Abraham Lincoln: American Dictator
- Thread starter f1onagher
- Start date
Circle of Willis
Well-known member
And the villainous faction in question was so odious that I daresay damn near any means would have been justified to ensure its defeat. Once again it's doubtless my outsider's perspective at work, but literally everything you mentioned as what Lincoln had gotten up to was bog standard at best for the suppression of rebellion in pretty much all of America's contemporaries, at worst unusually mild (don't even have to look abroad, look at how Americans themselves had treated slave rebellions - they'd kill everyone involved and then some).
And when the guys he's fighting & treading on are slavocrats who have done everything humanly possible to make themselves look like the unreasonable evil dudes for decades beforehand, or at best their Northern sympathizers (ie. Copperheads)? Forgive me if I cannot find it in my heart to shed tears for them or their sympathizers when the government takes a hard-line against them during the context of an outright civil war, no more than I will shed tears for Communist insurrectionists who launch a revolution, fail and get jailed or massacred (which also didn't happen to the Southerners post-war BTW, again quite unlike how most rebellions would have been treated in history).
So you're still insisting on defending a tyrant, and your way of doing this is just to say that the other asshole was a bigger asshole, and that somehow makes it okay for the tyrant to act like a tyrant and break every principal this nation is supposed to hold dear?
Again, why couldn't they let the South go?
Something else I'm curious about, is how many of the people defending Lincoln for being a literal tyrant turned their back on Trump after he said that shit about suspending the Constitution in response to the election fraud. I'm going to go ahead and call all of you hypocrites to your face right now.
Speaking of Trump... Razorfist apparently whining (still haven't seen any of the video beyond the few minutes on Sherman) about Sherman and his Wifes personal and private letters reminds me of today as well. Mostly in the vein of "NO MEAN TWEETS!"
Circle of Willis
Well-known member
In general, wars are not won by trying to kill the other side with kindness. And in the case of the American Civil War it doesn't seem at all as though the Union even out-asshole'd the Confederacy. For fuck's sake, even George Washington crushed armed rebellion based on an inarguably vastly more American cause than 'we are prepared to kill and die for slavery' - tax evasion - when he suppressed the Whiskey Rebellion; was he also a tyrant?So you're still insisting on defending a tyrant, and your way of doing this is just to say that the other asshole was a bigger asshole, and that somehow makes it okay for the tyrant to act like a tyrant and break every principal this nation is supposed to hold dear?
Again, why couldn't they let the South go?
Well, why should they have let the South go? From an ideological stand based on self-determination, why I don't think the slaves (a third of the Southern population) and Southern Unionists (of which there were many thousands upon thousands, from generals like George Thomas down to rank-and-file Unionist troops & guerrillas or the entire state of West Virginia) were consulted as to whether seceding & founding the Confederacy was a good idea - do they not also have as much right to self-determination as the fire-eaters? And from a more practical viewpoint, almost no country would agree to letting parts of it which it considered integral just walk away without a fight (the only exception I can think of is Czechoslovakia's Velvet Divorce post-Communism), especially not when the breakaway would be well-positioned to become a leading rival to it in its own backyard.
Soooooo we've approached that portion of the thread where we can finally ask, anyone know any heroes from history who are so clean they require no sanitation and talking positively about them isn't automatic apologism for Nazi esque behavior?
KilroywasNOTHere
"BEEP!"
Soooooo we've approached that portion of the thread where we can finally ask, anyone know any heroes from history who are so clean they require no sanitation and talking positively about them isn't automatic apologism for Nazi esque behavior?
Washington was decent
Circle of Willis
Well-known member
This is why the attack on Lincoln as being the 'harbinger of centralism and all its evils' fails, IMO. What he did may have been exceptional by American standards, but certainly not by international ones as already expressed earlier in this thread. And the exceptional-ity of his actions isn't even all that exceptional when you consider that it actually fits into a pattern first set by Washington and the Constitutional Convention, which after all replaced an even more decentralized (but also evidently unworkable, otherwise they wouldn't have abandoned it in the wake of Shays' Rebellion) structure of government as laid out by the Articles of Confederation, all prior to meeting violent rebellion with more state violence in order to suppress it.Soooooo we've approached that portion of the thread where we can finally ask, anyone know any heroes from history who are so clean they require no sanitation and talking positively about them isn't automatic apologism for Nazi esque behavior?
If Lincoln is to be blamed for sowing the seeds which would sprout into the Woodrow Wilson and FDR administrations, then it is only logical to blame Washington for sowing the seeds which would sprout into Lincoln. Washington (and actually most of the Founding Fathers as a whole - Hamilton's involvement was obvious but also Madison, Franklin, etc. I think only Patrick Henry completely rejected it) played an instrumental role in the first step the US took toward centralization with the replacement of the Articles of Confederation by the Constitution after all, and he also set the precedent of violent federal suppression of rebellions by snuffing out the Whiskey Rebellion. If Lincoln is Satan, then truly Washington, Madison, etc. must be the Fathers of Satan - and at that point you might as well retroactively extend blame for Wilson, FDR, LBJ, the Bushes, etc. to Washington and friends too!
