Lincoln's a guide because in 1854 he revived his political career over a moral question, slavery, and transformed the country. At a time when the mainstream political parties were accommodating slavery, Lincoln declared that slavery was evil and he wanted to stop its extension. Of course he had a lot of company, including abolitionists. But his focus was mainstream politics. Lincoln took an outsider, radical movement that was based on a simple principle, All men are created equal, and gave it political standing. The newly-formed Republican Party won the presidency in 1860, thanks to Lincoln.
Today the political mainstream is corrupted by its thorough endorsement of Israeli apartheid, an accommodation that is destroying my country's foreign policy in the Middle East. Many, many outsiders in American political life are opposed to this policy: but how will we have an effect? Especially when we are tarred with the friends-of-terrorists brush.
Lincoln was also tarred with the terrorism brush. He had to deal with his own version of Hamas: John Brown.
Today Brown is widely considered a heroic martyr. The leader of violent resistance to slavery culminating in the revolt in Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859 that killed 15 people, including two of his sons, Brown was hanged for treason by the federal government in late 1859. Now he is honored in song, monuments and novels. Yes, there is criticism of his use of violence, and of his role in starting the Civil War. But his image is generally heroic.
In the months after his death, Brown became a big problem for Lincoln in the presidential year of 1860. The south tried to hang Brown's revolutionary violence on Lincoln's "Black Republicans."
Like John Brown, Lincoln believed slavery was "a great moral, social and political evil." Indeed the party had formed around this position. Lincoln had come out of political retirement over the issue, and a popular movement had gathered around him because people wanted to deal with the issue at last. The historic moment had arrived for America. "We can no more avoid [this question] than a man can live without eating," said Lincoln.
Southern politicians said that Lincoln intended the violent overthrow the slave power. But Lincoln said he was against violence; and "by necessity," was for abiding slavery in the Southern States; after all, slavery was guaranteed by the Constitution. He was only against slavery's extension.
Lincoln distanced himself from John Brown in February-March 1860, in important speeches introducing himself to the East Coast audiences. He sought a political solution. He wanted to preserve a union with slave states in it--you don't attack snakes in a bed with children lying in it, he said, they could bite. He said that slaves had refused to join Brown. He said that Brown was as crazy as the man who'd tried to assassinate Napoleon: "An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them."
In New Haven, he cried that John Brown was not a Republican: "You have never implicated a single Republican in that Harper's Ferry enterprise."
Yet at the same time, Lincoln did not completely distance himself from Brown, in part surely because Brown was heroic to abolitionists, who were part of his base. Just like the leftwing antiwar vote is Obama's base. And Lincoln said, warningly, to those who would use John Brown against his political movement:
Consider the wisdom in those statements. You cannot destroy this feeling against slavery. And if you do so by discrediting its political channels, then what will be the result: More John Browns!
The analogy here is nearly perfect to Hamas and the anti-apartheid movement in Palestine. Those who hate oppression in the occupied territories want to overcome it by political means. But what if those political means are suppressed and frustrated again and again? What if the ballot box is rejected? Will there be more or fewer Hamas's? More.
"I think it is important that this matter should be taken up in earnest, and really settled," Lincoln said. "And one way to bring about a true settlement of the question is to understand its true magnitude.... We think that a respect for ourselves, a regard for future generations and for the God that made us, require that we put down this wrong where our votes will properly reach it."
Lincoln failed; votes couldn't reach slavery. Soon after Lincoln's election, the southern states, which saw Lincoln's election as a sectional victory that would lead to "irrepressible conflict" with the south, seceded from the union. And war came: a terrible war, with tremendous bloodshed, and lasting wounds. And yes, also: the emancipation of the slaves.
Alright, Obama claims Lincoln as role model. What is the lesson here from Lincoln to Obama?
I think a grim one. Today the U.S. is just as implicated in Israeli oppression as the north was in southern slavery then; and the situation wants a political solution. But that political solution has been deferred again and again, and as a result, violent forces have a great deal of power, on both sides. There are many many John Browns operating in that region, people who brood on oppression and commit themselves to action.
The lesson is earnest, but cool, political engagement, to try and channel the deep feelings that give rise to John Brown/Hamas, without causing people to resort to nukes. I think Obama gets this.
The correction of the American accommodation of slavery was extremely bloody. Let us hope that the U.S. can modify its politics now, to recognize the magnitude of this moral, social, and political evil, before apartheid and Israeli obduracy create even more violence. Let us get our political channels to work--let the media here reflect what world media are showing, let our politicians express compassion for the true victims of the situation. That is the only way to defuse the human feeling that gives rise to John Browns.
