{"id":23764,"date":"2019-07-27T22:49:52","date_gmt":"2019-07-28T06:49:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.richgibson.com\/blog\/?p=23764"},"modified":"2019-07-28T00:39:54","modified_gmt":"2019-07-28T08:39:54","slug":"rouge-forum-dispatch-draft-32","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.richgibson.com\/blog\/rouge-forum-dispatch-draft-32\/","title":{"rendered":"Rouge Forum Dispatch: Class Conscious News!"},"content":{"rendered":"

We Say Fight Back!<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Book Review: The Right Side<\/h1>\n

The revolutionary class politics of the Civil War.<\/h2>\n

O<\/span>n May 30, 1878, the Abraham Lincoln Post No. 13 of the veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic invited Frederick Douglass to speak at its annual Memorial Day celebration in New York. Douglass took the occasion to reflect on the previous decade\u2019s civil war, particularly in light of the recent attempts by leading secessionists to whitewash the cause for which they\u2019d fought by erasing slavery from their memoirs and history books. Southern writers were already asserting that they had fought nobly and heroically, if in vain, for the \u201clost cause\u201d of states\u2019 rights and limited government. But Douglass was having none of it. The bloody struggle between the North and the South, he insisted, was \u201ca war between the old and new, slavery and freedom, barbarism and civilization.\u201d The sentimental urge to honor the courage of the men who fought on both sides was all well and good, he said, but remember:<\/p>\n

There was a right side and a wrong side in the late war, which no sentiment ought cause us to forget, and while today we should have malice toward none and charity for all, it is no part of our duty to confound right with wrong, or loyalty with treason.<\/em><\/p>\n

Elizabeth R. Varon quotes Douglass\u2019s speech in the introduction to her 2008 book Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War<\/em>, and she quotes it again in the conclusion to her latest one, Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War<\/em>. By bookending her two-volume history of the war with the same quotation, Varon makes her point effectively but without fanfare: This was a momentous struggle over slavery, and in that struggle the South was on the wrong side. www.thenation.com\/article\/civil-war-elizabeth-varon-book-review\/<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

You know who was into Karl Marx? No, not AOC. Abraham Lincoln.<\/h2>\n

It was December 1861, a Tuesday at noon, when President Abraham Lincoln sent his first\u00a0annual message<\/a>\u00a0\u2060 \u2014 what later became the State of the Union \u2060\u2014 to the House and Senate.<\/p>\n

By the next day, all 7,000 words of the manuscript were published in newspapers across the country, including the Confederate South. This was Lincoln\u2019s first chance to speak to the nation at length since his inaugural address.<\/p>\n

He railed against the \u201cdisloyal citizens\u201d rebelling against the Union, touted the strength of the Army and Navy, and updated Congress on the budget.<\/p>\n

For his eloquent closer, he chose not a soliloquy on unity or freedom but an 800-word meditation on what the\u00a0Chicago Tribune<\/a>\u00a0subtitled \u201cCapital Versus Labor:\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLabor is prior to and independent of capital,\u201d the country\u2019s 16th president said. \u201cCapital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.\u201d<\/p>\n

If you think that sounds like something Karl Marx would write, well, that might be because Lincoln was regularly reading Karl Marx.\u00a0\u00a0 www.washingtonpost.com\/history\/2019\/07\/27\/you-know-who-was-into-karl-marx-no-not-aoc-abraham-lincoln\/?utm_term=.8b182fd7a7d8<\/a><\/p>\n