Mistelten wrote:Have you ever noticed that "anti-racist" groups are usually quite racist in their own ideology? The SPLC tries to slander DiLorenzo in order to censor him just like they try to censor anyone else they don't agree with. Racism is irrelevant until people start dying, and they are on the wrong side of racial violence as well.
I call bullshit. Inequality and injustice are not 'irrelevant' until people start dying. When people start dying, that's an indication that the inequalities and injustices have gotten way too far out of hand.
Mistelten wrote:Unfavorable reviews such as the Claremont Insitute's that you believe in are nothing but the inevitable responses of the Lincoln apologists. DiLorenzo calls Lincoln a cult of personality and he is completely right. You go through his political life or even take issue with anything he's ever done, and someone will fall back on the official truth in opposition to you. That alone is proof that his is nothing if not a cult of personality - you can criticize ANY president but him.
I'm calling bullshit again. I've read some very pointed criticisms of Lincoln that didn't involve him being a 'mass murderer' or a 'despot' - I think there is some truth to the assertion that he was a political chameleon who adopted views as they became expedient, but I have yet to see any factual basis for 'despotism' or mass murder on Lincoln's part.
Lincoln was definitely considered a martyr, but that was nothing of his own doing - indeed, he was a fairly unpopular president in his own time both among Democrats and Democrat sympathisers (for his anti-slavery stance) and among hardliners in his own party (for his conciliatory stance toward the Border States and toward the South after the war). However, the assassination of Lincoln, and the public outrage which followed, was in some measure responsible for his resulting popularity (much like Kennedy in that regard, actually).
Mistelten wrote:Radicals were given a pass in calling for Bush's assassination for the past eight years.
False moral equivalence - in no moral universe that I know of is
saying that someone ought to die the moral equivalent of
actually assassinating him.
Mistelten wrote:Really there are no rules: only don't tell the truth about the most tyrannical President in American history, although I wouldn't give him the dignity of the title.
Which DiLorenzo doesn't.
And the last part makes your stance more pitiable, but it has nothing to do with actual history (in which Lincoln
was President whether you like it or not).
Mistelten wrote:He was not elected by the country he conquered
False. Lincoln was elected by the United States
by a clear plurality in the first election. In no way was conquest involved.
Mistelten wrote:he stole the second election by shipping his opponent off to Canada under an armed escort (and still nearly lost to the hugely unpopular McClellan).
Also false. Lincoln won
a landslide victory over McClellan (by 191 electoral votes and over 400,000 popular votes), and McClellan remained a commissioned officer in the United States Army right up to the day of the election, never going to Canada (though he did end up going to Europe after the election was over).
Though perhaps you could be referring to the case of Representative Clement Vallandigham of Ohio, who
was exiled - but not to Canada, rather to the South. He was never a contender for the presidency, but rather for the Ohio governorship (from Canada), which he lost miserably.