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This article appears in the March 8, 2002 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

Abraham Lincoln Rips
Samuel Huntington's Lies

by Anton Chaitkin

[PDF version of this article]

A statement calling for an endless global "anti-terrorism" war, signed by fascist Samuel P. Huntington and others, was placed in U.S. newspapers on Feb. 13 by the so-called Institute for American Values. The advertisement was shocking for its bold hijacking of the views of President Abraham Lincoln—along with those of Martin Luther King, Jr., George Washington, St. Augustine, and Socrates—to support the aims of Huntington's imperial war faction.

But the real Abraham Lincoln exposed the lies of Anglo-American financiers and Southern racists who used their power over the United States to wage aggressive war—against Mexico. Lincoln's withering attack on the fraud of the Mexican War, delivered as a Congressman in 1847, must now come back to haunt Huntington and his coterie from the same, still undead faction Lincoln then opposed, the same traditional "Tory" enemy Lincoln later fought as President in the 1861-65 Civil War.

The Feb. 13 call for a global war had 50 co-signers, including Harvard professor Huntington, chief publicist for the ideas underlying the Sept. 11 coup plotters and their "Clash of Civilizations" dogma; Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, think-tank of Sen. Joe Lieberman's (D-Conn.) Democratic Leadership Council; Michael Novak of the rightist American Enterprise Institute; Francis Fukuyama, ideologue of the George H.W. Bush regime, who declared that militarily imposed globalism was history's "final" world system; eugenics spokesman James Q. Wilson, who attributes crimes by blacks to their racial heritage; Charles Wilson, director of the University of Mississippi's Center for the Study of Southern Culture; TransIslam magazine editor Khalid Duran, advocate of general war on Muslim states; and various self-proclaimed spokesmen for "traditional family values."

The ad says that al-Qaeda Muslim extremists organized the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, an assertion for which no particle of evidence is presented, or ever has been.

It says that the global war is to be fought to defend "democracy"—while this faction's media outlets have tried all along to whip Americans into a war frenzy fit to sustain a dictatorship. Huntington's 1957 book The Soldier and the State[1] advocates a military world empire modelled on Southern slave society. And in his 1975 Trilateral Commission report, "The Crisis of Democracy," Huntington calls for exclusion of "marginal" groups such as blacks from political power, as part of "desirable limits to economic growth" and "potentially desirable limits to the indefinite expansion of democracy."

The ad speaks of limiting the "response" to the Sept. 11 attacks to only the waging of "just war," and of not targetting non-combatants; it pretends to speak from the moral high ground of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, closing with words from Lincoln's First Inaugural Address, "we must not be enemies," on the pretext of speaking peace to Muslims other than extremists. Yet the Brzezinski-Kissinger-Huntington faction itself created al-Qaeda and other Afghansi guerrillas as an anti-Soviet Cold War instrument. The same group subsequently has screamed for war against Muslims, over the past decade, to replace the Soviet enemy image from the Cold War.

Speaking Truth on the Cause of the Mexican War

We invoke the spirit of Abraham Lincoln now against this ugly perversion of his life's work.

Lincoln risked his career when he laid bare the false pretexts for the Mexican War; he resisted the deluded war-mad public opinion. Though he lost public office and favor, he helped lay the basis for his nation's survival under his own future Presidency.

U.S. Army and Navy forces had launched an unprovoked attack against the Mexican republic during the Spring of 1846. Tens of thousands of Mexicans died in the next two years, many in artillery bombardments of residential areas; and 13,000 American soldiers died as well. The U.S. Army was occupying Mexico City, and the aggressive war faction was demanding the conquest and annexation of all of Mexico for the spread of slavery, when the 38-year-old freshman Congressman Lincoln decisively embarrassed and exposed President James Polk as a corrupt liar.

Just after invading Mexico, Polk had asked Congress not to declare war, but "to recognize the existence of the war," which he claimed had started when "Mexico ... passed the boundary of the United States, ... invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil." Sen. John C. Calhoun said later, that when Polk's war bill was rammed through Congress, "We had not a particle of evidence that the Republic of Mexico had made war against the United States."

