34. The Civil War

The American Civil War is a topic deserving of far more than I could ever produce in one chapter. The American Civil War in scholarship is fascinating because it was a war in which both sides wrote and published their respective histories, both sides were respected and reintegrated, and the instigators that normally conspire to edit history were very clearly alien to America and anything the Americans knew; and further, this record of scholarship survives intact up to the present day, is widely read and accounted for, and nearly every American can discern without too much difficulty that the alternate history imposed on us by Fabianism or idiotic German ideologues is a bunch of malarkey. I am certain this could be said of the Russian Civil War after 1917, and the many volumes of purges and counter-purges during the Chinese Civil War and Warlord Era, where the native people could tell you what happened on all sides but imperial history requires a "just so story" written not by the victors but by sniveling cowards that insist everyone else must be sniveling cowards. These cowards who have rewritten history are not found on the Union or Confederate sides, though you can find American historians and participants in the events who were more than happy to encourage this sniveling cowardice. They are rewritten by the British, who desired two things. One was to absolve themselves of the obvious acts of the British government to stoke the war. The second was to introduce the program of their favored clique, the eugenic creed, from the legacy of slavery and the slave power. The eugenists are also mysteriously removed from any consequences of war, always just out of range, and attacking them is made inadmissible even though their guilt in instigating and stoking the war in all ways is obvious to us. I do not seek to add to the scholarship of good or at least decent quality that exists on the American Civil War, or dispute those who are my betters. The "fag histories" are always written with that telltale stink of eugenist screeching and high-and-mighty posturing, intended to insult the reader and the whole society they are written for, and I believe you good readers have a discerning eye and are likely as disgusted as I am by the rank dishonesty that is promoted in the name of "justice". I may suggest to the reader competing stories of the central conflict, and let them decide for themselves if the worthwhile historical record, including accounts from the men who led the war, reconcile with these stories.

DEMOCRACY AND LEGITIMACY

Prior to the war's outbreak, the infamous Dred Scott decision stated starkly why the war would become a political matter. In the quasi-Legalist retelling of history, this is reduced to a question of "states' rights"—the right of the northern states to pass anti-slavery laws, the right of the slave states to secure their claims to human property, and what decision would hold in the Supreme Court, which clearly ruled in favor of the latter in that decision and in all of its previous decisions. The argument of the Northern states was simple; it was the will of the people of those states, and those states were sovereign. In principle, the same should apply to the nation. In 1860, the North had the clear democratic mandate to pass whatever laws it liked, and made clear its intention to do exactly that. What laws would have been passed has been argued over since the Civil War made that question moot; but there was no possibility of reconciliation over the slavery issue. Either slavery was to be abolished, or the slave power was to dominate and override what the people of the North wanted. It is this above all that the later eugenists had to edit out of history, make inadmissible, and replace with a narrative that all Americans were supposed to be racists who believed in the natural inferiority of the Negro and the necessity of slavery at the least. The democratic power had no "legal right" to end slavery. They didn't consult the textbook for "permission" to end slavery or pass anti-slavery statutes. No law in the Constitution of the time guaranteed any "freedom" for anyone. Once someone was made a slave, they were a slave with no legal rights whatsoever, and in principle this could be done to anyone. Those who still held freedom saw the institution of slavery as a direct threat to that freedom, and the threat of the slave power was not an indirect or abstract one. Slavery could only survive if it expanded and acquired both new territory and new slaves, and it did not tolerate the freeborn competing with slave labor. Slavery was not going to grant to the freeborn boons of wealth and property. The poor whites in the South knew that by heart, so long as they had lived. For the Northern worker and the growing class of professionals, slavery meant the end of them, either by starving them out or, should it continue, making them slaves outright and abandoning the racial pretenses of the past. There was no law against erecting anti-slavery laws or forbidding slavery in the free states, and so the people of those states did exactly that for perfectly understandable reasons. This had to be made inadmissible in the revised history, which is why this insane commitment to legalism is now the dominant narrative of the "free, liberal democratic" society of the 21st century. It is a deliberate exercise in ridiculing not only the post-war Constitutional laws prohibiting chattel slavery and the creation of a racial underclass, but in ridiculing the reasons why the Northerners believed they could say no to slavery in the first place; that they had both a democratic mandate and many who would do more than show token support for abolition of the slave power.