Unless Netanyahu changes his spots, things will get worse for Palestinians, and for the prospects for a two-state solution.
You are right to keep the light on the place.
In order to support a Lincolnesque perseverence, YOU personally will have to pay much more attention to the tone that you use, your selection of material to present, and how you headline them.
If anyone listens to you, then they will conclude John Brownish approaches.
The important events in John Brown's career was NOT Harper's Ferry, but in Kansas a couple years prior. Missourians (a border slave state) were stacking the deck in an election in Kansas whether to join the union as slave or free. John Brown recruited in the east to stack the deck the other way.
He was responsible for Hamas-like defense of free-state communities, and Hamas-like massacre of civilians in slavery-advocate communities.
Its real. Assume that people WILL listen to you, follow your cues.
[Not long after the Emancipation Proclamation, President Abraham Lincoln met a Canadian Christian Zionist, Henry Wentworth Monk, who expressed hope that Jews who were suffering oppression in Russia and Turkey be emancipated "by restoring them to their national home in Palestine." Lincoln said this was "a noble dream and one shared by many Americans." The President said his chiropodist was a Jew who "has so many times 'put me upon my feet' that I would have no objection to giving his countrymen 'a leg up.'"]
Those countrymen already have more than a leg up–hence, we get John Brown, aka HAMAS. Wake up, dummy. U 2 witty. But you can assume people will listen to Phil so follow his cues instead of playing
games at the continued great expenses of others. Be humane, for once in your life–get rid of your tribal filter and join the human race.
Phil, you are largely correct when it comes to your obsession, but when you don your lefty funhouse glasses, you drive the train off the rails.
Forget the Lincoln analogy. We don't need to import that DiLorenzo-Jaffa controversy here, but there's two sides to the story of the Late Unpleasantness, and more to the life of the Rail-splitter than is myth.
his myth.
Also, none other than Abraham Lincoln, not long after signing the Emancipation Proclamation, showed sympathy for Monk's pleas to end the suffering of Russian and Turkish Jews by "restoring" them to Palestine. Lincoln did not pursue the matter any further, and his assassination soon after made his interest inconsequential.
As Lincoln was still fighting a war, he didn't have time to pursue the matter.
From Harvard Interfaith Mumbai Vigil
From: thorsprovoni@aol.com
To: mchatter@fas.harvard.edu; cavedog14@comcast.net; syed@fas.harvard.edu; birdsall@fas.harvard.edu
Cc: Interfaith-list@lists.hcs.harvard.edu; rtobacc@fas.harvard.edu
Sent: Thu, 4 Dec 2008 10:31 am
Subject: Re: [Interfaith] Mumbai Vigil – TOMORROW!
Nothing justifies killing an innocent family with an attack from the sky, but the IAF does it all the time as does the USAF in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Interfaith is all well and good, but it is probably time for an honest discussion of Palestine and Kashmir.
Emerson raised money for John Brown in Harvard Yard.
Do you know what John Brown did? He had living slavers hacked to pieces in Bleeding Kansas.
Here in Massachusetts we consider John Brown to have been a hero.
American history and precedent supports terrorism against state sponsored violent racism.
Zionism is a crime against humanity ethically equivalent to Southern slavery.
I really don't like this worthy victim stuff.
We should be having a vigil in support of Palestinians murdered or besieged by Zionist forces and for innocent Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans and Pakistans murdered by the USA.
I am not the only specialist in Jewish studies that has problems with Chabad hypocrisy in claiming to oppose Zionism while the organization at the same time
On Terrorism
By American history and precedent terrorism against state-supported violent racism is completely justified. Palestinian terrorism against Israeli Zionist racists is exactly as justified as hacking slavers to death with swords in Bleeding Kansas. Reverend Professor Ralph Waldo Emerson (HDS, HC 1821) and Henry David Thoreau (HC 1837) raised money in Harvard Yard to support John Brown in Bleeding Kansas. All patriotic antiracist Americans and decent human beings in general should support Palestinian terrorism against Israeli Zionists, who are the enemies of the whole human race.
The only downside to Palestinian terrorism is the death of the Palestinian attacker. There have been no innocent Zionist civilians since the Zionists began their war of ethnic cleansing in December 1947. Suicide attacks against Zionist civilians are no more problematic than suicide attacks against German Nazi civilians during the Hitler period. Even though most Zionist factions effectively collaborated with Nazis from 1933-39 under the Haavarah or Transfer Agreement, Jabotinskians undertook assassinations against German Nazi civilians, and Jabotinsky called for suicide attacks against Germans.
