Slam ... dunk!!
The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history...
the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Lincoln himself never even remotely
approached it. It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic;
beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday.
The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their
lives to the cause of self-determination -- that government of the people, by the people,
for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more
untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it
was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves.
-- H. L. Mencken
(1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
H. L. Mencken on Gettysburg ...
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2 comments:
Interesting perspective. As a states' rights issue, he may be right. However, one could say that self-determination is a basic human right that was denied to blacks and to other non-white ethnicities. In the end, wasn't that one of the reasons why the Civil War was fought?
DaMacGuy, yes, slavery was part of it. But I don't think we can deny the Confederacy the right to self-determination simply because a some inhabitants held slaves. Using that test we would also I think have to say that our revolutionary war in 1776 was unjust.
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