The argument of the South was explicitly anti-democratic in the sense that the interests of the majority of Americans must be suppressed. They could not be allowed political rights equal to those held by the estates. The South's counterclaim was that slavery was the economic engine that fed their country, and the only proper basis for economic life. Some class was consigned to the status of "mud-sill workers", and to speak of the world being anything else was absurd and unnatural. You may say such thinking is profoundly anti-democratic on all levels, until you have paid enough attention to my book. What is the overriding drive of the associations of labor? Their dominant drive is to not be in the lowest class, and this is what the "mud-sill worker" is. Enough people in America, must like their kind in the rest of the world, believed this was a perfectly valid description of society, and asked why they must die for the sake of niggers. If the war were confined to a narrative about the Negro, then this theory of history and democratic society would have to hold, with the obvious conclusion that the black race were supposed to be there as a result of natural inferiority. The natural inferiors of course could include the weakest of the white race, who deserve to suffer. If "free market principles" were a driving force for the war, those principles were seen with the Southrons. Everything about the slave system comported well with capitalism and free trade, and it was cheap cotton and crops of any sort that the slave power and their British allies wanted to keep. The specific ideological justifications, as we have seen in these books I write, only come long after an elaborate chain of events that began with the philosophical state and the conceit of a caste system "baked into nature". The lowest class, whatever form it takes, was always assigned the task of suffering in a democratic society. No one in America seriously thought any other way. They may disagree about who is selected to die, or how many must die. They may have no particular stake in any theory of such, but they always implicitly understand that it is the fate of the lowest class to suffer and die for the sake of this—for faggotry. If the war were strictly about the democratic imperative as an essence, it was a great no-win scenario. Democracy couldn't really oppose the slave power as "pure democracy". Yet, that was the will of the majority of the people, who received no benefit personally from the slave system and certainly felt no great ideological justification to believe slavery was actually good. The simple reason for this is that people aren't as stupid as the theories of human society require them to be, and can follow through the logic of the slave system as it existed, and the logic of any slave system that would succeed it. The opposition to slavery was not about a specific program of chattel slavery or a specific law. It wasn't about "human rights" or even any notion of legal or political rights as they were understood at the time. There was among those who remained free a dread of what would happen if exploitation is all America and humanity could be. Whether they believed the matter was worth going to war over is another question, but so too is the cause of the war far more than slavery's existence. If the war's causes were distilled to slavery, some slave system surely succeeded the prior one, and no one was arguing for genuine freedom, which would mean the free people of this country and the newly freed slaves receive land and entitlement at the least. What was at stake wasn't just about the peoples' status as laborers or the contract they would live under, as if it were a purely managerial choice. Victory for the slave power meant victory of the stated imperative that the lowest class must be treated in the most vicious manner possible, and the free workers must never be too secure to believe they would never become targets of the same. It meant that any democratic society that involves the worker having anything at all is a null proposal. And so, no one was under any serious belief that the slave power didn't loom over the entire war effort and all of its worthwhile causes. Once established, the cause of the war, like the cause of any genuine war, becomes far more than a procedural matter or an ideological adjustment that can be encoded by the policymakers.

The republican society that arose put democracy "on trial" and insisted that it become a legal question, rather than something inherent to the construction of the American entity. Democracy as the framers understood it, whether they were in favor of democratization or against it, was not a legalistic question of whether it was allowed. The democratic society was the basis for any future armies, and the basis for any economic life starting from the free farmer-citizen and the free man who heads his family. Democracy, such as it existed, said something about what the country was at its base rather than something that was allowed or a technocratic policy. Whether the argument was legalism for the benefit of hierarchy and the expansive estates, or legalism to enshrine a new technocratic elite that had become apparent in the country during the 19th century, it was always an argument against this concept of democracy, wherever it may lead. The vehicle to realize that was in the most unwelcome condition of labor in the country, and the most unwelcome beast called "capitalism" that plagued it. If the war could be considered primarily an economic problem, so that the economic theories of the era were proven and the controversy taught, it would eliminate the democratic unit and establish the purely economic unit as the proper basis for the country. This is what corporate government required. You can see in the North the interests of corporate government and technocracy that were nascent and desired to rise, and they found the interests of the landholding estates hostile. The Northern industrialists did not care one way or the other about slavery, and their theories of human society recapitulated the "mud-sill" theory faithfully and proudly. Those who didn't recapitulate the theory were the base of Northern voters, who understood that such a theory would rapidly expropriate them, but soon enough, they wouldn't matter. If America were the "land of opportunity", the mud-sill theory follows from that proposition, because what could be more opportunistic than the most ruthless exploitation? There is a reason the mud-sill theory is called the Marxism of the ruling class. In both Marxism and the mud-sill theory, an immiserated mass is reduced to its lowest possible conditions, and all other conditions of the laboring class are stripped from them. In other words, the essences of the classes and the social orders are distilled. They could only have been distilled with the five-caste schema diagnosed beforehand and seen as a goal worthy of perpetuation for its own sake. The question then is what the commoners of the North wanted out of any of this. Did they want industrialization and modernity to work for some productive and prosocial end, or was the future to be consigned to ruthless capitalism? The Southerners did not consider any such option seriously. The forces opposed to slavery's expansion believed that what they did was right and good, and any precedent upholding slavery had to seriously be reconsidered if their existence was for anything but ruthless exploitation. In the rewritten history, it was necessary to portray abolition of the slave system as unnatural or some willfull imposition on history, or the abolition of slavery had to be reduced to a material clockwork that was historically inevitable. Nowhere could it have been the rational choice of men who saw what would happen if slavery continued, as if they had any "right" to say no to historical progress.

