Mark Levin cites the Siege of Vicksburg to justify civilian deaths in Gaza
Citation From the November 7, 2023, edition of Westwood One's The Mark Levin Show
MARK LEVIN (HOST): This is from last Saturday, opening statement Life, Liberty & Levin on Fox. Go.
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MARK LEVIN: I wanna talk about casualties. Do you think a 100,000 civilian deaths in one year is significant? Oh, it's massive. When you consider we lost about 59,000 men and women in the Vietnam War, when you consider we lost over 50,000 in the Korean war, it's a lot of people. Those were combatants, not civilians, not citizens. So, let me ask you a question. When a president of the United States keeps a border open intentionally, the southern border, and upwards of a hundred thousand young Americans age 18 to 45 die every single year that border is open from fentanyl, almost 100,000 civilian, American civilian casualties -- well, what kind of president is that? Is that a man who gives a damn about human life? Is that a man who's compassionate about the American people? Is that a man who wants to protect the American people? Absolutely silent. He doesn't even talk about it while his flunky, the secretary of DHS keeps testifying that the border is secure, or we need comprehensive immigration reform. And I'm not even including the inhumanity, the other inhumanity that's taking place on the border, the sex slaves, the children sold into sex slavery. The rapes, the murders, the other drugs coming across -- drug cartels with ties to the communist Chinese who use techniques like ISIS coming into our country. They now have a foothold in every major metropolitan and every one of our states.
What kind of a president is that? He's a president that should be impeached. That's a high crime, doing that to your own country -- 100,000 civilian deaths a year, probably more. We just had the FBI director testify that the FBI now controls enough fentanyl, illegal fentanyl that it has -- that it has acquired to kill 270,000,000 Americans. 270,000,000 Americans, and the border's still wide open given what's going on in the Middle East. Can you think of another country that has an open border? Any? Can you think of another president or prime minister or dictator or monarch who would leave a border open like that, so its own people are suffering and dying? We're talking about potential terrorist attacks, we're gonna have them. We all know it. You can't have millions of people coming in here, not vetting them, not even know who they are and where they're going and assume that the people who wanna blow us up, the people who took down the Towers, the people who hit us over and over and over and over again, that all of a sudden they're gonna somehow respect the rules of law, or they're not gonna sneak across the border. Biden knows it. Harris knows it. The attorney general knows it. The FBI director is sitting right next to Mayorkas, and he wouldn't even point the finger and say, you need to secure that border. No. He couldn't even bring himself to do that.
Why am I telling you this? Because Joe Biden doesn't give a damn about American civilian casualties as he goes on about civilian casualties in Gaza, as he talks about a humanitarian ceasefire. You know what a humanitarian ceasefire is? It's appeasement. It's appeasement in stages. But appeasement in stages is appeasement. The Israelis cannot afford to lose a war when their very survival's at stake. Ask Hamas, they keep announcing "We're gonna keep at it till they're destroyed." Ask Hamas's rioters, protesters, the Hamas network. You see them in the streets. You hear the professors. You see the college students, you even see the media. What do they say as they spew the propaganda of the enemy? As they spew the propaganda of the enemy?
The Democrat Party is a problem. The Democrat Party is a party without a soul. It's a party without principle. It's a party without morality. That's why the democratic socialists, AKA Marxist who hate America, that's why the Hamas Nazi-supporting individuals in our country, they're all Democrats. They have representation in Congress. They have representation in Democrat Party Organizations. They have representation of the Democrat media. They're not Republicans. They're not constitutional conservatives, they hate us.
But I wanna talk about civilian casualties because they're trying to now force Netanyahu to resign. MSNBC and Biden and the other -- "He's weak. He's weak" -- no, it's Biden who should resign. He should be impeached. A high crime that he's committing against the people of the United States, just the southern border alone. But I wanna give us a little bit of history here that I'm sure is not being taught in our schools.
The Civil War, the Siege of Vicksburg was one of the most important victories for the union in the American Civil War, writes Aaron O'Neil at Statistica, as it helped give them control of the Mississippi River while cutting off a major supply line for Union forces. When Major General Ulysses S Grant's Union troops tried to take the fortress by force in mid-May 1863, they were twice pushed back with heavy casualties. Instead of sending his man to try a third time, Grant had a different idea. He encircled Vicksburg.The 2nd most important military manufacturing city in the Confederacy. One side, the Mississippi River, he sent his massive gunboats. The rest of it, often on a hill, he surrounded it. And what did he do?
