What Constitutes a War Criminal? (Transcript)

Today Bob Barney gives a history lesson about facts not taught about the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO BOB BARNEY’S SPECIAL SUNDAY 7:11 BROADCAST: WHAT CONSTITUTES A WAR CRIMINAL?

When we think of war criminals, we think of people like Adolf Hitler, Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, or Mao Zedong. How many people would consider that many American presidents or generals are to be considered war criminals?

Hi, this is Bob Barney with another edition of the Plain Truth Today broadcast for the plaintruth.com website.

First of all, before I make too many people mad, this is a history lesson, and I am not a left-leaning, mindless, piece-of-slab Democrat and what you are going to hear in this history lesson today is just that. Like many things, and this is a theme of the show all the time, you have been lied to about our own history. In fact, you’ve been lied to, especially in certain cities of the North, you’ve been lied to about many things about our own history.

Now, before I start, I want to say that I am a patriot. I am from the North. I’m not a southerner at all. I believe that war is, as General MacArthur called it, the greatest sin of mankind. Things happen in war that are unthinkable and, I guess, forgivable only to the fact that you have to win the war if you’re fighting on the side of good. However, I’m also one who believes that you do not sugarcoat history, that you tell history in a simple, factual way and let the people who are listening to it make up their own minds about the events of history. I’m not a revisionist historian like liberals tend to be.

They like to take facts and they bend the truth.

At the same time, I am a person who believes that if you’re going to believe in something that you should know everything about it before you make an opinion. You should realize that you live the life of being fed a lot of baloney from a lot of people. This comes from your schoolteachers, from your television reporters and even from a lot of people around you.

Here’s something I bet you did not know.

We had a President of the United States that waged an unconstitutional war that cost 620,000 Americans their lives, including 50,000 innocent people being murdered.

This President arrested American citizens.

Congressmen tried to arrest this Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. 

He suspended the Constitution.

He suspended the Bill of Rights.

He stood for a position that we think today is honorable.

In fact, he’s one of the greatest Presidents that the United States ever knew!

Now, the person I’m talking about is Abraham Lincoln.

As we talk about people marching in the streets about how Israel is targeting civilians in Hamas in the Middle East, we have to realize before we call people war criminals, we have to understand that you do what you have to do to win. That’s going back to what General MacArthur said about war being the greatest sin of mankind. Once war has started, you have to use every available means to end the war. I am not a pacifist, although I do believe there are certain boundaries that civilized people do when they do war. 

I think most Americans believe that the American military…the American soldier has always stood above every other soldier of the world of being better in the field than other nations. For example, when I was a young teenager, I worked for a man who was in Patton’s Army. He had mentioned how whenever German soldiers wanted to surrender, they made sure they surrendered to the Americans and not to the British…and especially not to the Russians. The Russians would torture them in terrible ways and then murder them. The English would not murder them most of the time, some did, but they would torture the heck out of them. The Americans treated them with dignity, took their weapons, imprisoned them, sent many of them to America to live in prison camps. Many never to return back to Germany and became decent, hardworking American citizens after the war.

America has been seen by the whole world as a special country when it comes to warfare.

I want to get back to this president who is Abraham Lincoln, by the way, he’s on Mount Rushmore along with some other famous presidents.

I bet you didn’t know this about Abraham Lincoln. I mentioned he waged an unconstitutional war. Yes, the Civil War, the war between the states, whatever you want to call it…but this war was not a declared war by Congress. It was unconstitutional. He arrested several thousand Maryland citizens who were suspected of Southern sympathies. Now you have to remember this, Maryland was a union state. It was not a breakaway state. It was not a state that was in the Confederacy. There was no reason why anyone living in Maryland should be treated without the same due process as anybody else living in this country. Then again, to Lincoln, it didn’t really matter what state you came from because he got a little tougher on the state of Maryland and maybe other people as well.

He arrested 30 members of the Maryland state legislator because they did not vote in state politics the way he wanted them to in order to fight the war. 

He arrested a United States congressman that represented Maryland who were against the war.