The legalistic excuses to attack democracy by lawfare were not a flimsy pretext or something half-believed. They existed because they could be expressed for the first time as a corporate government of new type. The corporate government of the past had to settle for favored treatment and work through republican organs that were modeled on what the Greeks and Romans understood about republics. Far from the liberal republics being "ideologically capitalist", the republics immediately faced the age old question "What is Property?" Famously the verbiage upholding a right to property in the Declaration of Independence was punted to future generations, replaced by Jefferson with "the pursuit of happiness", whatever that jumble of words was supposed to mean. Not only was the obvious property of human slaves the question, as if slavery were just another artifact that could be turned on or off at will; nor was it about the whole institution of slavery as the sole impediment to property. Enshrining property as the overriding duty of the state precluded the very republic and its democratic basis that some of these men believed to be the purpose. The men of the Continental Congress were all men of property and certainly believed that rich men should rule, but they could see the obvious problems with "propertarianism" as a guiding moral principle of the state. For states of the past, property was not a "right" in any sense, but an expectation that the state had to regard. If someone wanted to squeal "me wantee" about a deed they owned, states can and do freely ignore that when the good of the state requires ruling against property. An unlimited right to property was a right to monarchy and monopoly, stating preemptively that monopoly cannot be challenged morally or legally by anything a republic may do, or that the members of such a society may think is prudent. There was no reason to believe that "capitalism" was now an eternal fixture of human society in the liberal order. Captialism as "capitalism" had only been around for roughly 80 years at the onset of the Civil War, and during that time, capitalism had already transitioned not once but twice to radically different formations both globally and in the nations where capitalism prevailed. The very existence of the slave power and its history was but one reminder that "history does not work that way". I do not believe, if I give due credit to Adam Smith, that he suggested free trade or capitalism were standing "systems" of that type, or even "systems" at all. Someone could take the assessment in Wealth of Nations and conclude a commonwealth operating on a generally agreed upon plan was wholly acceptable and did not trample on the liberty of commercial interests, ordinary people, or the state's traditional interests. In other words, the competition of the free market was always a choice. If it weren't a choice, no one could seriously propose regulations or best practices like those a Chamber of Commerce would deem suitable for orderly society. The interests for and against slavery saw their choices not as "mindless market actors" but as men who saw the very real effects of slavery and their investment for or disdain for the practice. As the United States matured and settled into its pattern of industrialization and expansion, the slave system changed with the times along with everyone else. Nowhere were the slavers "ideological" in the Hegelian sense, nor were such excuses required. That German perversion had no place in the United States or the understanding of those who lived here, whoever they were. The business interests that built railroads and explored coal and oil not only changed with the times but with the advances of science, and they did not exist in embryonic form because liberalism "created" science or men of industry. So too did the financial mechanisms change, as the expansion of credit and lending during the 19th century occurred all over the world and was a reason why those railroads and infrastructure projects could be funded. Without a liberal idea, the industrialization would have still posed the question to those who governed society of how, or if, to build such things. There was no romantic notion that industry must be rejected for purely aristocratic conceits, as would become the stupid koan of the European conservatives. There was not, really, any necessary controversy between rising coal and oil interests and the slave power. Slaves could be deployed regardless of industrial technology's advance, and this was one of the arguments of the slavers for why slavery was defensible and superior to free labor and free farmers.^[1] Far from a superior "free labor" arrangement taking over due to technological progress, technological progress brought the slavery question to the forefront. If labor could be deskilled and assigned to slaves, what place would free men have in labor? The only defense of free men would, to the imperious mind, be the mud-sill theory; that certain jobs, even if the true intellectual requirement were middling, had to be assigned status above that of the mud-sill worker. Free labor could only acquiesce to this, unless something were terribly wrong with the calculus regarding human labor and its position in society. So long as it remained a purely economic problem, free labor wasn't free and would in short order reproduce the slave system under the poisonous contract.

THE CONSTITUTION OF A NATION

The United States was a newfangled project; a type of polity that had never existed in human history, and that was, aside from those who emulated its course in the Americas, untested and unproven. The war that began was in one way a trial to judge the very existence of such a polity. I have given only a very poor description of why the Americans were an unprecedented project. Because such a project was untested and invited peril, the existence of such an entity required a concept of Union that was unlike that of the national republics that would rise in Europe. The existence of a "national consciousness" of the sort that became prominent in France during and after its Revolution had little going for it. There was the union of interested parties who saw America as a great way to make money, exploit the land, or fulfill an imperial mission in line with the strange religious belief peculiar to this country. This concept was not cleanly copied to the other American countries, especially since most of those countries were ruled by Latin-speaking Catholics and the conditions of their settlement did not share the same concept of race that the English developed; and so, when the wars for independence in South America happened, there was no drive for Manifest Destiny, for the Spaniards had already commanded the continent save for its most dangerous interior regions, which were unsuitable for expansion until the 20th century and not a goal of interest for the rulers of those lands. Rather than forming one large country, the centers of colonial administration became the capitals of countries, which were ruled primarily for the interests of whomever ruled them for a time and then got out of the game. Few could impose a greater vision for Latin America or chart an independent course, and as history went on, the doctrine of the United States was to keep the countries of Latin America pliant and open for the interests of capital, and never allow them to become a rival or any sort of competitor. By the 20th century, the fate of South America was tied inextricably to what Washington and the Yankee wanted, such that when the polities of the 20th century were established and their bureaucracies grown, any decision in North America would be dutifully carried out by the compradors, and no serious expectation of a "different system" beyond its obvious cultural distinction and antipathy for American dominance arose in South America. The people who ruled the South are, in the final analysis, far too similar to those who rule the North in their interests and theories of what society should be, and are now tied by an immense preponderance of force and no interest in allowing powers outside the Americas any stake in the New World. If we were to look at the true governing apparatus of the Americas, it would appear as if the continents were ruled by a single interested party and could only be bound to each other. They could not be split up or set against each other arbitrarily to create a sustained war, unless that war were a Plan War waged in the most limited manner possible. The idea that any country in the Americas is a "cultural entity", or that the faggotry of the British monarchy ruling nominally large parts o the continent is a force that can set up such a Plan War, is not in the interest of any local elite.

The Americans faced a question of what their country would be other than mercantile advantage or conquest and slavery. So far, the answer had been not too much of significance. There was no great culture or singular idea, and the Union of states was still weak for much other than the army's purposes. Every idea was pitched as a way to make more money or some vague religious cause that, due to the lack of any state religion, could never be agreed upon, and which usually returned to Christians wanting to hold their piece of land so they can individually make more money. So far as most of the people cared on the surface, it would have made little difference if the United States were a British protectorate. Its culture and intellectual environment were still dominated by the expectations of the mother country, because Britain and Europe was where the real bank was. Its immediate aims were to seize more land on the continent and populate it with white people, who were always in short supply compared to the demand yet continued to fail because the underbelly of this country despises those who do not grift and no expectation that it should be any other way meant anything to the men who ruled this beast. So far as the poor cared, what happened anywhere in the world was of no consequence. Land was still cheap and rent not yet so exorbitant, and the wages of labor were relatively high compared to the rest of the world, for free workers who were remarkably lazy even if they upheld a habit of punctuality. If the country was about making money, there seemed to be little enthusiasm for any purpose money would serve, and the country was not particularly rich or interesting.