Night after night, day after day, relentlessly, he prevented anyone from leaving, and he prevented anyone from going in. No ingress, no egress. Citizen, noncitizen, it didn't matter. The inhabitants survived for about 40 days before running out of provisions. They couldn't get any food. Many reports claim the starving inhabitants, mostly citizens, but also military had to resort to eating dogs and rats in order to survive. Dogs and rats. Some people starved to death. Most were malnourished. It was a horrendous scene.
Vicksburg. Was Abraham Lincoln a war criminal, or was Abraham Lincoln one of our greatest presidents in American history? And let me ask this question. Israel needs to fight to survive. Hamas has said it wants to destroy them. Hamas is backed by Iran. Hamas is backed by Hezbollah. Hamas is now backed by Russia and China. This tiny little Jewish state with 7,000,000 Jews up against it, do they have a right to fight to win? Not if you listen to to Joe Biden. A humanitarian ceasefire, so you can provide food and medicine and fuel that the enemy Hamas steals? There's evidence they're stealing fuel from the hospitals, they're using their people as fodder. The Israelis aren't doing it. The enemies doing that, but, of course, the American media are all in.
Was it really okay for the Israelis to go after one commander who helped lead the slaughter of their people, with all the casualty occurred? Do you think that would have been asked during the Civil War?
So here's my question. Abraham Lincoln, in my view, the 2nd greatest president in history, George Washington, the first. Do we revere him? You bet we do. Why? Because he defeated the South, he kept the Union together and he ended slavery.
Well, let me ask you something. 700,000 casualties. 50,000 citizens died. Now, I know it's not as much as the open border that Biden has with a 100,000 Americans dying every year, but 50,000 were killed. Was it worth the battle to keep the nation together and to end slavery? Well, most of us think it was. You see, Lincoln didn't agree with a two-state solution. It was one country. No two-state solution. He could have easily negotiated for a two-state solution. He said no, it's the United States of America. That's number one. Number two, slavery. Slavery was barbaric. Do we agree? Democrat, Republican, do all of us agree? Yes.
700,000 casualties -- so when the Israelis fight for their lives, for their survival, is that okay? No. No. They're the aggressor. No. They're the occupier. No, they need to be obliterated. And so they keep trying to pull Netanyahu back. They keep trying to pull the IDF back. Well, it seems to me if it was good enough to fight -- and it should be, and it was -- to end slavery, well, it's good enough for the Israelis to fight for their lives and their very survival and against this whole notion of a two-state solution, which will be their final solution.
You wanna hear another one? How about the Battle of Atlanta? By 1864, General William Tecumseh Sherman had come to believe that a Union victory required not only defeating the Southern armies -- listen -- but also destroying the South's physical ability and psychological will to continue the war. This was also the case in World War II. World War II is often called the war against civilians. Dresden, Berlin, London, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, all -- and partially military, but all aimed at destroying the will of the people to support these regimes. All of them, and we were involved in them, big time.
Atlanta Transportation Industrial Center, a symbol of Confederate strength made a prime target. So, what did Sherman do? Well, he marched through Atlanta like crap through a goose. Soldiers set fire to the city, culminating when the troops set much of the downtown area ablaze during the last night in the city. Sherman had carefully studied census records to make sure his troops could live off the land before leaving Atlanta and to maintain his supply line. The Union soldiers raided farms, destroyed cotton fields and mills, slaughtered livestock and burned properties where they met resistance and took as much food as they could carry.
During the occupation of Atlanta, Sherman wrote to city officials there, "War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it." Years later, he shortened the sentiment during an address at the Michigan Military Academy -- "War is hell." And we've always viewed it that way, and we've always fought it that way. Two of our greatest presidents, Lincoln, and then later Grant viewed it that way. We would not have this country, we would not have ended slavery if we didn't fight the way we fight. We would not have won World War II and defeated Hitler and the 3rd Reich, Tojo, the Japanese emperor and Imperial Japan, we would not have defeated Mussolini and Fascistic Italy. We would not have destroyed those concentration camps and all the rest of the brutality that the Axis powers were involved in, had we not fought to win. To win. That's our perspective. That should be our perspective.
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Levin: Now that I'm back live, that covers some of the areas we've discussed before, and there's another piece of it that I wanna play for you after the bottom of the hour, since the next segment will be too short.