By suggesting that it was an extreme insult to Christians for Lincoln (who was not a Christian) to have pretended to have known what was in the mind of God, for one thing. And for another thing, by reminding the Lincoln Cult that the rest of the planet ended slavery peacefully in the nineteenth century, as Jim Powell documents in his outstanding book, Greatest Emancipations. This is not a “crazy slavery theory,” as neocon Ira Stoll says, but historical fact. Slavery ended peacefully in New York and other states in the North, by the way, not just in Britain, Spain, France, Netherlands, Sweden, etc.
What really bugs Ira Stoll in this article is the idea that anyone — especially a former president — could possibly suggest that peaceful solutions to international disputes are preferable to war. Ira says the mass-murdering Lincoln should be Obama’s role model for foreign affairs, not Jimmy Carter, or the Prince of Peace himself for that matter. If Lincoln could micromanage the murder of 350,000 fellow citizens, what could possibly be wrong with the Obama administration murdering a few million Muslims and North Koreans? “Father Abraham” would approve, they will say.