Into this vacuum an ideological poison could be planted. It was not possible to invent an "ideology" as such in America, and that would remain the case into the 20th century when such an ideology was violently impressed on everyone and most Americans shrugged and asked what the devil that faggotry was. Ideology clamors for war wherever such a poison exists. It does not matter what the war is for, and so the intellectual elites of the North believed that war was somehow necessary just as much as the Southern establishment provoked war to defend their institutions. It ceased to be about why or for any particular cause before the excuses began. There was in the two decades preceding the war every opportunity to address the matter of slavery and the interests of most of the people of America to see it end. Every argument against slavery did not matter because the drive for war had little to do with the viability of slavery or faith in it. Instead, the drive of ideology latched onto slavery, for slavery was never morally defensible as a practice for its own sake. Only ideology, that Germanic poison, could make such a moronic claim. So too was there a faction of abolitionists whose answer to the "Negro Question" was extermination of the black race, and they did not want to hear of anything else, despite this position being obviously disgusting and uninteresting to most of the white population, who did not see their existence as one devoted to such a race war. The black slave was made "contentious" as an early example of "teaching the controversy" so that a war may be instigated for any reason, even though the black slave had done nothing, and there was since colonial days a free black population in the North who were not in any way controversial or weird, whatever the common racist beliefs were in American society. There was not a belief that freedom was proprietary, because everyone knew what that meant for any future of the country. It would have immediately made the claims of the new political elite in America hollow and pointless, for all of them were new men who had no right to rule anything. There had to be a way to make freedom wholly proprietary and raise the asking price, so that such a society may be abolished. Ideology was the means by which this could be insinuated, and the racial question was "supposed" to naturalize this ideology, even though most of the free population didn't care about who deserved freedom and who did not. Their conflict with the native tribes was between nations rather than a race-theory, and that was also the cause for the native tribes who understood themselves as nations rather than a race and saw each tribe as interested in themselves rather than any grand racial project of that sort. The same race-theories could easily be used to strip large populations of "white" status within America, and this was seized early and often by those who have always been amenable to ideology and the poison ideology entails.

When ideological causes for the war are brought up, the reader should remember that these ideological positions were made on demand, without any serious regard for the history of the country up to that point, or any necessary material basis whatsoever. No ideology could be said to operate in the Constitutional system or any of the state governments. The various churches and religious interests, who would be the center for any "American ideology" valued the independence of their church, separation of church and state (since that allowed their own congregation to be protected from other congregations or overbearing state influence), and separation of the social functions of the community from political functions that were in the Americas mostly concerned with commerce. It was not state business to manage family life or educate beyond a bare minimum, and it was not church business to create a political rationale for the people. The church could persuade morally and could be domineering over private life as was the habit of Christianity generally, but none of this was "political" in a way that involved the state or the nation outside a congregation. None of this necessitated any political hierarchy or an assumed natural hierarchy. The hierarchy that was relevant to the Christian was their congregation and church against all other hierarchies and any institutional influence that violated the property of their church. This was made doubly apparent by Protestantism being dominant in Americas and all forms of Catholic popery being associated with something alien to anything the Christian wanted, and so even within Christian communities there was a distrust of extensive religious hierarchies, and antipathy towards replacing them with natural hierarchies or political hierarchies.