He arrested the mayor and the police commissioner of Baltimore and the entire Baltimore city council. 

They held these arrestees, these detainees at Fort McHenry at Point Lookout without trial. 

Does that sound like January 6th? People held without trial for many years?

He suspended the writ of habeas corpus and that means produce the body in court. That’s just Latin for produce the body. A person has a right to appear in court and he suspended the writ of habeas corpus without the consent of Congress as required by the United States Constitution.

He illegally shut down and confiscated the printing presses of dozens of newspapers in the north that spoke out against him. 

We’re not talking about southern states in rebellion. We’re talking about northern states newspapers who were against Lincoln’s war. It was called Lincoln’s War by the way at the time when they wrote an editorial condemning his actions of fighting into the south; bringing a war to the south and to the civilians. He would have the army arrest the newspaper editors, destroy their printing presses, sometimes doing even worse. He even, listen to this, all you people out there who hate Trump and say Trump was going to be a dictator. He even issued an arrest warrant for the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court because he gave a ruling that he did not like. Chief Justice Roger Taney had ruled that Lincoln’s actions were, quote, illegal, criminal, and unconstitutional, unquote. Lincoln didn’t like what the Chief Justice wrote about him, so he tried to get him arrested. This attempt was not successful however, there were enough people, I guess there wasn’t as much of the deep state then, there were enough people who refused to carry it out. Then he invaded the south without the consent of Congress, again as required by the Constitution. By the way, do you know that Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers, had made it clear in his writings that states had the right to succeed from the Union at any time that they wished.

They were there voluntarily and if their citizens wanted to leave, they should be able to leave. Just a point of a Founding Father who saw that you can’t mandate that states be in a union they no longer want to be a part of. 

The next thing Lincoln did, he brought the war not to the soldiers of the Confederacy, he brought it to the citizens. Again, many people do not know this, but the Civil War, and I learned this in college, as I said in earlier shows, I was a political science major and I really have enough credits to be a history major or even an English major, even though my English isn’t that good. But the study of what Lincoln did in the south by declaring war, the Civil War is the first what is called modern, quote unquote modern, war in the history of the world. You know, before the Civil War, most wars were between armies and yes, civilians that got in the way were raped and murdered and butchered. I’m not going to say that wasn’t the case, but you have to go back almost to the ancient biblical days before you saw where the citizens of a state were considered warriors and not just the soldiers.

The Civil War changed all of that.

It adopted the new idea that the people were responsible as much as the soldiers on the side they were on. He imprisoned without trials, hundreds of newspaper editors, like I said, and censored their newspapers. He censored telegraph communications. He created two brand new states, West Virginia being one of them in order to get enough votes to get him elected the second time. He ordered federal troops to interfere with northern elections and made sure his parties could stuff ballots.

Does that sound familiar? It did to me.

 He confiscated private property, including firearms in violation of the second amendment. Private property, not just of the Confederacy of people living in the south, but people living that were still part of the union. But these people had talked against Mr. Lincoln’s war, and so he would send thugs in uniform to arrest them and confiscate all their weapons so they could not join the south if they wanted to. Then he ordered his generals to attack U.S. cities, southern cities, not northern cities, that were full of women and children and ordered them to be burnt to the ground.

Are you still not convinced?

Well, here are some really hard facts to swallow. Lincoln’s war, as I said earlier, Lincoln’s war established a precedent that has shaped the course of wars ever since. As I said, it was the first modern war where civilians were included in the targets. It also centralized the government power in Washington, D.C. Before Mr. Lincoln’s war, Washington and the federal government were controlled by the U.S. Constitution whereas the states had much more power. He also entered into a central banking system that we are stuck with today. He started an income tax long before the amendment in 1918 that legalized income tax. He legally levied an income tax on the people of the north. He instituted for the first time in American history, and America was 87 years old at the time, four score and seven years means 87, a score is 20 for those who do not know. He instituted an income tax, and again, he ordered civilians to be especially targeted to break the back of the south in order to win the war…a practice that we did in World War I and World War II. It so horrified General MacArthur that he saw that war had to be outlawed and had not thought of, especially with the invention of the nuclear bomb, because he saw that mankind’s greatest sin, war, could bring total destruction to the earth.

