Ron Paul whistles Dixie

Normally politicians with links to neo-Confederates keep it under the table. George Allen didn't bring it up his fraternization with the Council of Conservative Citizens in his last campaign, and Trent Lott initially denied active involvement with the Council of Conservative Citizens.

However, Ron Paul, on meet the press, was up front with his neo-Confederate beliefs. This is the link to the story and at that web page you can get the entire transcript.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22342301/

I am not surprised by this. If you want to learn about the libertarian wing of the neo-Confederate movement go to http://www.mises.org/ or http://www.lewrockwell.com/.

Not surprisingly, they are big supporters of Ron Paul.

In regards to the historical arguments that Ron Paul makes.

1. There was a proposal to sell the public lands and use the money to purchase the slaves and free them. The State of Georgia was livid over the proposal and fulminated against it, passing a resolution against it.

One reason the United States didn't use funds to free the slaves is that the slave states were against it.

2. Ron Paul comments about the abolition of slavery elsewhere misrepresents history. In Brazil the Imperial Army was called out to support slavery towards the end, and slavery began to end when the army announced that it would refuse to capture runaway slaves.

There was violence against abolitionists in Brazil. The whole process of abolition in Brazil wasn't as peaceful as neo-Confederate apologists like to make out.

However, the thing to consider is that abolition of slavery elsewhere falls under one or more of these five categories.

A. The slave holders in many Latin American countries were a small minority of the larger polity and didn't have the political strength or resources to fight abolitionism and certainly not the resources to carry out an insurrection.

B. Some slave holders were dependent on the larger polity to maintain slavery. Without the British Empire the British West Indies slave holders would not be able to maintain their systems of slavery. When the Empire decided to abolish slavery, they could hardly resist militarily, and being tiny white elites over large slave populations they could hardly risk disorder of any type or the lack of the law supplied by the British empire.

C. Slavery in many cases was abolished after the Civil War as the blockade of trans-Atlantic slave trade became more efficient and slavery couldn't support itself without the easy importation of slaves.

D. Unfortunately, in some cases the abolition of slavery was merely the founding of some other type of bondage, such as peonage.

E. After the American Civil War it was fairly obvious that slavery was on the way out and abolitionism meant modernism for nations.

The United States on the other hand had a body of slave holders that represented a large geographic region of major economic resources with a population to raise an army, they had the means to resist. At the time of the Civil War it wasn't obvious that slavery was the dead past. The trans-Atlantic slave trade was still going since the slave states would block effective American actions against it. The American slave owners were also of violent temperament as shown in the case of Preston Brooks.

The slave states also made it clear from the Constitutional Convention onward that any effort at abolition in their states would result in violent resistance. The proposals to avoid a Civil War during 1861 involved adding more amendments on the Constitution to fasten slavery on America forever. Reading the Crittenden Convention minutes makes you glad that the compromise didn't go through, because it would have eventually resulted in the discrediting and end of America.

It would of course been better that the United States didn't not have a Civil War, but the slave states were committed to violence.