Ideology was calculated to specifically attack this tendency that was common to Americans, whatever their attitudes towards social order were. By no means were Americans uniform anarchists or anti-authoritarians. The traditional ruling interest of the United States at the time, which found its greatest representation among the Southern slave holders and their allies, saw their hierarchical position over the common stock as desirable and a condition they would wish to preserve. At no point was their claim for this hierarchy an ideological one or one that they sought to justify or naturalize. If that were the case, then as I made clear, not one man in America had any claim to rule, because their entire existence was unnatural and illegitimate by the expectations of such a thing as ideology. Too many Americans were quite aware that their rulers were just some rich white guys who asserted that they were going to be something, and then the attitude of that new aristocracy was not uniform nor aligned with any ideological project that would have reduced most of the new aristocracy to a clearly servile status among their peers. Ideology stunk to high heaven whether someone was high and low, and the justification of American ruling class brutality was never passionately believed. The rulers of the United States were cruel and malevolent and made little pretense that they should be anything else. The regular humiliation of the common people, the cruel and excessive treatment of slaves, were all regular habits that were glorified by the ruling interest of America for their own sake. Every disgusting Mason knew what their filthy fellowship entailed and by this time no American was convinced there was any "good guy" in the entire sorry spectacle. The men who ruled showed their disdain for social inferiors, regardless of their pretenses or their various schemes for the country. Only among the slaveholders was the appeal of hierarchy as an idea truly necessary, since democracy in the genuine sense would abolish the slave power thoroughly and remorselessly. For everyone else, the regular cruelty of the American spirit, such as it was, was simply there because it could be asserted and nothing in the country or the wider world said it would be any other way. Rather than believing something that cannot be reformed, from which no good was ever possible, can be transmuted into the good, the American common stock and the black American slave viewed their rulers and the entire situation with appropriate and utter contempt, for it was worthy of contempt. It was faggotry, little different from the wellspring of monarchism the revolutionaries ostensibly fought. If someone understood what the American Constitution was, they would see it was an instrument of a body with aristocratic pretensions, whose sole reason for republicanism came from the men not trusting any one of them to be King. This was the same impulse of the Roman Republic many centuries before. Nowhere in this instrument was any natural or ideological goodness implied, and the assumption Americans learned from their churches was the exact opposite, right side up as it should be. The Christian teachings make clear that humans are nasty and fallen creatures, forever tainted with original sin, and the overall attitude towards hierarchy in the country followed from the assumption that men weren't moral creatures at all by any nature. Whatever goodness they acquired had nothing to do with a "primordial inner light" in that sense, without many qualifications of what the Christian understood as predestination or fate that allowed some men to be virtuous and prosper, and damned other men to failure no matter what they did. Goodness certainly did not arise from the state, which was and always would be no more than a mafia for rich men and disgusting Masons. Whatever goodness men had, and goodness was understood as something more than mere virtue and necessary if this society was to be anything other than the vacuous Evil of ideology, came in spite of the state and in spite of malevolent institutions. Good institutions could, in theory, facilitate the existence of good men and allow them to do good things. Nowhere in the American project did politicians vow to morally educate the subjects or tell them what they're supposed to think. That was very clearly something that was church business, the business and duty of families, things delegated to civil society and the associations anyone could form as they pleased, and ultimately something that men could derive for themselves. There was a concept that there was goodness to aspire to, somewhere in this mess, if for nothing more than the necessity of such for survival. If there was no goodness and existence was only in service to power, that leads to an obvious outcome; and for the Americans, it meant little more than their country becoming a European protectorate, "as nature intended". It could not be clearer what the conservative ideologue wanted to impress upon the grubby Americans, whether they were grubby American rulers or grubby American workers from the favored to the most abject of the slaves. As in England, the dread of the free worker was not that they would become slaves or bound to a particular legal doctrine; their dread was that they were consigned to the workhouse, to moral humiliation and shame where they would only know the scorn of their neighbors. In a country with a weak state and weak public institutions, where the interests of the rulers wanted to keep institutions weak, this dread was even more pronounced. It was the fate of poor whites most of all in the South, where poor whites could never compete with slave labor, nor could they own slaves or carry out the tasks of overseeing slaves; nor did these poor whites see any reason why they should serve an institution that openly declared its intent to humiliate the noncompliant of the free. This though was limited to the interest of slavery, which remained a "peculiar institution" rather than a state institution granted ideological justification. Only in the long term could the slave system accomplish what it truly needed; to abolish the idea of free labor once and for all, and make official the condition of slavery for all workers.

Where in this structure can ideology be asserted? There was not at this time any public institution that could be commandeered to make ideology palatable. The republic understood that it had to be a republic in some sense that functioned as a republic. The public trust had to be maintained not as an ideological plank or a lie told to the masses, but as a machine carrying out basic functions through the action of publicly elected or appointed officers, whether they were invested with political power or served as bureaucrats whose job was limited to carrying out the rote tasks of government that did not leave any opening for grand intrigues. Fear of despotism or a dictatorship was well established in the early republic, again because the men in government did not trust any one of their own to be King, nor should they trust any one man with such authority. It was not in the established civil society organizations, all of which had a similar fear. It was found in the very free association that democracy implied. Ideology would never have worked if it were imposed from the top on an unwilling populace, for ideology has always been alien to the interests of the people. Ideology did not work through self-interest, rational or otherwise. It worked by that great regulator of democracies I described in Book 3. It worked through fear of the valid of being declared invalid and losing everything their association promised. This could not be effective if people could go to infinitely many associations or operate independent of them so long as they had the security to simply exist. What could happen is that there were those who saw intuitively what was possible in association, and formed associations centered on this principle. They excluded all other purposes and goals of existence, and found like-minded people who shared such a vision for the world. You might think such ruinous things were unnatural and impossible, but the reality is far from it. There had been throughout human history those people who were always amenable to any venality, any malice, that focused on this and only this. In the past, these people found each other through cults and through religious matters, and they organized gangs to rape and pillage the world. They conspired, they undermined and mocked the honest, all in the name of deciding who was selected to live and who was selected to die. Such is the root of aristocracy, and in this time and place it would be no different. The same sickly cycle asserted itself, even when a worked-out theory of ideology or the appeal of such did not exist in America. What did exist was a certain avarice. Ideology was the vehicle through which these men and women could realize that avarice, make it total and Absolute, and impose it on the world. No one had until modernity isolated why this worked, but it would in modern history assert itself as a direct challenge to the democratizing force in human history, and a repudiation of science itself. In other words, democracy and the very idea of "freedom" would be put on trial, and those raring for the fight are this sort of person. Ideology was found not among the American aristocracy or its higher proprietors. Ideology in America was a solidly middle-class force, and it sought to advance the aims of that faction of the middle class amenable to ideology. This is very different from the birthplace of ideology of we know it, Germany, in that the German ideology was the doctrine of German aristocracy and nobility against the middle class and the broad masses. In Germany, only with force and some difficulty were the German middle class pushed into ideology, and this was always received with contempt from that middle class, who saw correctly that this was about demolishing a liberalizing and democratizing tendency that was known throughout Europe and had been suppressed in Germany. In America, ideology was a total alien to the interests of anyone, save for a grouping of people who saw ideology as a vehicle to disturb and disrupt association for their own benefit. This was very different from the German case, where the aristocratic ideology promoted a peculiar type of selfishness but also a peculiar type of obedience to state authorities and institutions. The American ideologues, in this nascent condition, believed they could stridently impose their new religion on the rest of the middle class, practice it in their families and among their congregations, and then insist that everyone must follow it. Such a thing was profoundly anti-American, but the ideologues were given over to a particular loathing of the very idea of America, regarding it as an aberration of history. This was not the case in German history, where the German nation and its precursors were always upheld by ideology, even if it was to be a nation ruled by aristocrats that hated nationalism and constitutions. Only in the 20th century would ideology turn towards devouring the German state, and it did so for very particular reasons that followed the same interest that form here in America around an ideology.

