August 5, 2018
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
Do NOT Go See Dinesh
D’Souza’s Latest Film, “Death of A Nation”
Friends,
In
case you haven’t heard, there is a new “conservative” film out; it is titled
“Death of a Nation: Can We Save America a Second Time?”
It’s
director and screenwriter is Dinesh D’Souza, the somewhat pompous,
word-measuring figure who occasionally shows up on Fox to talk in pious tones
about “conservatism.” He is the movie producer who, by his own admission, has
done as much as anyone to shape (in an almost ahistorical manner) perceptions
about American history and the Founding Principles that have supposedly guided
this country. And, in his latest
cinematic adventure he stunningly compares the “triumph of America and its
values” under that “great president and martyr” Abraham Lincoln to the crisis
facing President Donald Trump. Like Lincoln, Trump is saving America “for a
second time.”
Here
is the film’s official blurb from D’Souza’s web site:
Not since 1860 have
the Democrats so fanatically refused to accept the result of a free election.
That year, their target was Lincoln. They smeared him. They went to war to
defeat him. In the end, they assassinated him. Now the target of the Democrats
is President Trump and his supporters. The Left calls them racists, white
supremacists and fascists. These charges are used to justify driving Trump from
office and discrediting the right “by any means necessary.” But which is the
party of the slave plantation? Which is the party that invented white
supremacy? Which is the party that praised fascist dictators and shaped their
genocidal policies and was in turn praised by them? Moreover, which is the
party of racism today? Is fascism now institutionally embodied on the right or
on the left? [https://www.dineshdsouza.com/films/death-of-a-nation/]
Thus,
the president who refused all compromise (and torpedoed negotiations) with Southerners and Confederates (who were, as
D-Souza assures us, no better than “racists” and “fascists”), the president
responsible for the most egregious violations of habeas corpus and
constitutional liberties in American history, the president who in effect
unleashed a vicious conflict that took the lives of at least 620,000 Americans
and maimed and handicapped for life hundreds of thousands more, the president who
by military force radically altered the original American Constitution and set
the stage for the growth of powerful and unchecked government, and the
emergence of the managerial Deep State…that president is D’Souza’s
model…and his analogy for Donald Trump.
And
Lincoln, that noble opponent of “racism”? D’Souza omits Lincoln’s contradictory
statements on American blacks and his repeated desire that blacks be sent back
to Africa. And he conveniently fails to cite Lincoln’s declaration to New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley,
August 22, 1862, scarcely three months prior to the formal issuance of the
Emancipation Proclamation:
If
I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could
save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it, and if I could save it by
freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about
Slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save this
Union, and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to
save the Union.
The
one very significant fact that becomes clear in his latest cinematic screed is
that D’Souza is ignorant of American history, and that he is an ideological and
historical fabricator who seeks, in the name of defending his adopted nation,
to bend and mishandle its history to fit a preconceived narrative which
satisfies his Neoconservative task masters. For him history becomes a cudgel, a
weaponized arm to further the Neoconservative agenda of “equality” and “liberal
democracy,” both against the “farther Left,” but also, very significantly,
against the traditional Right and traditional conservatism…and, as well, against
Southern conservatives who would dare defend their heritage and traditions.
His
narrative is essentially a leftist one, and like other Neoconservatives, he
partakes of the basic philosophical views of the post-Communist Left,
emphasizing politicized constructs of race and gender, and equality and
democracy, projecting them back to incorporate all of American history. Thus,
so it goes, echoing Marxist historians like Eric Foner: “the South had slavery,
therefore it was a racist society. Racism had to be opposed at all costs and by
all means. And that is what Lincoln did.”
The
equation says too much, and leaves out too much. Four slave states did not
leave the union, and Lincoln’s reasons for attacking the Southern states were far
more economic and power-driven than not, with his later appeals to abolitionism
seen by most observers then, as well
as by many historians since, as
desperate propaganda appeals to war-weary Northerners, to gin up the sagging
war effort.
As noted
economist Frank Taussig has detailed in his classic study, Tariff
History of the United States (1967 edition), tariffs were the
chief revenue source for the Federal government. The Morrill Tariff more than doubled American
tariffs and greatly expanded the list of taxable items. Abraham Lincoln had
campaigned vigorously on a platform of strong support for the Morrill Tariff. While the
South would be paying nearly 80 % of the tariff, most of the revenues would be
spent in the North. With the Southern states seceding, such a loss of revenue
would be devastating to the Federal treasury and could not be allowed to stand.
There is another major critique that must be made: despite D’Souza’s claims, it was the Republican Party in 1860 that was, by every measure, the radical party, the party intent on destroying the original Constitution and transforming the union, not the more conservative (at that time) Democrats. D’Souza projects a political genealogy that simply will not stand up to serious historical investigation. The outbreak of war in 1861 did not come about due to Democrats who “went to war to defeat [Lincoln].” As historian William Marvel, in his Mr. Lincoln Goes to War (2006), relates, the conflict must be laid squarely at the door of the Lincoln administration: “It was Lincoln, however, who finally eschewed diplomacy and sparked a confrontation. He backed himself into a corner from which he could escape only by mobilizing a national army, and thereby fanning the flames of Fort Sumter into full-scale conflagration.” (p. xvii) Thus, it was the intransigence of the Lincoln administration that literally provoked war.
There is another major critique that must be made: despite D’Souza’s claims, it was the Republican Party in 1860 that was, by every measure, the radical party, the party intent on destroying the original Constitution and transforming the union, not the more conservative (at that time) Democrats. D’Souza projects a political genealogy that simply will not stand up to serious historical investigation. The outbreak of war in 1861 did not come about due to Democrats who “went to war to defeat [Lincoln].” As historian William Marvel, in his Mr. Lincoln Goes to War (2006), relates, the conflict must be laid squarely at the door of the Lincoln administration: “It was Lincoln, however, who finally eschewed diplomacy and sparked a confrontation. He backed himself into a corner from which he could escape only by mobilizing a national army, and thereby fanning the flames of Fort Sumter into full-scale conflagration.” (p. xvii) Thus, it was the intransigence of the Lincoln administration that literally provoked war.
Even D’Souza’s
supposedly hated Marxists recognized that Lincoln and his actions furthered
their program and ideals. In 1864 Karl Marx sent Lincoln a famous “Address” from his “workingman’s group,”
in which he declared that “victory for the North would be a turning point for
nineteenth-century politics, an affirmation of free labor, and a defeat for the
most reactionary capitalists who depended on slavery and racial oppression,”
that is, one more critical step in the projected Marxist historical dialectic.
The American ambassador in London, Charles Francis Adams, responded and “thanked
them for their support and expressed his conviction that the defeat of the
rebellion would indeed be a victory for the cause of humanity everywhere.” [https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/08/lincoln-and-marx ]
Like
his supposed enemies over on the farther Left, Dinesh D’Souza employs the same faulty
historical template, and, even if his arguments appear, at times, attractive or
useful to conservatives, the end result is certain: you do not triumph
historically or argumentatively using the same essential propositions, albeit
less outrageous, as your opponent. Once you accept his grounds for debate, the
battle—the war—is over.
No: stay away
from this cinematic fraud…like tasty ice cream infected with poisonous
venom, it might taste good at first, but the poison is sure to work its effect.
I agree. D'Souza's brand of American "history" is something we can all do without.
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