There is no objective difference between Oliver Cromwell, Maximilian Robespierre and Abraham Lincoln.
They're all cut from the same depraved cloth...
No, there is at least one a big difference. One was facing a 'nation' of evil. Who you face affects the morality of ones actions a lot. Robespierre wasn't facing anyone evil, he replaced a revolution (that hadn't yet gone crazy) with evil. Oliver Cromwell wasn't facing evil either, he was just facing Catholicism
Lincoln could have allowed the South to secede while totally refusing to recognize it. Then committed a total trade embargo on the south/funding slave rebellions and insurgencies by religious fanatics within the South..Like the radical Republicans were doing any way. The whole of the South would have eventually descended into total anarchy and then you move in using local militias supported by Federal troops to restore order.
Hell he could have declared war as he did OTL yet done so without the grotesque abuse of his office and the proto surveillance state.
Here's another problem: You are using the leaders of the nation to convict the nation. Maybe Lincoln was bad. But the side he was on was not. Invading a seceding territory that fired on you first is 100% justified. The same applies for the rest of the leaders of the nation as well. They can be bad people personally, but what matters is the cause of the war. They (by which I mean everyone from the general soldiers to the generals, we can tell from diaries and such) were fighting for union, and later on in the war, many came around for freeing the slaves. The confederacy was fighting for slavery.
Any way..both sides were equally immoral, one fought for slavery and the other was run by a guy who in a debate with Douglas said he would deport all blacks to Africa if he could find a way to do it cheaply and his second most important General was a guy Adolf Eichman and Hydrich both sourced when coming up with the holocaust.
The South fought an idiotic battle to protect a method of agriculture that was obsolete by that point for the better part of a century and hinged their entire cultural wagon to that wildly unstable horse and ran themselves headlong into a cultural genocide as a result.
So a couple of problems here. First, at the time they were looking for anyway to get rid of slavery, and some were in favor of deporting and others weren't. Also, yes, General Order no 11 was evil, but again, that doesn't mean the
cause of the war was evil, just some of the methods used.
You can play this game for WW2 as well, noting that FDR was an evil socialist, so was Stalin, and Bomber Harris was a war criminal. But there was still a right and wrong side to the war.
But the ACW was not a tale of heroes vs villains, but tyrants fighting madmen.
They weren't Tyrants. Lincoln did very little wrong. He might have started precedents that were used later by awful people, but that's not on him, that's on who used the precedents. Please name
concrete tyrannical things Lincoln did. Now he definitely did some not great things, but I want to know which things you don't like so I can debate on solid ground.
On American slavery black Americans have only benefitted from it today and they aren’t remotely grateful for it.
So this is incredibly, incredibly stupid, but also incredibly revealing about you. Outside of living in America, which only counts as a good if I were to give you this stupid ends justify the means argument where the ends weren't intended by anyone, any good of slavery would have ended with the banning of the slave trade in the early 1800s. So what good are you talking about here? Centuries of enforced obedience? Mass rape? Mass torture?
It’s also way more consistent to say “slavery isn’t inherently morally bad or the worst thing ever and I love America and it’s founding” and “slavery is the worst thing ever and I love America and it’s founding”. Once you cede that ground how do you say you love Americas founders and foundation exactly? They were the most evil and immoral men possible apparently, and according to @Abhorsen logic many of our founding fathers were more evil than men like John Wayne Gacy, with body counts higher than Edward Shipman.
Very easily. I say that I don't like everything they did, but I respect them for the good that they did, and the good that they did affected millions more than their evil. One doesn't have to be perfect to be honored, and until you understand that, you will continue to support evil in a stupid, self-defeating, attempt to defend America. Also, many of the founders weren't slaveholders either, so I don't even have to worry about that for many.
When people start talking about the evils of the Confederacy it just agitate me a bit, not because there weren’t bad aspects to the Confederacy, but because white slavery of blacks is singled out as something uniquely and horrifically evil that people today should still be ashamed of, yet all of the other terrible stuff happening all over the world through out the millennia is ignored.
So there is a side of me that just wants to fly the Stars and Bars as a big F-you to all of the anti-white leftists out there who it would piss off, not because I want slavery or want secession.
Here's the thing: It was uniquely evil for what Americans were doing. That and the mass invasions of the Indians started under Jackson are the two big problems. Now the invasions of the Indians can be somewhat justified by noting that they attacked us too, but there is zero justification for slavery. It is very evil, and it eventually led to One of America's big failings in the 1900s, namely Jim Crow.