What is the ideology, then? Is it Eugenics? A variant of Christianity peculiar to America? The allure of capitalism and the enjoyment of bossing others around? Was it some strange species of socialism? I believe it was something far more basic and far easier to communicate to a business-driven society with loose institutions and a weak sense of national identity and purpose. The ideologues were driven most of all by the most opportunistic and self-serving thinking they could summon, and they did this not at the prodding of foreign agents or because they were attacked or victimized by anyone, but because they could and the ideas Americans held about freedom told the ideologues that this was a quick way to curry favor and force one's way into friend groups. If this idea seems similar to the habit of Marxists to enter a political space and consume it, it's because it flows from the same root, but this idea predates Marx's writing and it developed without any great awareness of anything Marx wrote. It is not reducible to the ineffable power of Freemasonry, for the most strident ideologues had, at least officially, nothing to do with Masonry and counted themselves among the forces opposed to the Masons, and were among the people who charged ahead with the idea that purging the country of Masons would be the best thing that could ever happen. (An argument that this author finds little reason to argue against, I assure you!) The prevalence of Masonic leadership and tactics was one fertile ground for ideology, and it could work with the traditional three-pronged assault. The Masons could easily stoke and manipulate ideologues, and became better at it when worked-out theories of ideology that placed the material first were designed and then built upon to create much of the political machinery we know today. The anti-Masons saw in ideology a get-rich-quick scheme where they could be like Masons and conspire towards foul ends. The general public could then be caught between these groups and, by repeated inducements, be pushed into believing this thing, "ideology", has to be respected at all. Even if the general public loathed ideology and recognized its stench, ideology would learn, especially with the rise of the eugenists, how to make the public comply with increasingly insane dictates.

The nascent interest in eugenics and things like it develops alongside the interests of the slave power and its protracted struggle against those who opposed slavery because slavery was a direct threat to their continued existence as anything other than slaves. The slave power has no direct interest in ideology as such, but the eugenists see in ideology a useful tool for maintaining group discipline for their movement. Eugenics is something much different than an ideology, as is its precursors. But, absent any unifying force other than self-interest for such an obviously monstrous and selfish cause, ideology would be the key to keeping the rank and file of society in a state of fear and ignorance regarding the situation, while maintaining control of information and mediated reality. The purpose of ideology was less to believe in it and more to use it as a weapon against others, including their own membership who would be disciplined by ideological pressure and conformity. Where the German ideologue upheld notions of the state and aristocratic superiority in all respects, the eugenist embraced anarchy because that was the ideal conditions for what would become eugenics. It was the ideal situation for a group united by insinuation and the power of the taboo, which is what eugenics would place at the center of its project. It has its origins in the way doctrines would be imposed by religious leaders within a church and the pressure they could exert over wider society. Ideology always rendered a perfect parody of the Puritanical drive for goodness of character and virtue that was most amenable to a faction in American society descended from colonial Puritans. This "pious" tendency in the American electorate was identified early, compared against the "liturgical" tendency that usually found itself as its political opponent. The existing religion of the Americans was unfit for this purpose. Christianity, whatever may be said of it, had very clear injunctions against slavery and the wanton killing of human life for the cause eugenics sought. As much as possible, the extermination of the Negro had to be portrayed as a natural consequence that the Puritanical mindset had absolutely nothing to do with, even as the stated policy made it clear peaceful coexistence of white and black was socially impossible on eugenic grounds. This required a baldfaced ignorance about what slaves thought, and also considerable ignorance of the slaves' genuine abilities or their wish to be part of American society in any capacity. False universalism and false egalitarianism are introduced into the ideological canon of the eugenists and the "pious" tradition, even though these are brazen violations of Christian teaching or anything we could consider good. In the long term, the history of the country must be rewritten wholly and replaced with an alien, but this part of the program has to remain occluded for many decades after the war's end. It was evident and wished to make itself prominent. Who then really commandeered this ideological ship? It was the British, who wished to launder everything they were doing during the war. Never forget though that they were assisted by a more than ready ideologically primed faction whose numbers could grow so long as there was a contentious issue. The slaves, and later the free black American, had to be made contentious, even though the ex-slaves only wish was to be able to continue with their life and not be whipped, killed, branded, or traded as chattel, which no one had any good reason to believe was an onerous request or incompatible with American society. It had to be made controversial, and this would be left to the successive generations of schoolteachers who were mandated after the war, and a program launched very early to denigrate American histories of the War and promote foreign and especially British histories of the War. It is the school, that most monstrous of institutions, that was the natural spawning ground of ideology, in which such a poison could be injected into unwitting children. When this ideology was ready for deployment, it contained most, but not all, of the ingredients of the toxic stew that would become our modern eugenic creed.

OIL, STEAM, AND THE MUD-SILL THEORY

I mentioned the "mud-sill" theory earlier, and this theory rests at the center of all of these things. It was not merely a statement on the existence of slavery or an oppressed class, if we consider the technological context that was understood to all Americans and was especially relevant to the rising interests in railroads and oil in the North. Dubbed the "Marxism of the ruling class", the mud-sill theory was promoted by Southern politician James Henry Hammond.^[2] The key argument of the mud-sill theory is that it was premised not just on a vaguely inferior class with vaguely inferior intellects, but on a class whose deficiency was technologically measurable and appreciable as an economic necessity. This meant that in principle, if you were stupid or made to look stupid, you belonged at the bottom of society, and this became an immutable fact of reality; but this stupidity had to tie to some mechanical ineptitude that was incurable and that the ruling system had no desire to ever cure. The stupidity of this class of mud-sill workers is portrayed as a virtue, for the mud-sill worker was valued for its loyalty to menial labor and lowered expectations, and this stupidity was a boon to the favored classes, regardless of how middling their intellect was or what their cause may be.