Now it could be argued that Washington was pretty mild compared to Lincoln and that he probably didn't see his actions at the time as precedents for future tyrants who either weren't even born or were but children during his own lifetime, but of course the exact same argument can be made to defend Lincoln from any association with people like Wilson and Roosevelt, so yeah...
Yinko
Well-known member
An experiment implies that it has success and failure standards. The US can have no failure standards, therefore the idea of it being an experiment is mere propaganda. That's why I've always hated the phrase.
Lol
. You think it ended. Professor J. Rufus Fears was a huge fan of Lincoln and did a series on him called "Lincoln in his Own Words". I watched it when I was quite a lot younger. Even that, rather curated, account was extremely red-pilling towards Lincoln. I hadn't known most of the things that were in this video. I wish that I could say that they had all been a surprise. However, it is extremely clear to even a cursory examination of history that the character of the US changed during the Civil War, from a collection of polities to a single monolithic polity, and that is not possibly without tyranny. The only examples of groups banding together under empire of their own accord is due to the threat of a greater external power, which did not exist hear, especially given that the 'threat' was then folded into the empire.
KilroywasNOTHere
"BEEP!"
Personally, I'm honestly starting to wish that he had just genocided the southerners and given them a final stand given how whites, especially Deep South American whites are treated and spat upon as a result of the civil war, but that comes down to a difference in philosophy. For me it's better to die with a sword or a pen in your hand than to live with your face downcast like a mere dog.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
1: The South started the war.
2: The people leading the South had demonstrated a willingness to use armed force to try to implement slavery in other states, and to go and seize escaped slaves. Even if the war had not started immediately, this (among other things) almost certainly would have caused it within a decade.
Zyobot
Just a time-traveling robot stranded on Earth.
That’s like saying it’d have been better for the US to bomb Europe into oblivion after World War II, in order to spare its eastern half communist rule or the rest of us the twenty-first century as we know it. Pointlessly destructive, more akin to outright killing a patient instead of amputating their gangrenous arm, and ultimately, the Moral Event Horizon where you lose whatever high ground you once had the second you cross it.
Look, I get you and others here don’t like Lincoln, but honestly? This is where you’ve lost me, as well as lots of other people who might otherwise be amenable to “Okay, so the North wasn’t perfect!” lines of argument in general. Otherwise, I’d be perfectly willing to entertain the idea that the expansion of federal power nonetheless had deleterious long-term consequences, but really, you can’t make the Feds worse than if they unleashed the goddamned Morgenthau Plan on the defeated South.
Circle of Willis
Well-known member
What??? Firstly Lincoln couldn't have done anything to the post-war South, seeing as he was assassinated right after Lee's surrender but before the ACW even ended and the Confederacy itself wasn't totally defeated until it collapsed entirely in May of 1865, a month after his death.
Secondly, Deep South American whites were probably the most leniently treated rebellious populace in all of history. They weren't massacred in droves, they weren't imprisoned or deported to an Alaskan/Arizonan gulag, they certainly weren't enslaved themselves, and they even got to restore their power like a decade later. I've said as much before but apparently it must be repeated: in the same timeframe as the ACW something like 70,000 Poles got deported after the failure of the January Uprising against Russia (on top of tens of thousands killed in the rebellion itself), ~800,000 Indians died in the suppression of the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 by the British, and 30-100 million Chinese were getting killed over the course of the Taiping Rebellion's suppression by the Qing dynasty, among a bunch of other outrages performed in attempts to break rebellious populations elsewhere.
Had they rebelled against any other imperial power in any other time in history they'd probably be looking at even worse than that. The same Jacobin revolutionaries Thomas Jefferson was fond of responded to the Vendée uprising with a pseudo-genocidal campaign of massacres & rapine that left 200,000 dead. And the Roman Republicans who the Founding Fathers looked up to responded to Spartacus' slave rebellion by crucifying 6,000 slaves between Rome & Capua, while their Imperial successors were the reason why there wasn't a Jewish nation in Israel until 1948.
You're out of your mind if you think they were 'spat upon' and treated harshly by the US government post-war, just because...well, why? Because CRT (which I don't deny is complete bullshit) has been a thing and Hollywood celebs have held 'flyover country' in disdain for the past 60 years, basically a blink of an eye in macrohistorical terms? I sincerely recommend getting some perspective and also thickening your skin here. Like holy shit, 'massacre everyone who looks like the rebels regardless of guilt' was how Southern American whites themselves responded to Nat Turner's slave revolt a full 30 years before the outbreak of the ACW!
