by
William Norman Grigg

Recently by William Norman Grigg: Ruby
Ridge and the Age of State Terrorism

“There’s
nothing American about what just happened,” protested
Nevada Republican delegate Wiselot Rouzard after the convention
refused to seat the delegation from Maine. “This is the death
of the Republican Party.”

What Wiselot
and fellow Ron Paul delegates had experienced was a memorable display
of the Republican Party’s fetid essence. The tactics employed by
the GOP establishment to isolate, intimidate, and ultimately to
expel Ron Paul delegates were the natural product of the party’s
totalitarian genetics. By using criminal means to impose a monolithic,
top-down process in which an entrenched oligarchy can re-write the
rules to suit its whims, the Republican Party was simply living
down to its odious pedigree.

From its inception,
the Republican Party has been devoted to a doctrine properly called
national socialism – the fusion of politically favored corporate
interests with national bank and an all-powerful, militaristic central
government. This is why Dr. Paul’s noble attempt to cultivate a
liberty movement within the GOP was ultimately as futile as seeking
to create life in a test tube.

As Dr. Thomas
DiLorenzo documents in his slender but potent volume Lincoln
Unmasked, a century and a half before the lamentable advent
of Barack Obama “The Party of Lincoln set out to fundamentally
transform the American government from a decentralized confederacy
of sovereign states to a consolidated, monolithic empire.”
The mission of the GOP, in a single phrase, was to supplant the
republic with a reich.

The party’s
objectives were described with admirable clarity by Ohio Senator
John Sherman – brother to the infamous mass murderer Gen. William
T. Sherman, who after putting Atlanta to the torch pursued
an exterminationist “final solution” to the problem of
the Plains Indians on behalf of the corporatist railroad combine.
The Republican Party, Sherman proclaimed, sought “to nationalize
as much as possible, even the currency, so as to make men love their
country before their states. All private interests of individuals,
all local interests, all banking interests, the interests of individuals
– everything – should be subordinate now to the interest of the
Government.”

Mussolini would
later digest that formula into a single pithy prescription: Everything
within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the
State.

Dr. Paul and
the movement he inspired have agitated for an end to everything
the Republican Party cherishes – central banking, fiat money, centralization
of power in the executive, militarism, crony capitalism, government
regimentation of private life in the name of “morality.”
Thus it’s hardly a surprise that the RNC and its epigones treated
the Ron Paul delegates with the same cultish hostility displayed
by Landru’s
followers toward
those who were “not of the Body.”

Witness the
fact that objections by Paul delegates on the convention floor were
shouted down by mouth-breathing party cadres chanting “USA!
USA! USA!” (A more appropriate refrain, given the Party’s emphasis
on unity uber alles, would have been: “Ein volk, ein
reich, ein fuhrer!”) Also of note were the Soviet-style methods
used to suppress even the audible mention of Ron Paul’s name during
the convention’s roll call.

“It’s
a totalitarian process,” lamented
Yelena Vorobyov, a disillusioned 30-year-old Ron Paul delegate from
Minnesota, referring to revised party rules – enacted by a patently
fraudulent voice vote after key potential dissidents had been detained
or effectively abducted – that stripped all power from state
parties. What the RNC accomplished in Tampa is best captured in
another German expression – Gleichschaltung, the “coordination”
of all activities under the control of the party’s central committee.

What happened
in Tampa was a relatively genteel version of the undisguised Brownshirt-style
thuggery that had been employed by Party operatives during the primaries.
Witness what took place during Louisiana’s state GOP convention
on June 2, where Henry Herford – the convention’s duly elected chairman
– was feloniously
assaulted by a thugscrum of four Shreveport Police Officers,
who acted on the orders of the Quisling faction within the state
Party.

Herford was
hospitalized for a dislocated prosthetic hip. In keeping with standard
procedure, the
uniformed assailants filed spurious charges against the victim.

“They
arrested me for … resisting arrest, and they never said I was under
arrest,” Hereford commented after being released from the hospital.
“And [they said] I didn’t leave when they told me to leave
– but I never was told to leave.”

Herford, who
underwent a CAT scan on his hip and received a painkiller injection,
didn’t sign his arrest papers.

“I can’t
sign anything while I’m on a narcotic, and I told the police that,”
he explained.

Alex Helwig,
a Ron Paul delegate and Chairman of the Rules Committee, made a
formal motion to remove the chair. In a fashion reminiscent of a
third world dictatorship, Helwig
was seized by Shreveport Police and removed from the room. During
his brief detention, Helwig suffered several broken fingers – a
punishment favored by Mussolini’s Blackshirts – and when he returned
to the event he walked with the aid of a cane.

During the
convention, Doug
Wead recounted, “Louisiana GOP officials ignored the vast
majority of duly elected delegates and attempted
to use illegally adopted rules to deny Ron Paul supporters an opportunity
to attend the Republican National Convention in Tampa.”

What happened
in Louisiana was a detailed foreshadowing of what would later take
place at the national convention. Once again, this is to be expected
of those who preside over the GOP, which is America’s original socialist
party.

In their valuable
book Red
Republicans and Lincoln’s Marxists: Marxism in the Civil War,
Walter D. Kennedy and Al Benson, Jr. examine the role played
by the “48ers” – veterans of the 18 interconnected revolutions
that convulsed Europe in 1848-1849 – in creating the Republican
Party, bringing Abraham Lincoln to power, and conducting the war
against the South.

Lincoln, who
would later slaughter hundreds of thousands of Americans in order
to create a unitary national government, offered unqualified support
to the proto-Marxist revolution of 1848. “Any people anywhere,
being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and
shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits
them better,” he insisted in a January 12, 1848 speech. “Nor is
this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing
government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people,
that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the
territory as they inhabit.”

The “48ers,”
note Kennedy and Benson, sought to overthrow the existing political
order and then consolidate power over larger territories. They weren’t
secessionists who sought merely to withdraw from an unsuitable political
arrangement, as was the case with the American South.

The revolutions
of 1848 understandably appealed to the idealistic impulses of people
weary of absolutism. But, as Kennedy and Benson observe, this proved
to be a familiar bait-and-switch, with those “freed from local
decentralized control” were made subject to “centralized
authoritarian control” in the name of Democracy.

The
revolutionaries applauded by Lincoln lusted to reconstruct society
through violence. In Germany, the stated objective of the revolution
was to fuse a multitude of independent principalities into “a united
indivisible republic.” Again, this foreshadowed the work of Abraham
Lincoln and the party that elevated him to power.

When the revolt
of 1848-49 was crushed, the “48er” diaspora brought many of the
most ambitious and radical of the revolutionaries to the United
States, where many of them were instrumental in creating the Republican
Party. Several of them – such as Joseph Wedemeyer, Charles
A. Dana, Franz Sigel, August Willich, and Carl Schurz – played prominent
roles in the war to conquer the independent South. Dana,
a personal friend of Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, was assistant
secretary of war under Lincoln.

The slogan-spewing
herd poisoners who compose the GOP’s media auxiliary routinely depict
Barack Obama as the embodiment of an ideology alien to America’s
constitutional origins. If such people were burdened with a particle
of intellectual honesty, they would recognize that to the extent
this depiction of Obama is reliable, he is Lincoln’s true heir.

August
31, 2012

William
Norman Grigg [send him mail]
publishes the Pro
Libertate blog and hosts the Pro
Libertate radio program.

Copyright
© 2012 William Norman Grigg

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