We have to see what industrial technology, electricity, and effective engines would have meant for free workers if their intellects were not degraded or presumed so. By what reason should the machines not be deployed for the wealth of the people and an increase in living standards? Directly, the mud-sill theory did not suggest necessary material deprivation or that the inferior class must be kept at the edge of starvation at all times. Hammond's speech states the opposite; that slaves are docile and cared for, and the standard of living afforded to slaves was superior to the free wageslaves that were suggested as the alternative. What was needed for the mud-sill theory was an affirmation of intellectual inferiority made permanent. The productivity of new machines became a menace to a free society because those products would enter the hands of those workers who saw no reason to continue abasing themselves so thoroughly, and they would by their position in society be able to grab hold of an unlimited strike fund and, if they were competent, command of the very machines coveted by the capitalist. Nothing prevented a worker, even a relatively dull one, from operating a machine or a weapon. The black slave was no less capable of this than the white wage worker, a fact demonstrated by the renting out of slaves for industrial labor. What was needed more than faith in intellectual inferiority that was taken for granted was an affirmation that this inferiority were legally obligatory and expected, so that the desired mood of a stupid, fearful, and ultimately pliant servant class was maintained as the great image of humanity. Nowhere did the rising technologists in the country want to see their workers claw back some of this intellectual production and proceeds that their labor entailed. The worst possible thing in the country would be for workers to see that their command of machinery under labor could easily be made into power greater than mere political power or anything that would be won at the ballot box. To prevent the worker from accessing machinery they used every day, new lockouts had to be devised. The society would have to be managed, much as the slaves were managed by overseers, since without this the slaves would see no one is minding the work space and they would escape, or do nothing, or decide today would be a great day to kill the masters since the slave's life will never, ever be anything but this. The purpose of the lockouts was not to rule by force, but to rule by ignorance. In the long term, the only secure basis for this grossly unequal society was one of two things: forced ignorance taken to its uttermost extreme so that all who work are "mud-sill" status and too retarded to rebel, or slavery as a sacrosanct right and duty of society to mark the free from the unfree. In the latter case, freedom meant in principle admission into intellectual society, even at its lowest lungs; anything to not be retarded. The management of slaves taught the masters to do this every single time, since "this always works".

The question wasn't necessarily a human-focused one, but a question on the nature of technology and machinery in the world moving forward. If mud-sill workers were necessary, could we not conceive a world where all are mud-sill workers except managers and proprietors? In every way, technology could displace the menial tasks and complex mental tasks, leaving behind only a class of deskilled and mostly worthless people who could still be utilized for some low value. The tasks that involved heavy industry and the technology commandeered by the rich would be granted special status and treated as exception, forever denied to the mud-sills regardless of any actual ability involved. The need for technological control was made increasingly evident as more technology rose to displace workers, and the need for technological control was always clear in slavery. Slaves were never to be entrusted with any tool they could commandeer to inflict severe damage. That was a restriction slavery held; but, free and favored men with the same tools were no guarantee of safety. As much as possible, the new class of skilled workers had to be screened for loyalty to the regime and hostility towards the workers generally. What was the position of free labor against this argument? There really was none in the final analysis. Free labor suggested that workingmen were something more than "just workers", for the argument for free labor was never premised primarily on efficiency or the superior merit of free labor. Free labor was the basis for citizen armies, and it was not inconceivable for laborers or their children to socially promote. If they possessed money and a little good fortune, a worker should not be discouraged from rising. The argument then became the same argument aristocracy always had; that a favored group was desirable and had to be installed as a naturalistic proposition. The argument for free labor ran in the face of established wisdom regarding technology. If the free laborers had the means to hold the new machinery, master its use, and become its designers, those workers would only use that position to gain greater leverage over the proprietors and the hostile sectors of the order of the commons. Those workers would also see that promoting internecine conflict between (valid) workers was not in their medium- or long-term interest, for the superior numbers of the workers, augmented by associations of those workers to improve their station, were one of their most useful assets. It was necessary to negate that as much as possible, both by denigrating the class of the workers collectively by marking down their lowest common denominator, and by denigrating humanity's overall ability to adapt to technology. The technology increasingly had to be mystified, and this could only be accomplished by a thorough program of indoctrination and by the promotion of magical thinking, anti-systems thinking, and the corruption of language to make genuine scientific thought possible. It was not enough to take for granted an inherent desire of human beings to kick down to get ahead, because the advocates of that were seeing before their eyes that a large faction in the North did not subscribe to that world-view, and this question divided even the political class. The rift over slavery was one of many that indicated the causes I describe here, and by no means are those causes a complete listing.