On Dec. 22, 1847, a few days after he took his House seat, Lincoln introduced eight resolutions asking the President to inform the Congress about the "spot" on which "the blood of our citizens was shed." Wasn't it first Spanish, then Mexican territory, always occupied by Mexican farmers and never by Texans? And wasn't the first American blood shed, that of soldiers, who invaded from Texas after Gen. Zachary Taylor had repeatedly said "that in his opinion no such movement was necessary to the defense or protection of Texas"?

Lincoln now emerged as a new national leader in what had been a long battle against America's British-guided free-trade faction, of Boston opium-trafficking millionaires and their Southern planter allies.

Four days after Lincoln introduced his famous " 'Spot' Resolutions,"[2] his fellow nationalist Whig, Congressman and former President John Quincy Adams, wrote that the "design and purpose to dismember Mexico ... has in my opinion been ... a 'fixed fact' at least since the year 1830."

The British-Backed Polk Presidency

Lincoln knew that the Polk Presidency, as well as this design on Mexico, had been planned by the enemy international oligarchy. In the 1844 election, Lincoln's Whig party had issued a pamphlet showing that the British financed the "free-trade" Presidential campaign of James K. Polk, against the protectionist, nationalist Henry Clay. Lincoln's party asked patriots to decide "whether British gold shall buy what British valor could not conquer" in America's Revolution and the War of 1812. The Whig pamphlet quoted from British newspapers and from the literature of Prime Minister Robert Peel's free-trade political movement, documenting the British transfer of at least $440,000 (equivalent to hundreds of millions today) to Polk's election campaign.

A British underground political machine put Polk into the Presidency, and pulled the strings to start the war against Mexico. The British pointman was George Bancroft (now known primarily as an historian), the Washington operative of a set of Massachusetts opium-trading Tory families still bitter at losing the American Revolution.

Northerner Bancroft, who claimed to oppose Negro slavery, contrived the surprise, "dark horse" Democratic Party Presidential candidacy of Polk, a degenerate mediocrity of a Tennessee slaveowner and land speculator; Polk asserted that "a slave dreads the punishment of stripes more than imprisonment, and [such whipping] has, besides, a beneficial effect on his fellow slaves."

Then, as Polk's cabinet officer, Bancroft himself pushed the provocative actions against Mexico, such as on June 6, 1845, when, as temporary head of the War Department, he ordered the U.S. Army's first movement southwestward into territory beyond the line of Texas settlement.

The Anglo-American Swindle

Political debate at that time revolved around the Oregon Territory lying between (Mexican-owned) California and (Russian-owned) Alaska, an area contested by the United States and Britain; and around the territory of Texas, which a revolution had taken from Mexico, and which had just been annexed to the United States by the previous administration of President John Tyler.

The strategic question was, should America risk another war with Britain by kicking the British out of the Oregon territory? Or should we accommodate the British Empire's expansion of its Canadian colony, and point Anglo-Saxon guns southward, using tense Mexico-Texas relations as a trigger and pretext for an aggressive war to steal California—instead of buying it?

American nationalists bluntly said, take the Pacific Northwest and fight Britain, not Mexico. U.S. Ambassador to England Louis McLane reported to Secretary of State James Buchanan on Jan. 3, 1846, about Britain's huge naval armament program: "[British Foreign Secretary] Lord Aberdeen said ... they were obliged to look to the possibility of a rupture with the United States, and that in such a crisis the warlike preparations now in the making would be useful and important." John Quincy Adams warned Congress that Britain was dispatching warships and troops to Canada, and he called for U.S. preparations to drive the British Empire entirely from North America. Democrat Sam Houston, the Texas independence leader, counselled Polk to maintain peace with Mexico, and called for an Oregon Territory showdown against the British.

Americans today can still get a strong whiff of the stench from the swindle that Lincoln denounced, since the Polk 1844 election slogan, "54-40 or Fight!," echoes down through time. That was Polk's pledge to exclude the British from all of the contested Pacific Northwest Territory, up to the southern border of Alaska at latitude 54°40@pr.

