The Latest Nonsense from the Lincoln Cult

Compare the words of Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence:

“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers
from the consent of the governed.”

To this, from one Austin Bramwell in the Takimag blog:

“Nothing short of a new national mythology could have justified
the Civil War’s carnage. Lincoln preserved legitimate government
in North America . . . . For this reason conservatives . . . might
revere Lincoln.”

So despite the Lincoln Cult’s worshipping of the Declaration (well, actually, only the “all men are created equal” part), we are informed that governments don’t derive their just powers from the consent of the governed after all. One man, in this case Dishonest Abe, is able to invent a new and ahistorical theory about America (his “nationalist mythology”), and prove himself “right” by orchestrating the mass murder of some 350,000 dissenters to the new theory. This is what preserves “legitimate government.”

This of course is not new. It’s the tired, old lie that Lincoln himself invented and is kept alive by such propagandists for the American empire as Harry Jaffa and his merry band of Claremontistas.

Stalin must have loved this theory — that “legitimate government” is derived from the mass murder of those who do not consent to being governed by Stalin. I suppose that’s why communist sympathizers such as Lincoln Cultist Eric Foner of columbia University opposed the break-up of the Soviet Union. In a Feb. 11, 1991 article in The Nation entitled “Lincoln’s Lesson” Foner opposed the secession movements in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Georgia and urged Gorbachev to deal with them in the same brutal and barbaric manner that Lincoln dealt wiith his own citizens who didn’t buy into his new theory of “nationalist man.” Secession, said Foner, would destroy the “laudable goal” of “overreaching loyalty to the Soviet Union.”

There are apparently no limits at all to the nonsense that Lincoln Cultists will come up with as they desperately try to invent more and more excuses for Lincoln’s mass murdering of 350,000 of his own citizens.

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9:28 am on May 16, 2008