He even used these words on the U.S. Missouri when he accepted the surrender of the Japanese in 1945.

He said, quote, if we cannot find a more equitable way of solving conflicts, Armageddon will be at our door, unquote. Yes, General MacArthur knew the next war, the next world war, which we have not done yet since World War II, could be Armageddon, and Armageddon is the end that brings on the invasion from outer space when Jesus Christ returns.

Human beings did not always engage in total warfare as introduced in the south. In fact, in 1863, anybody old enough to remember the Vietnam War, World War II pictures, especially those who can remember the movies about World War II, remember something called the Geneva Convention. This was where even the Germans would allow, because they wanted to follow the Geneva Conventions, even those Nazi Germans would allow the Red Cross from Switzerland to visit POW camps in Germany and other Nazi-held territories to inspect the conditions and make sure the people were fed well, they had proper exercise, and they were not treated as slaves. Now, we all know that’s not true. We know that the minute the Red Cross people left, they were back being beaten to death again, but they made a show of it, at least, for the Red Cross and for the Geneva Convention. Not even Adolf Hitler would turn his nose on the Geneva Convention which so-called civilized warfare.

So this Geneva Convention that everyone talks about in World War II and Vietnam actually developed in the midst of the Civil War. The convention that made rules of war actually targeted Abraham Lincoln himself, calling the American Civil War a war crime. Lincoln, and they cited this in the Geneva Convention, Lincoln, I’m trying to get a paper open here, and I hope I can do that here without too much ado, but I’m having a problem. Sorry for the interruption there, but Lincoln made a plan called the Anaconda Plan, which he sought to blockade all the southern ports and waterways, including medical supplies and drugs and medications to save people, civilians or military people, from disease and illness. In the very first battle of Bull Run, the very first, there’s one and two Bull Runs, in the very first battle of the Civil War, the federal soldiers plundered and burnt the private homes of dozens of northern Virginia countryside residents, many of those who were not even sympathetic to the South.

General George McClellan, who was the leader of the Union troops, who would run against Lincoln for president in 1864 because he abhorred Lincoln’s policies, wrote to Lincoln a letter imploring to him that the war being conducted was not known to be of Christian civilization’s methods. He also recommended that we avoid targeting civilian populations at every extent that was possible. In fact, again, he said a war must be fought with the principles known to Christian civilizations.

Three months later, McClellan was replaced and Lincoln ignored the letter.

Most Americans are familiar with General William Tecumseh, you know, Sherman and his famous march to the sea, but his atrocities didn’t start with his famous march to the sea. In 1862, Sherman was having difficulties subduing Confederate sharpshooters who were harassing his gunboats on the Mississippi River. He then adopted the theory of collective responsibility, which we follow to this day, to justify attacking innocent civilians and retaliation for such attacks. He burnt the entire town of Randolph, Tennessee to the ground. He began taking civilian hostages and trading them for federal prisoners taken in war, or he would execute them.

It almost sounds like Hamas.

Jackson and Merritt in Mississippi were also burned to the ground by Sherman’s troops, and Sherman allowed his troops to ransack and steal and plunder whatever they found, as he said it was a cost of doing war. In 1864, Sherman would announce that any persistent resistance would meet death without mercy.

In 1862, General Sherman wrote to his wife that his purpose in the war would be to the extermination of not just the soldiers, but every Southerner there was in the South. His loving and gentle wife wrote back that her wish for him was, quote, a war of extermination and all of that, all of them Southerners, in parentheses, would be driven like swine, pigs, into the sea. May we carry out fire and sword in their states till not one man, woman, or child is left alive.

