A New Birth of Tyranny: Lincoln’s “Entirely Fraudulent” Gettysburg Address

Today’s essay by Kirkpatrick Sale brilliantly illustrates the “entirely fraudulent” nature of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.  The “nation” was not founded in 1776, as Lincoln weirdly asserted, but years later when the Constitution was ratified; it was not founded on the principle of egalitarianism (“all men are created equal”) either; the founders did not revere democracy (“government of the people, by the people, for the people”) but feared it; and the War to Prevent Southern Independence was not fought over any of these things, as Lincoln falsely claimed in what has to be the Biggest Political Lie in American history.

The great H.L. Mencken recognized this decades ago.  The late Joe Sobran also demolished this lie while pointing out that the entire purpose of the existence of such neocon propaganda mills as Harry Jaffa’s Claremont Institute is to perpetuate this Big Lie since it is the “rhetoric of continuing revolution” (a.k.a., the rhetoric of perpetual war for perpetual peace).  Most of the rest of Lincoln’s rhetoric about the American founding, about which Sobran thought he knew next to nothing, is properly characterized as a “spectacular absurdity” by Donald Livingston.

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2:20 pm on November 13, 2013