—

With these causes at work, the coming of war was not so much "inevitability" but desirability of monstrous interests and a reckoning with the mess modernity had made of America. In the 20 years preceding the war, every possibility to move away from such a course was habitually denied by those who wanted to stoke that war for ultimately technological conceits about what the world should be. These parties had no real cause to fight for, not even slavery as an institution. If it were possible to find a less reputable cause than the slave power, the partisans who stoked war year after year found it. Yet, all it takes is one rebel raid to set off the great rebellion of the South, waged by the South ostensibly because the North was rebellious not just against the established order but Nature itself. A few men practicing the art of incessant instigation and getting away with it created hundreds of thousands of corpses, ruined lives and fortunes, and the instigators getting away with it. It would be a model to emulate for such instigators in the future, and it is a model they return to often. If you want to find the time in history where the theory of "pure politics" as aristocracy practiced it came into its own, without any of the fetters of kingliness or public decency, it is in the causes of such a war and those that followed its model of instigation. In every case, technological causes are presented as historical inevitabilities that moved men, while the clear and obvious guilty instigators are somehow exonerated. Flimsy pretexts and dubious wars are not new, but the particular influence of technology on everyone's political decisions was first felt here, rather than in the modern revolutions themselves. The modern revolutions brought the idea of free trade, the idea of nationalism, the idea of corporate government, and so many other ideas into prominence, but decisions were made by men who looked forward rather than to the primordial. The Civil War begins the trend where history can be relitigated and edited, and it is always edited by the most dishonest for the most banal of cruelties. It was not a particularly American effort to edit history for the sake of one party or another, at least in the decades after the war. Histories published immediately after the war were frank that the war was a terrible calamity. Far from ending the mud-sill argument, the outcome of the war intensified it, as slavery was replaced with the company town and the barren world of monopoly capitalism, and the ex-slaves often saw nothing but their re-enslavement in state prisons and nothing with which the former slaves could live. Where they remained free, they were consigned largely to tilling the same fields they tilled as slaves.

Yet, for all that didn't change, there are things a technologically-focused history ignores or simply disavows. The antislavery force was a democratizing force and it saw not just the institution or law of slavery as the problem, but the entire premise of the institution and the premise of the mud-sill theory. The petty-manager of our time was not such a force in the middle of the 19th century, however much such men bemoaned that they could not run the greatest grift of the world to come. The slaves did not see their newfound freedom as "just an illusion" or a story, because legal freedom was never about the pretenses masters held about the institution or the receipt of approval and a gold star. Legal freedom meant a world of difference, for now the black ex-slave could migrate or find some place apart from the white man if coexistence was to be made impossible. Those who never have to seriously question legal freedom will never know what it means to have that accursed deed to their name, for the deed meant something different from the sacred contract that would become the new chains. The revisionist histories had to work over the following 150 years to foment an idea that "freedom isn't free", making a mockery of everything that was democratic and saying that it was now the morally sanctified thing to do. Finally, the outcome of the war was not lost on the men who rose in the aftermath. The leading families of the new America would become the Old Money houses, and they knew from the start that playing the game of the hapless capitalist was stupid and pointless. The Old Money houses took that mud-sill theory and pushed it into overdrive, now assisted by public schooling that was at first primarily concerned with a eugenic function before it could make serious inroads with ideology and the forcible stupefication of the country.

It is a sport of all revisionists to place words in the mouth of the lowest class, so that the shill familiar to our times is reproduced throughout the ages. Now, the lowest class rarely ever gets to speak in any writing that comes down to us, and if they do it is apocryphal comments recorded by a usually hostile and contemptuous source. Usually the dominant revisionist narrative here is that no one actually cared about abolishing slavery or freedom or anything and wanted the easy way out of the war, curiously exempting the "righteous" of the combatants who were invariably aligned with eugenics and its ideological precursors. The war itself "just happens", as if it were some event of nature predestined to spin that great wheel of destiny. The majority opinion of the lowest class, as it is in every time, is that all war is a bunch of bullshit designed to kill poor people. The war was clearly instigated by the most malevolent actors in the country, and the actions of Lincoln could only be interpreted as a defense of the Union that was rightfully defended. Here is the very heart of the revisionist histories; that they must discount the tendency towards union in a country that has little going for it except a few promises of good will that are sometimes tolerated. Without anything else to keep it together, some effort for the sake of goodness had to exist. There was nothing noble or glorious about the cause of slavery or the instigation of the war on the Southern end. The fickleness of the historical revisionists tells them that wars are a fait accompli, and that they are always won by instigation and transgression alone. This would become the German pattern of the world wars, and it is the pattern of the State of Israel today. The ideology must declare that the war is already won by the first transgression, because it was so super sneaky and obviously destined to win. "Ask the Krauts how well that has gone for them in both rounds," you may say. Yet, the same people continue the same narrative, stuck on repeat. There was no "Lost Cause" mythology during the war, nor was the Lost Cause mythology an invention of the Americans. It was always a British and Germanic deception to tell us, insultingly, "this is what you are". If you saw the conduct of the war and its length, the Southerners did not believe their cause was lost or hopeless from the start, as if historical progress were there to dictate history. From their view, the Southerners were in the right with the law, the dominant institutions of their day, and fielded the most capable generals of the war. People do not make transgressive acts to make a glorious last stand. The instigators begin wars that are finished by other men. Only after the war became a war of conquest by the North could it be won, and the grand narrative theory of history omits any genuine consequence of war once it is possible to edit history to remove its human components. In the grand narrative theory, all history is reduced to essential thought-forms that battle for no apparent cause, and the men are made to do as the instigators please to the bitter end. It is not hard to see what these revisionist histories aim to make permanent and unchanging. How can they do this? They begin by placing words into the lowest class that resemble the aristocracy's vision of them, and by extension all of the orders beneath the instigators and their agentur are denigrated. The mud-sill theory comes to be not just an economic or technological theory of human society, but a theory of the whole apparatus of mankind, where only the lowest of men may prevail and anything that spoke of anything else was automatically retarded and inadmissible. This makes sense if we accept, as I have, that all of these historical entities, these states and the executive directing body of any war, are themselves pieces of technology rather than mere ideas or spooky spiritual totems; and humanity is, ultimately, one very big machine.

End of Book 4