I read a lot of history and I've read Lincoln's speeches and writings and I do not find the man this guy describes. If one quotes Southern newspapers, Copperhead Democrats and their allies, sure, you get the message that Lincoln was just as evil as this guy portrays him. But then if you pick and choose your "authorities" you can make a case for any private belief about those terrible days in our history. There were a few honorable men in those days and often they were surrounded by an impossibly corrupt body politic. These honorable men and women were placed there by God, I believe, to stand in the breach and defend us from the true enemy of all mankind.
What Lincoln did do, for all his perceived failings, was by his words instill generations of men and women with the dedication to the idea that all men are created equal. The South clung desperately to the idea that some men were created more equal than others for more than two hundred years - even long after the Civil War and into the 20th century. Rags of that belief about the inherent inferiority of people of color still drift on the political winds in the South and even in the North where the culture is supposed to be above all that. I doubt seriously the South would ever have given up that idea of racial superiority on their own. I know, because I grew up in the South and I witnessed the stupid blind racial prejudice of my own forbears first hand, bred into them when they ought to have known better.
It's odd that someone like my friend, who argues from the far right on most occasions, would choose at this time to make Lincoln the evil one in 19th century history, as though all those poor slave-holding Democrats were simply misunderstood. It's odd that the new anti-Lincoln conservatives argue that Lincoln should have negotiated more with the South and that would have worked. Odd for a conservative to favor negotiation as the cure-all for slavery. This guy even suggests that if Congress had simply expanded slave territory as the Southern planters politely requested, the good-hearted slave owners would have had more room to relieve over-crowding in the slave pens and bought time for them to end slavery in an orderly fashion (as though the Southern gentlemen were working busily to end slavery all on their own).
If the writer had any experience of the South at its cultural pinnacle, he too would recognize what a flying load of horse excrement that idea is. The South wanted to expand slave-holding territory so they could insure there were enough votes in the Senate and House to stave off something like the Emancipation Proclamation. Negotiation only prolonged the agony. We should be ashamed we did not put an end to slavery sooner than we did - on principle!
NEGOTIATION!???!!!
Do these guys honestly think negotiation would have ended slavery? Were they not paying attention in 6th grade history? You don't end an evil by compromising with it. I think the far right blogosphere has been seeded by the progressives with counter-insurgents. You can tell who they are because of how much they sound like Obama when you get them heated up.
Extend that same rationale that my friend has suggested be applied to the slave states to our Middle East policy and we should just go talk things out with the nice Islamo-Facist states and all would be well. No pre-conditions, just a nice chat on the porch, maybe some lemonade and mint juleps..... I'm just certain that would work so much better than us blowing up terrorist bases willy nilly. I mean, somebody could get hurt with all those nasty guns and things. If we negotiate with them and stop shooting, then that would make them like us, wouldn't it?
I have an idea! Let's let them have Europe so they have room to relieve over-crowding in Palestine and Yemen and the Sudan. That will give them time to put an end to terrorism voluntarily. You know they really don't want to be terrorists and if we just give them a chance and show them how nice we really are, they'll come around and be nice to us!
NEGOTIATE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Great flying buckets of penguin poop, would you read something besides the revisionist progressive/socialist/Marxist history please?
The Civil War was frightfully bloody BECAUSE it was preceded by decades of brilliant negotiation by Daniel Webster, Henry Clay and the like. The result of all this brilliant negotiation was that Southern gentlemen did decades more of further slave-based profit-taking and brutalized hundreds of thousands of slaves in the process, locking them more firmly into the slave system than ever and damaging their culture so badly that the effects are still to be seen today in the ghettos and 'hoods of our major cities where millions wait passively for Massa Obama to bring them something from his magical Obama stash.
It was about damned time someone stood up and said ENOUGH. As it was, to get the thing done required every ounce of negotiation, compromise, double talk and conniving President Lincoln could do, to stand up to the planterocracy. He bent the hell out of the constitution, that's certain, but he saved a nation and freed a whole race of people in the process.
If a group of the states decide to go Marxist and began marching guys like me off to the gulags for not going along, I rather hope we get a president as willing as Lincoln to do what it takes. Somewhere it says that "All men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The founding fathers changed that last line. It started out "life, liberty and property" but they wanted to eventually end slavery and didn't want to lock the new government into protecting slaves as "property". Four score and seven years later they were still "negotiating" to free those slaves and nowhere nearer to achieving that goal.
Now, we face a new kind of slavery - slavery to an ideology that views man as a mass and not as individuals and demands service to an elite leadership and not to the ideal of liberty. We are up against an ideology willing to lie, cheat and commit mass murder to insure, not equality, but sameness of all. It is a great evil come upon us and this is not the time to start denigrating the very heroes who have stood in the breach in our past and fought for freedom. That is what the enemy sappers will do to prepare our nation for conquest - blow up our icons and knock down the very symbols that teach us to do right. The idea is to leave us without heroes and heroic stories so that we may be left wandering aimlessly about without direction or purpose when the invasion comes.
The people will save their government, if the government itself will allow them.
- Abraham Lincoln
"It is always requires the voluntary shedding of the blood of good men to purge an entrenched evil from the world."
You can quote me on that one.
Tom King - Flint, TX
-
No comments:
Post a Comment