"Of all the men I ever met, he seemed to possess more of the elements of greatness, combined with goodness, than any other." William Tecumseh Sherman speaking about Abraham Lincoln in his Memoirs of William T. Sherman
There is no American who is more beloved than Abraham Lincoln. A remarkable fact considering that he made war on half of this country and where many still despise the him.
Some modern day scholars have tried to play the role of iconoclast and tear down the hallowed image we have of the benevolent, but resolute President who lead us through out nation's darkest hour.
They accuse President Lincoln of being a racist because he believed that the black man was intellectually inferior to the white man. Of course the fact that this was the prevailing belief amongst whites in mid-19th century America plays no bearing upon their argument. Lincoln also did think about the issue of mental inferiority and whether blacks degraded social status had anything to do with this perceived difference in intellect.
It is also mentioned that the Emancipation Proclamation did not set all the slaves free, just those in the states in rebellion. They use this as a criticism of Lincoln when in fact it was the only thing Lincoln could have done. To order all to be free--including those of the border states--would have risked pushing those border states into the arms of the Confederacy. It was an politically smart move.
Another criticism levied at Lincoln was that he did not fight the war to set blacks free. This is true. He fought to preserve the Union. This of course, was the only thing he could do. Without a nation, he could not affect the change needed to remove the manacles of slavery from the nation's body. Therefore, his ultimate goal HAD to be the preservation of the Union.
Abraham Lincoln was not a perfect man. No person is. Not Ghandi, not Martin Luther King, and certainly not any other famous figure of history.Human beings are flawed creatures.We have become so accustomed to viewing Lincoln as a marble stature that we forget that he bled, he cried, he laugh. In short, he was a MAN.
But what made Abraham Lincoln great--and for that matter, any widely admired person of history--was his ability to transcend his fragilities as a man to accomplish something that benefitted mankind. His selflessness in his service to this nation, his magnanimity towards his foes, and his political genius in dealing with the variety of characters in his cabinet, in the army, congress, and the general population.
If Lincoln failed, he would have gone down in history as one of the worst Presidents. But he did not. This most unlikely of Presidents( he served but one term in the US House of Representatives to go along with a few terms in the Illinois House) became our greatest President. How lucky we were.
Greatness is sometimes thrushed upon a man by the circumstances in which he is thrown into. For Lincoln, that challenge was the Civil War. Fortunately for us, he proved to be the equal to this daunting task.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Monday, February 9, 2009
The troublesome issue of genocide..
On the 9th of December 1948 the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This treaty legalized Genocide and made violations of it punishable by force of law. The man responsible for the creation of the term "genocide" and the pursuit of codifying it was a Polish Jew named Raphael Lemkin.The word genocide is the synthesis of the Greek genos(family) and the latin -cide(killing).
Article Two of the convention defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
From January of 1951 on, this law has been on the books. As anyone who read kept on current events or has a basic knowledge of the history of the second half of the 20th century and the beginnings of the 21st knows, this has not prevented the malevolently inclined from butching millions upon millions of people for whatever reason they deem adequate to justify their bloodlust.
It seems that neither the the United States or the rest of the "civilized" world seem able or more likely, interested in preventing such man made catastrophes from happening. The world stood by while the Khmer Rouge murdered 1.76 million cambodians, 100,000 East Timorians were killed by the occuyping indonesian army, the slaughter of 8,000 Bosnians by the Serbs in Srebanica, and the deaths of 800,000 Tutsis' by Hutu militiamen over a period of 100 days.These are just the most well known large scale atrocities in recent years
But if one looks at history, one may start to understand why few react. the harsh truth is that most of the powerful nations of the modern world have a history of mass killing. The United States and Europe devastated the Americas with losses in the millions, 8-10 Africans died on the voyage from Africa to the Americas in the 200 years of the slave trade, the US's subjucation of the Phillippines cost up to a million people their lives,the aborigines were nearly wiped out in Australia,the Germans nearly successful attempt to eliminate European Jewry, the Japanese attempted to annihiliate the Chinese in the Second World War, the Turks butchered a million Armenians and the world saw large scale massacres in areas stretching from Brazil to the Congo to Azerbaijani.
The renowned political theorist Hannah Arendt once wrote of the "banality of evil" when writing about Adolf Eichmann. She was referring to the willingness of people to do evil because the state deemed it as being acceptable to achieve an ends.(in this instance the removal of Jews from germany and Lebensraum for the german people)I think that when one looks at various organizations of men have reacted thoughtout the centuries that there is more than a modicum of truth to this. The ends do at some level justify the means.
This visceral understanding of what needs to be done is one reason, I believe, why so many groups do not to this day respond to threats of mass murder. That and the rather simple idea that people just don't care about what happens to someone thousands of miles away from them and who more than likely does not speak their language or have similiar physical characteristics.
What has clouded the issue of genocide further is that many nations either refute or do not acknowledge the charge of genocide. The Turks for example adamantly refusr to acknowledge that they murdered 1 million Armenians as well as hundreds of thousands of Greeks and Assyrians. So much so that Turkey made mentioning the genocide a criminal offense.
