[Peace-discuss] Letter to Editor

[C. G. Estabrook]

Although Seiter thinks he's presenting a reductio ad absurdum,
I think he might be right.  

It may be as much a mistake to make Lincoln a hero, just
because slavery was wrong, as it is to make Bush Jr. a hero
because Saddam was a tyrant.  It's certainly a mistake to see
both (Lincoln v. slavery, Bush v. Saddam) as either-ors that
exhaust the possibilities.  

The radical Republicans ca. 1860 would have said (probably
did) "You're either with us or with the slavers" -- that's
what Lincoln's rhetorical genius allowed him to say in the
Gettysburg speech -- and there's no more reason to believe
that than there is to believe its modern analogue.

See the anti-establishment portrait of Lincoln in Gore
Vidal's novel of the same name, perhaps more accurate than
the historical consensus.  A recent scholarly study, Ethan S.
Rafuse's "McClellan's War: The Failure of Moderation in the
Struggle for the Union," presents the politics of those who
were opposed to the slave-holding aristocracy as well as to
the radical Republicans.  William Appleman Williams, the major
revisionist (and anti-Vietnam war) historian of a generation
ago, pointed out that those Republicans represented the
interests of, e.g, wealthy Midwestern landowners.  

In fact the Civil War called upon poor people to die in a
contest between two elites who disagreed on how to exploit
labor -- slavery or the wage contract.  In some ways
wage-laborers in the North were treated worse than slaves. 
(E.g., to drain the pestilential swamps around New Orleans,
Louisiana slave-owners imported Irish laborers from the North:
a dead slave was a major loss, but you could always rent
another Irishman.)  Marx wrote to Lincoln to congratulate him
on the defeat of slavery, but only because he believed it
clarified the class struggle. 

I can imagine being a member of an anti-war movement in the US
a century and a half ago.  It's not too much of a stretch to
see those who arranged Lincoln's nomination as the neocons of
the time, mutatis mutandis.  Like the neocons, they
represented one end of the elite policy spectrum; one might
even argue that they divided the Whigs as the neocons have
divided the Republicans.

As Mark Twain said, history doesn't repeat itself -- but it
does rhyme. --CGE


---- Original message ----

On 30 May 2006 Brian Dolinar <briandolinar at gmail.com> wrote:  

>Don't miss this...
>
>Anti-war critics could take aim at Lincoln
>Tuesday May 30, 2006
>
>Carl Estabrook (May 8 letter) predictably demagogued my
letter. My
>comment directed toward Estabrook referenced his hypocrisy in not
>generating a ballot referendum calling for the impeachment of
>President Clinton.
>
>I am not impressed by whatever lip service Estabrook may have
paid to
>purported Clinton war crimes either on his radio show or
through his
>letters to the editor. It is action, not words, that counts.
>
>If anti-war ideologues were consistent in their moral views,
there was
>no greater warmonger worthy of impeachment than Illinois' own
Abraham
>Lincoln.
>
>President Lincoln "illegally and immorally" invaded other
sovereign
>states of the South using South Carolina's bloodless bombing
of Fort
>Sumter as a pretense for war. No war for cotton, Mr. Lincoln!
>
>President Lincoln spied on Americans, he lied about not going
to war
>over slavery, and he suspended the Writ of Habeas Corpus. If
he had
>simply trusted in the Anaconda plan, war could have been averted.
>
>These so-called facts prove Lincoln was the worst president
of all
>time who sent 618,000 American soldiers and untold tens of
thousands
>of civilians to their ignoble deaths. And for what? For the
good of
>America? To free the slaves? Bah, humbug.
>
>No slave that ever lived was worth the life of one American
soldier.
>Not in our name.
>
>I'll be accused by some of comparing apples to oranges, and
maybe they
>are right. Given the anti-war left's own purported concern
for the
>safety of American soldiers fighting "a bunch of radical
Arabs," how
>much more grievous was Lincoln's "evil" when it was Americans
fighting
>Americans? Lincoln lied, and Americans died!
>
>HENRY SEITER Jr.
>
>Urbana