After repeated diplomatic and military provocations by the Polk-Bancroft regime, U.S. troops finally got into a small skirmish with Mexicans, and on May 11, 1846, Polk told Congress to "recognize" that Mexico's invasion of the United States had started a war.

On June 6, 1846, Secretary of State Buchanan met secretly with the British Ambassador, Sir Richard Pakenham, and agreed to sign a treaty giving Britain control over what is now British Columbia. The treaty was signed nine days later.

Not long afterwards, President Polk appointed George Bancroft Ambassador to Britain. Bancroft wrote back to Polk on May 14, 1847, exulting that the British were deeply pleased with "our war with Mexico, our [free-trade] finances, and ... [with] the immense superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race as displayed in our great number of victories over the Mexicans."

Abraham Lincoln later, in a short 1860 autobiography, summed up the hoax of the Mexican War: "Mr. L. thought the act of sending an armed force among the Mexicans, was unnecessary, inasmuch as Mexico was in no way molesting, or menacing the U.S. or the people thereof; and that it was unconstitutional, because the power of levying war is vested in Congress, and not in the President. He thought the principal motive for the act, was to divert public attention from the surrender of 'Fifty-four, forty, or fight' to Great Britain, on the Oregon boundary question."

Nation-Building vs. Imperialism

Samuel Huntington's globalist imperial faction usurps the name of Lincoln, the nationalist enemy of Britain's free-trade doctrine.

Lincoln wrote in 1859, "I was an old Henry Clay tariff whig. In old times I made more speeches on that subject, than on any other. I have not since changed my views."

Sen. Henry Clay, Lincoln's mentor and political guide, had procured a protectionist tariff in 1842 which had jump-started many American machine industries and raised wages. But the Polk Administration pushed through the tariff reduction demanded by England and the slaveowners, while gearing up war against America's sister republic to the south.

The questions of the imperial war, and of nationalist versus imperial economics, were two aspects of the same battle of Lincoln's entire life.

On his way to Washington to take his Congressional seat, Lincoln stopped in Lexington, Kentucky, the hometown of his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, where her family had close relations with the family of Henry Clay. There Lincoln attended a Whig rally on Nov. 13, 1847, at which the old Henry Clay described America's War of 1812 against Great Britain, as "a just war. Its great object, announced at the time, was trade and sailors' rights against the intolerable and oppressive acts of British power on the ocean." Clay continued:

"How totally variant is the present war! This is no war of defence, but one unnecessary and of offensive aggression. It is Mexico that is defending her firesides, her castles, and her altars, not we...." The Clay speech rocked the country.

Lincoln, inspired, was soon afterwards in Congress, delivering his own attack. And in the days immediately after Clay's Lexington rally, Congressman-elect Lincoln made a set of notes on protectionism—and the idiocy of farmers who think they benefit from "cheap" industrial goods imported from Britain—to clarify for himself what he must press for in Washington. Years later, these notes were collected and sent to some of his supporters, as representing his nationalist thinking. The first act of his Presidency (put through two days before his inauguration!) was a tremendously high tariff, which is what actually began the American steel industry.

Clay's inspiration reached well beyond Lincoln. Another future great American statesman, James G. Blaine, then 17 years old, was also present at that 1847 Lexington speech. Blaine wrote that he was then and there inspired to pursue his own life's work in Clay's footsteps. Blaine carried on the Lincoln legacy until his death in 1892, as a Secretary of State who spread nationalist economics and anti-imperial solidarity from America to Ireland, to South America, Russia, India, and Korea.

This tradition was revived by Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Lincoln and his allies, still alive despite the murders and the lies that sought to erase them from history, now must confront Samuel Huntington, and block the drive for a catastrophic world war.


[1] See profile in EIR, Jan. 25, 2002.

[2] See Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "The Lesson of 'The "Spot" Resolutions'," and Anton Chaitkin and John C. Smith, Jr., "How Britain's Treason Machine Made War Against Mexico," EIR, Dec. 5, 1997.

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