He's totally right, and this makes the mystery more tantalizing when you realize who it is.

"Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men's views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it. ( Read more... )

The real Civil War is ongoing, and mostly spiritual in nature.

My previous post is meant to begin an inquiry into what appears to be a tantalizing historic mystery that, if solved or even explored far enough, may shed some light on "how things got this way" in context.

There seems to have been a series of "devil's deals" going on around the turn of the century in the US. Implications of deception, manipulation, blackmail perhaps...

In that essay, in full, the author invokes Lincoln. What he fails to either understand or be courageous enough to admit is that Lincoln, as a protege of Henry Clay, is part of the same tradition of Hamiltonian darkness that the author rightly disdains as "un-American"(in the best sense of this term) in another part of his essay. Like Hamilton, Lincoln was someone who did one great piece of good within an overall context of ... let us say not-so-good. The Republican party of his day had not betrayed the overall spirit of Lincoln in any sense, except maybe the mythical Lincoln who did nothing else but Free The Slaves.
But interestingly Lincoln too was afraid of this same interlocked power that the author of our essay mentions. He railed against it in private, and may have been killed by them, for he did make some halting attempts at freeing our economy from it, if only out of a misplaced sense of loyalty to a different set of elites.

There are wheels within wheels in American history, threads that are not even hinted at by the average education, even up into the collegiate level. The truth is complex and fascinating, revealing people who had the best of intentions committing terrible horrors and people almost wholly owned by the forces of darkness rebelling under their yoke.

(no subject)

Here's another clue. The person in question was primarily speaking in opposition to a very popular former president who spearheaded a movement that the author considered himself a member of, or at least claimed to be. He was attempting to cause a radical shift in that movement away from the sort of policies and ideas championed by that former president.

I've been digging into history a bit more lately, and finding that my surface level assesments were off base in many ways. The situation was much more complex than I had understood it to be. This of course is a source of intellectual glee for me, and that's why I'm sharing this with you all... in the patented ineffabelle manner, of course. :)