Zionists are waging a dirty demographic war against Palestinians and do not respect the status of protected noncombatants under the Geneva conventions. Racist Zionist invaders, thieves and interlopers have been brutalizing, raping and murdering the native population (including women and children) of Palestine at least since the 19-naughts. Moreover, Zionists have frequently stated since the beginning of the 20th century that every single Jew in Palestine is a weapon or foot soldier in the demographic war against Palestine. The defenders always have the right to destroy the weapons or kill the soldiers of the invaders. Under such conditions Palestinians have no recourse but proportionate response to purposeful and indiscriminate IDF murder of Palestinian civilians.
Americans have been conditioned to believe that Israeli Zionists as Jews could not possibly do the horrible things that anyone will see and experience if he or she lives among Palestinians for a few weeks. (Joshua Hammer, former Jerusalem bureau chief for Newsweek and later a Nieman fellow, made such a statement at Harvard.) In fact, during the 30s many Americans refused to believe that the German Nazis were committing Nazi crimes because such criminality was inconceivable for Germans, a people that had produced Goethe, Lessing, Schiller, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach etc. The idea that German Nazis or Israeli Zionists could not perpetrate the crimes of Nazism and Zionism is simply racist prejudice based in an assumption of German or Israeli Jewish superiority to the people they are victimizing.
Israeli Zionists are the most militarized people on the planet. There is hardly a square centimeter of Israel that is not a legitimate military target, and buses are dual use civilian military vehicles that are used as troop carriers and that service illegal settlements. By US rules of engagement attacking such vehicles is certainly allowable, and during the Kosova war the USA attacked similar and to my mind far less military targets.
Every weapon that the Israeli Zionists criminals use against the native population is bought or provided by the USA. Without the USA Israeli Zionism would just be a bad memory. Palestinians are in fact at least as much at war with the USA, which as been manipulated into a satanic foreign policy by traitorous ethnic Ashkenazi American Neoconservative racists like Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith and Wurmser and by irredentist neo-Confederate white racists like Jerry Falwell, Pat Roberts and Richard Land.
Israeli Zionists are the bad guys and represent an evil in the world today just as the German Nazis did in the 30s. Nowadays, we Americans are the bad guys because we are allied with Israeli Zionists. We Americans have to accept that Americans and Israeli Zionists may be subjected to attacks by billions of people justifiably enraged at our policies, just as Germans whether military or civilian were subject to attacks by the French, Polish, Russian and Yugoslav resistance during WW2. As the bad guys and allies of the bad guys we Americans have no more right to criticize the tactics of the resistance than the German Nazis had. In retrospect and to this day we consider the anti-Nazi resistance heroes that fought for all of humanity. Likewise the Palestinian resistance today is heroic and fights for all of humanity.
And you wonder why the Ivy league is so embarassed. But, their have been those more evil than Joachim graduated from those halls.
' Soon after Lincoln's election, the southern states, which saw Lincoln's election as a sectional victory that would lead to "irrepressible conflict" with the south, seceded from the union. And war came: a terrible war …'
The sudden switch to passive voice ['war came'] is highly revealing. War didn't just boil up like a summer thunderstorm. When southern states seceded, Lincoln could have said, 'Don't let the back door slam your ass on the way out.'
But there was an essential economic issue. The South's agricultural exports provided the bulk of foreign exchange to pay for U.S. imports. Lincoln's rump North would have found itself running a disastrous trade deficit if the South had been permitted to go. So he ended up slaughtering half a million people, not so much over slavery, but rather to establish the immutable principle that the United States is like a roach motel — you can check in, but ya cain't check out.
Like the antebellum South, any of today's fifty states could enormously benefit by escaping from the clammy clutches of the U.S. fedgov, which has a negative net worth of $60 trillion — $200,000 per capita, $800,000 for every nuclear family with two kids.
Thanks to Lincoln, it is now established policy that if, say, Vermont seceded, it would be invaded, bombed and pounded into submission at whatever human cost 'necessary.' From a supposed voluntary compact of sovereign states ceding limited powers to a federal government, the U.S. has mutated into something like a wife-beating sheik with 50 abused concubines, all of whom know that an attempted escape will be punishable by death. One almost envies Israel's status as the so-called 51st state, still preserving its sovereignty, and receiving billions of year in boodle without being on the hook for any of the crushing debt resulting from it. How can we get a deal like that?
Hey chris, how about for once attacking Joachim's message with some critical dissection of it, rather than
attacking the messenger, Joachim? You are truly pitiful.
