincoln redefined treason from the definition of it in the Constitution (Article 3, Section 3) as being the levying of war upon the states, which is exactly what he had done, to criticism of him and his regime. These are just a few of the reasons why generations of historians referred to “the Lincoln dictatorship.” It was a lawless regime that boastfully lied about the laws being “respected.”

When the South seceded it had no intention whatsoever of attacking the Northern states. Jefferson Davis did not want to run the government in Washington, D.C. any more than George Washington wanted to run the government in London. Yet the Seward/Lincoln Thanksgiving Proclamation speaks of “diversions of wealth” to “the national defense” (emphasis added). But Lincoln was waging an offensive war, the purpose of which, according to his own numerous declarations and the declarations of the U.S. Congress, was to force the Southern states back into the union so that “the duties and imposts” can be collected from them, as Abe announced in his first inaugural address.

In the Northern states freedom of speech was essentially abolished; tens of thousands of political dissenters were imprisoned; taxes of every kind were raised to astronomical levels; hundreds of thousands of soldiers had already been killed or maimed for life in the war; inflation was raging; draft riots occurred not just in New York City but throughout the North; capital investment was massively diverted from civilian to military uses, thereby crippling economic growth; and international trade had almost come to a halt. Yet the Seward/Lincoln Thanksgiving Proclamation cheerfully concluded that “the country” is “rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor.”

This was an obvious attempt to falsely equate “the country” with “the government” in the minds of the public. War always explodes the size, scope and powers of the state by crippling, diminishing, nationalizing, or destroying parts of the civil society and the private enterprise system.

Lincoln also claimed to know what was in the mind of God in his Thanksgiving Proclamation by asserting that God is “dealing with us in anger for our sins” by forcing a war on the nation. This was also the main theme of Lincoln’s second inaugural address – that the war was not in any way his fault, but just “came” as God’s punishment for all Americans, North and South, for the sin of slavery. Americans were “unavoidably engaged” in a war, he said in the Thanksgiving Proclamation.

Lincoln never attempted to explain why God would punish only Americans for the sin of slavery while ignoring the fact that some 95 percent of all the slaves that were brought to the Western Hemisphere were kidnapped and transported there by the British, Spanish, French, Dutch, and others besides Americans.

Lincoln concluded his Proclamation by urging the nationalization of Thanksgiving by celebrating “with one heart and one voice by the whole American people.” It is unlikely that any American from a Southern state (which Lincoln always insisted were at all times a part of the American union) at the time would have been so motivated.

Thanksgiving 2013

News Hawk wrote:Do you know a John L., of Moultonborough?

He's another "Confused-Conservative-Cousin", but if you need another member for "the Porcupine" group, he'd be the one to go to in Moultonborough.

I'll relay a contact later today.

 

News Hawk wrote:

Anti Federalist wrote:

News Hawk wrote:We always have the News Crows to tell us how our country should be run like Detroit.

Happy Thanksgiving there, Harm

Someday we'll have to meet up in town for a drink.

Do you know a John L., of Moultonborough?

Now, there's someone who'll drive me to drink!

Nope, not off the top of my head.