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February
09
2026

Lincoln’s Union Army Was More Evil Than the Israeli Defense Force
Paul Graig Roberts

Recently someone sent me a copy of Walter Brian Cisco’s book, War Crimes Against Southern Civilians. Until I began reading this book, I had regarded Israel’s “defense force” as the ultimate in barbarism. The Israelis justify shooting mothers and babies in the head on the grounds that all Palestinians are terrorists, and that the babies will grow up to be terrorists and that the mothers will have more babies that will grow up to be terrorists, and that is better to kill the mothers and the babies before this happens.

The Israelis acknowledge this, but if gentiles repeat it, they are dismissed as antisemites. So it remains knowledge that we know, but are not permitted to repeat.

Apparently, historians have the same policy toward the war crimes inflicted on Southern civilians by Lincoln’s Union Army that was nothing but an organized gang of plunderers, murderers, and rapists who make the Israeli “Defense Force” look like benevolent Christians.

Until Lincoln’s invasion of the Confederate States of America, war in the civilized Western world was confined to combatants. Lincoln broke the code of civilized warfare and conducted war against the civilian population of the South. The Americans and the British followed this practice in the war against Japan and Germany. The nuclear weapons of today mean that war is total and is conducted against all of humanity. Today we have this situation in which disagreement between the elites of two countries can result in the extermination of humanity.

The documented accounts in Cisco’s book of war against Southern civilians are horrific. In Missouri, for example, the populations of entire counties were forced on the penalty of death to leave their homes, businesses and properties and be relocated in Kansas. It was the precedent for Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians from Palestine.

In New Orleans, General Benjamin Butler, one of Lincoln’s many incompetent and hate-filled political appointees who had never commanded soldiers, responded to women who complained of the mistreatment of fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers by declaring the women “to be treated as a woman of the town plying her advocation.” Butler’s invitation to his troops to rape southern women astounded the British Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, who condemned it in a speech before the British Parliament.

Just as all Palestinians are terrorists, Southern men in towns under Union Army jurisdiction were shot or hung on the grounds that all Southern men were bushwackers aiding and abetting the Confederacy’s resistance.

When Union soldiers appeared in a Southern town, the town could expect to be totally looted and burnt to the ground. Cisco provides example after example.

When Lincoln’s army appeared on a plantation, the black slave women were mercilessly raped for the failure of slaves to revolt against their masters, thereby supporting the South’s war effort.

Lincoln’s war against the South was a war of hate. Many Union officers and generals were indoctrinated products of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a propaganda publication that demonized the South as a society of slave owners mistreating slaves, as Union soldiers actually did. The hatred generated by Northern abolitionists resulted in the worst war crimes in human history.

Corrupt historians busy at work feathering the official narrative have kept buried the true history of the so-called “Civil War” which was not a civil war, but an invasion of one country by another.

When I was  growing up in the South we knew that our ancestors had suffered grievously at the hands of the Yankees, but we were left with monuments, such as statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, that told us we had made a stand against greed-driven aggression from the North. The North intended for the South to pay for its industrialization via the Morrill Tariff, and, therefore, would not allow the South to secede from the Union despite the South’s constitutional right to do so.

But  the statues have been taken down, erasing public references to the South’s resistance to invasion.

When the extraordinary war criminal Abraham Lincoln went to war against the Confederacy, he went to war against the American Constitution. It was Lincoln who destroyed the United States that was created by the founding fathers as a union of sovereign states who had under the Constitution most of the governing powers.

As Lincoln repeated over and over and over, his war against the South was a war to make the South pay the tariff necessary to finance the industrialization of the north. Lincoln never said that he went to war to free slaves, at least not during his war. The Emancipation Proclamation was a war measure designed to produce a slave rebellion that would result in Southern troops leaving the front lines and returning to their homes to protect their families. The proclamation only applied to slaves in areas under Southern control. As Lincoln’s Secretary of State noted, the proclamation did not apply to any areas under Union control.

Lincoln’s war against the South anticipated by a century the Israeli Defense Force’s war on Palestinians.

I have always thought that the collapse of American morality occurred in the 20th century, but Cisco’s book makes it clear that American morality collapsed during  1860-1865 and the following decade of Reconstruction during which everything in the South of value was stolen by the North.

The South did not recover from its looting and gratuitous destruction until after World War II.

In view of the unprecedented harm Washington inflicted on Southern people, it is extraordinary that the military of the United States would not exist were it not for the voluntary enlistment of Southern men. These are men who know nothing of their history, or of the torment of their ancestors by the government to which they give their lives. If this is not the total failure of a historical consciousness, what is it?

In 1863 when General Robert E. Lee commander of the Army of Northern Virginia made the first Confederate invasion of Union territory, General Lee addressed his troops:

“The duties exacted of us by civilization and Christianity are not less obligatory in the country of the enemy than in our own. The commanding general considers that no greater disgrace could befall the army, and through it our whole people, then the perpetration of the barbarous outrages upon the unarmed and defenseless and the wanton destruction of private property that have marked the course of the enemy in our own country. It must be remembered that we make war only upon armed men, and that we cannot take vengeance for the wrongs our people have suffered without lowering ourselves in the eyes of all whose abhorrence has been excited by the atrocities of our enemies, and offending against God, to whom vengeance belongeth.”

When Lee surrendered his starving and barefoot army that the Confederacy could no longer provision, Union general Philip Sheridan wanted to massacre the surrendering soldiers and had to be admonished by Union general Grant. As soon as the Confederacy was conquered, the Republican government in Washington sent the Union war criminals Sheridan and Tecumseh Sherman to destroy the Plains Indians. The buffalo herds were destroyed in order to deprive the Indians of food, and the Republicans used germ warfare against the starving Indians. Strange, isn’t it, that historians can be so utterly corrupt to claim the Union fought a war in behalf of blacks, and as soon it was over, turned to the destruction of another people of color.

A Union soldier from Illinois wrote home that the Union soldiers had so abused the Southern blacks that “many of them have learned to hate the Yankees as much as our Southern brethren do.  The army is becoming awfully depraved. How the home folks will ever be able to live with them after the war, is, I think, something of a question. If we don’t degenerate into a nation of thieves, it will not be for lack of the example set by the Union army.”

The only civilization that existed in North America in the 19th century was in the South, and the evil war criminal Abraham Lincoln destroyed it.

And the monument to Lincoln has not been taken down.

 

Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.

He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.

Dr. Roberts' latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions - The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.

Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper's, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

 

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