Jim, you are right. Cotton was King. The oil of the day. When Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, which was unconstitutional since blacks were property, only to be freed by due process in a court, as it was unenforceable by brute force at the time he made it. Timing was everything, and for the end game of preserving the Union, the Proclamation was a great propaganda tool. France at the time
was ready to join the confederacy, and Britain was coming around to join it–King Cotton was a powerful incentive. If Lee had won one more victory, England and France would have entered the fray on the side
of Johnny Reb. But Lee lost the key battle, or at best it was a stalemate. Since slavery no longer existed in
those european lands, they took the high moral ground.
Hey chris, how about for once attacking Joachim's message with some critical dissection of it, rather than attacking the messenger, Joachim? Posted by: Citizen
but my cute little frustrated antisemite, Joachim is the message. Joachim is the cheerleader of the message. Joachim is an antisemitic piece of shit. Why not attack such an asswipe? Like Churchill Ward and Finky, he needs to realize that his antisemitism is nothing but racist hatemongering. Let him starve like the rest of Phil's Phools. Let him rely on the dole like Rowan and Martin.
With all due respect, your comparison of John Brown with Hamas is historically inaccurate and self-serving. I am not concerned with your views of contemporary issues. But I am a biographer of Brown and your take on his actions and your characterization of him are profoundly incorrect and apparently premised on a level of discourse that constantly takes place among journalists and ivory tower elitists who know next to nothing about Brown themselves. Worst of all, by calling Brown a terrorist, you sanctify the status quo of chattel slavery that dominated this nation 150 years ago. I realize you just need to make your neat little thesis work, but it doesn't. Lincoln was a political moderate; he dismissed Lincoln in 1860 in order to get elected; later he used John Brown's model to explain his own intention of enlisting blacks to fight. In his first speech on Brown, which actually took place on Dec. 1, 1859, the day before Brown was hanged, Lincoln acknowledged that Brown was a good man although he disagreed with his tactics. But when he spoke of Brown in front of proslavery audiences (and that partially entailed the Cooper Union address in New York in 1860) he was more dismissive. I wish that second-hand history writing like this could be readjusted to the facts of history; the terrorists in 1860 were not Brown and his men; they were the slaveholding society that oppressed human beings with the sanction of politicians, and southern terrorists like Quantrill.
Phil
It will turn out being a far more simpler and easier task to accomplish than you or these other posters imagine.
"The terrorists in 1860 were not Brown and his men; they were the slaveholding society that oppressed human beings with the sanction of politicians, and southern terrorists like Quantrill."
Get a clue. We agree with that. Similarly, the palestinian suicide bombers nowadays are no more terrorists than Brown was; the terrorist today is the state-sponsored terrorists of Israel, enabled by the USA; they are the occupiers as NAZI Germany was an occupier. They oppress human beings with the sanction of both USA and Israeli politicians, and of former usa citizens living in the settlements as jewish religious and greed fanatics.
Joachim, I agree that slaves had every right to rebel, as Palestinians do. In either case, I don't think anything is off the table when it comes to fighting back. However, I have to stop there in comparing Israel's treatment of Palestinians to N. American slavery. As bad as owning slaves, selling slaves, profiting from the institution, constructing slave ships or supporting slavery is, it's not the same as waging a war of demographic destruction.
Also, I'm curious as to why you would consider Jerry Falwall, Pat Robertson or Richard Land to be neoconfederates or even white racists? I'm more familiar with their followers than the men themselves, and their religion doesn't really fall in line with that of the somewhat decadent antebellum southern aristocrats, their churches are more apt to be somewhat mixed racially than the typical Methodist, Baptist or Episcopalian church, and they are focused on Israel and the rapture, rather than on secession or even a return to a segregated South within a preserved Union.
Jim, I agree, war didn't just happen. It's easier to just blindly claim that the South was Jefferson's rural utopian vision gone bad, and that it had to be attacked and destroyed, than it is to admit that Southern secession was a major economic threat to the North. The South was behind the North in industrial output, but industrialization was happening, which would have made Southern economic domination or independence a real threat in time.
Georgia wasn't even founded as an English colony until 1733, and the other Deep South states formed from the territory weren't settled until later, so it's obvious that develppment would lag behind New England and the Mid-atlantic states. I wouldn't say that the southern states were developing in a more exploitative way than the states of the Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic regions did, and the settling of the Midwest was more violent and as racist anything that happened in the slaveholding areas.
I don't see a reason to compare Palestine to the American South. Since we can't have an honest discussion about either issue, why mix the issues?