The Geneva Convention in 1863 condemned the bombardment of these cities by civilians, and Lincoln, unlike Adolf Hitler, ignored anything, and he didn’t even try to make a pretense to be following the Geneva Convention that we so adopt today as the standard. Sherman himself admitted after the war, when he was teaching at West Point, that if he lost the war, he would be hung for the things that he did and would have deserved it because he was, in his own words, a war criminal.

 These are the facts.

These are the facts of the war between the states, the Civil War, whatever you want to call it.

I’m not going to get into all the things that happened during war and try to justify this side or that side. I’m not. I’m not justifying, for example, I’m not taking the side of Hamas at all. Hamas are known butchers, terrorists, but there are times in American history when we were too! That doesn’t not make you a patriot to point that out and to understand that. We are still the best country in the world with how we treat the people we fight, the civilians in the land as well however we do inflict atrocities as well. I will suggest we have not been as bad as other countries as I think we do follow Christian values in most of wars we have fought so far however, we have to face the truth. We cannot be blindsided in this time with the Biden administration doing the things they are doing without realizing this has been done before and it’s been done with horrible consequences.

Consequences, by the way, which killed 620,000 American civilians and soldiers.

Basically, one-fourth of the population of the United States was either killed or wounded in the Civil War.

The wounded were so great in number with horrible pain that the next wave of a cost of that war was drug addiction.

Everyone was given back then morphine for their pain because their pain was so severe with legs shattered or cut off and afterwards for the next 40 years America suffered from morphine addiction. Many people do not know this, but the book Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was really written by someone who was addicted to morphine and that he saw that when he was under the effects of morphine he went from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde/ He had become a monster and this plagued America for some 40 years after the Civil War where some reports say up to a third of all adult Americans were morphine addicts.

Think about that. 

I will make my point and remind you that I am a patriot. I believe in this country, and I believe God blessed this country and God forgives this country for some of the war crimes that it did, but I want people to make decisions based on reality, on the facts, or as I would say, on the plain truth about all situations and then make an informative, intelligent decision. 

Don’t be led, or I should say misled, by people who want to feed you a line of history that just didn’t happen the way it’s taught.

You know, it’s always been said that the victory goes to the ones that write the history books and that is true. So, many times the history books are completely false because the victors were not the people they claimed to be when they wrote about themselves. If Adolf Hitler was able to pull off World War II, he would have been able to write all the history about it and the American people would have been all the villains deserving to die. That is, again, what happens when the victors write the history books. Thanks be to God, and I will say thanks to God because this is the case, there is enough stuff out there for us to be informed about the real history that shapes this country and shapes the world and shapes your destiny and that there is going to be a time of total peace when Christ returns to this world. He will come and He will stop us from destroying each other because that is what war does.

It just destroys and kills and maims and is the greatest sin of mankind and thankfully Christ will return.

He will rule this world.

He will not be elected. He won’t need your vote.

He will rule with an iron hand and a steel fist, and he will have things done His way and He will bring total peace. He will bring total joy and total victory over death and that’s what we need because we certainly are not following the ways of Christ today in this country or anywhere in this world…we need to be. We need to realize that we have been lied to. We’ve been lied to about our religion. We’ve been lied to about our government. We’ve been lied to about many things, and it is our responsibility to learn and to educate ourselves so that we can make informed decisions. Again, you have heard some of this in other broadcasts.

You don’t have to listen to me and quote me and say this is what Bob Barney said. Go look it up for yourself. You will find it readily available even on a censored internet that we have today with big tech trying to censor all of our little voices out here, but you can still find it.

Look for it now before that even goes away because I predict all of this will go away except what God allows through

. So anyway, that’s what I have to say about war crimes and American history. This was an American history lesson, and I think for many people listening to this they are a little surprised about the man on Mount Rushmore that wasn’t exactly the man we were told he was. There are many other stories about the racism of Abraham Lincoln and many other aspects as well about his character but that’s another story.

The most important thing to take from this broadcast is to learn your history, to learn your Bible, to learn the facts…to learn The Plain Truth about as much as you can so that you can then make informed decisions. That is what God wants you to do and that is what I ask you to do, too. Until the next program, this is Bob Barney saying thank you for listening.