In the United States, most Americans are aware that the Natives were "wronged", but not the extent of it. Very few are aware of the destruction to the population of the Phillippines or even the fact that the United States was even there from 1901-13.
The same willful ignorance or obstinate refusal to admit a wrong is found all across the world in lands scarred by large scale killings . One shouldn't be surprised by this considering that few people ever want to admit to such embarrassing aspects of their nations history or the fact that even less violent examples of oppression are openly discussed.
Unfortunately, when they are discussed, it is used as a means to advance an political agenda. The left--particularly those influenced by Marxism--are particularly enthusiastic in singling out the abhorrent activities of the United States government over the past two centuries.The brutal and unspeakably inhumane treatment of the indigenous populations are the most pointed examples of how cruel and wicked western civilization and its chosen economic and political systems are.
Of course, this requires one to ignore the thousands of years of barbarous behavior from people from China to the Middle East to the Pre-European Americas.This truncated and ideologically driven version of events also choses to ignore the tens of millions who died as a result of decisions influenced by the tenets of Marxist-Leninism.
The sad truth behind all this is that genocide is not brought about by capitalism, racism, or any other "ism" one can think of. Those are just convenient covers for what some call the "dark side of man".Greed, jealously, love of violence...we've heard them all before. Until we figure out how to control or eliminate man's inner beast, we will continue to deal with genocide.
Article Two of the convention defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
From January of 1951 on, this law has been on the books. As anyone who read kept on current events or has a basic knowledge of the history of the second half of the 20th century and the beginnings of the 21st knows, this has not prevented the malevolently inclined from butching millions upon millions of people for whatever reason they deem adequate to justify their bloodlust.
It seems that neither the the United States or the rest of the "civilized" world seem able or more likely, interested in preventing such man made catastrophes from happening. The world stood by while the Khmer Rouge murdered 1.76 million cambodians, 100,000 East Timorians were killed by the occuyping indonesian army, the slaughter of 8,000 Bosnians by the Serbs in Srebanica, and the deaths of 800,000 Tutsis' by Hutu militiamen over a period of 100 days.These are just the most well known large scale atrocities in recent years
But if one looks at history, one may start to understand why few react. the harsh truth is that most of the powerful nations of the modern world have a history of mass killing. The United States and Europe devastated the Americas with losses in the millions, 8-10 Africans died on the voyage from Africa to the Americas in the 200 years of the slave trade, the US's subjucation of the Phillippines cost up to a million people their lives,the aborigines were nearly wiped out in Australia,the Germans nearly successful attempt to eliminate European Jewry, the Japanese attempted to annihiliate the Chinese in the Second World War, the Turks butchered a million Armenians and the world saw large scale massacres in areas stretching from Brazil to the Congo to Azerbaijani.
The renowned political theorist Hannah Arendt once wrote of the "banality of evil" when writing about Adolf Eichmann. She was referring to the willingness of people to do evil because the state deemed it as being acceptable to achieve an ends.(in this instance the removal of Jews from germany and Lebensraum for the german people)I think that when one looks at various organizations of men have reacted thoughtout the centuries that there is more than a modicum of truth to this. The ends do at some level justify the means.
This visceral understanding of what needs to be done is one reason, I believe, why so many groups do not to this day respond to threats of mass murder. That and the rather simple idea that people just don't care about what happens to someone thousands of miles away from them and who more than likely does not speak their language or have similiar physical characteristics.
What has clouded the issue of genocide further is that many nations either refute or do not acknowledge the charge of genocide. The Turks for example adamantly refusr to acknowledge that they murdered 1 million Armenians as well as hundreds of thousands of Greeks and Assyrians. So much so that Turkey made mentioning the genocide a criminal offense.
In the United States, most Americans are aware that the Natives were "wronged", but not the extent of it. Very few are aware of the destruction to the population of the Phillippines or even the fact that the United States was even there from 1901-13.
The same willful ignorance or obstinate refusal to admit a wrong is found all across the world in lands scarred by large scale killings . One shouldn't be surprised by this considering that few people ever want to admit to such embarrassing aspects of their nations history or the fact that even less violent examples of oppression are openly discussed.
Unfortunately, when they are discussed, it is used as a means to advance an political agenda. The left--particularly those influenced by Marxism--are particularly enthusiastic in singling out the abhorrent activities of the United States government over the past two centuries.The brutal and unspeakably inhumane treatment of the indigenous populations are the most pointed examples of how cruel and wicked western civilization and its chosen economic and political systems are.
Of course, this requires one to ignore the thousands of years of barbarous behavior from people from China to the Middle East to the Pre-European Americas.This truncated and ideologically driven version of events also choses to ignore the tens of millions who died as a result of decisions influenced by the tenets of Marxist-Leninism.
The sad truth behind all this is that genocide is not brought about by capitalism, racism, or any other "ism" one can think of. Those are just convenient covers for what some call the "dark side of man".Greed, jealously, love of violence...we've heard them all before. Until we figure out how to control or eliminate man's inner beast, we will continue to deal with genocide.
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