KilroywasNOTHere
"BEEP!"
I'm talking about how they are being treated TODAY. Half the stuff in regard to all the "White man bad" narrative came about because of slavery and the civil war (The other half comes from European colonization). No south means no muh confederate narrative that globalists have been able to successfully use to browbeat every white nation on the planet. I can't buy that living under WEF globalism is a better fate than death.
Zyobot
Just a time-traveling robot stranded on Earth.
So … that’s your outlook? Kill the patient outright, rather than amputate their gangrenous appendages and do whatever you can to save the rest of them?!?
Because if that’s the case, then I sure as Hell don’t want you as my doctor. And judging by your exchange with him, I highly doubt @Circle of Willis does, either.
KilroywasNOTHere
"BEEP!"
your looking at this like an infection when I see the disease more as cancer, and a terminal one at that. and in the case you don't do everything to save him and leave him in misery and agony just to buy him a couple of more weeks you let him go out on the terms he wants to go out on even if it means he goes out quicker going out on your terms does not always mean committing sucide. and there ARE worse fates then death in this world.
Circle of Willis
Well-known member
Southern blacks had to put up with their Southern white overlords like Benjamin Tillman, Rebecca Felton and Theodore Bilbo regularly ranting about the need to lynch blacks in order to keep them subordinate to white men and their paws off white women, and then at best abetting and at worst directly leading & participating in such lynchings and massacres, for decades. They managed to survive that just as they survived segregation in all facets of life, being funneled into convict-leasing schemes and chain gangs (basically the only sort of slavery kept legal by the 13th Amendment) for offenses as bullshit and petty as 'vagrancy', having all peaceful efforts to accumulate wealth and gain political power be overturned by violent white supremacists (ala the Rosewood Massacre and the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898) and, yes, being mocked and made fun of as part of a nation-spanning 'black man bad' narrative by way of minstrel shows and blackface comedies and movies like Birth of a Nation. The 'white man bad' narrative pushed by CRT proponents is hideously overblown but, like any good lie, it's one that has a kernel of truth to it: blacks were indeed slaves, and then second-class citizens, and they did face genuine oppression (not the sort Tumblrinas whine about today) back in the day.
If you're genuinely advocating that the white South should've been genocided so that its descendants 200 years in the future wouldn't have to deal with, Idek, unqualified Lizzo-esque 'academicians' ranting about wypipo bad or the existence of Blacked.com and that whole genre of porn...man, I don't even know what to say. This isn't even suggesting killing the patient outright rather than treating his injuries because you think the injuries aren't survivable, this is suggesting killing the patient because if he lives to reproduce, his great-great-grandson might get yelled at by an idiot protester 200 years down the road.
Zyobot
Just a time-traveling robot stranded on Earth.
Maybe there are billions of people who don't want to go out the way you want them to. I'm sure one of them, and again, so are @Circle of Willis and non-blackpilled just on this forum alone — never mind out there in the real world!
You also forget the part where you administer comfort and reassurance to the patient as they lay dying, rather than smother them with a pillow because you can't stand how "drawn out" and "emotionally taxing" the process is — for doctors and the dying person both. Sorry, but that's my bottom line, and while I'm certainly not one of those naive souls who thinks every last problem America faces will be fixed by civic engagement or whatever, I'd at least like the chance to keep myself and circle of loved ones safe and sheltered as the coming storm approaches. And if you're seriously suggesting demolishing all the buildings in the hurricane's way before we can so much as set the shelters up to begin with ... then honestly, I'm at just as much a loss as Circle is to convince you otherwise, and simply wish you the best of luck.
KilroywasNOTHere
"BEEP!"
Maybe there are billions of people who don't want to go out the way you want them to. I'm sure one of them, and again, so are @Circle of Willis and non-blackpilled just on this forum alone — never mind out there in the real world!
You also forget the part where you administer comfort and reassurance to the patient as they lay dying, rather than smother them with a pillow because you can't stand how "drawn out" and "emotionally taxing" the process is — for doctors and the dying person both. Sorry, but that's my bottom line, and while I'm certainly not one of those naive souls who thinks every last problem America faces will be fixed by civic engagement or whatever, I'd at least like the chance to keep myself and circle of loved ones safe and sheltered as the coming storm approaches. And if you're seriously suggesting demolishing all the buildings in the hurricane's way before we can so much as set the shelters up to begin with ... then honestly, I'm at just as much a loss as Circle is to convince you otherwise, and simply wish you the best of luck.
what can I say? I'm out of hope. When One side is so emasculated they start worshiping people like Andrew freaking Tate of all people and the other side is advocating for their own deaths because "Muh white privilege?" and neither side knows how to wipe their butts without a Nanny (Metaphorically mind you or at least lord I hope it's only metaphorically) I'm left totally at a loss.