No President nor any sitting administration in the history of the United States has accepted secession peacefully in any sense. The Buchanan administration that preceded Lincoln also rejected the notion that it was within the Confederacy's rights to secede from a Union which they felt did not represent them, the argument made by DiLorenzo in his "Lincoln is a fucking crock and his academic cult can suck it" series of books. There has never been any Constitutionally-based right to secession; even the Founding Fathers recognized this (Patrick Henry, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton; James Madison flip-flopped on the issue, and we all know where Jefferson stood). There is a right to revolution, but revolution implies the alteration or destruction of the existing government, not a rescinding of that government.[/quote] You did not answer my questions. You start off with an appeal to tradition. You then bring an uncited quote from one of Thomas DiLorenzo's books and act like that matters in a discussion. I'm not Thomas DiLorenzo. If you would like to discredit him, please do it elsewhere considering this thread is about Abraham Lincoln's presidency. It's not about some author who writes about Lincoln. The Constitution explains what the government can do. Secession is not even discussed within the Constitution. Just because it's not explicitly written in the holy Constitution doesn't mean they have to attack someone who wants to secede or that it is ethical to attack people who want to secede. You're interpreting like I'm trying to deflect blame when what I'm saying is that the argument that "Lincoln was the greatest oppressor of them all" is just as flawed as the conception of him as The Great Emancipator. The reality is somewhere in between.[/quote] Can you answer my question directly now? Wasn't it primarily his responsibility as president to decide whether or not to allow the South to secede? If it was his decision, isn't the Civil War (as it actually happened) his fault? He may not have been the greatest oppressor of them all; however, his actions directly led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans all because some people wanted to secede. Yes, a conflict was brewing. No, it was not unavoidable. Whether or not he is the greatest oppressor is debatable imo. Which presidents would you cite as worse than him? W. Bush would probably be pretty high up there, but the worst acts of oppression that he sanctioned weren't committed against Americans (imo). There are a lot of presidents and I do not claim to be an expert on all of them, so I'm open to changing my mind on this.
The cult of Lincoln must be challenged on all fronts. No President has done more to destroy the validity of natural rights as taking preference over legal rights in all of the United States' history. Natural and legal rights - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Ex: The First Amendment says that Congress Shall not abridge the freedom of speech, as opposed to the 26th amendment, which establishes the right to vote for those 18 and older. Secession is a natural right that has been recognized throughout history. Lincoln denied his fellow Americans the right to alter or abolish their government, and in doing so set the state for the modern presidencies of warmongering corporatism such as both Bushes, the Clintons, and Obama. The US was founded on secession, nobody has any qualms with that. The Eastern European states seceded from the Soviet Union as well, nobody protested that one either.
lol you started a thread just to escalate a fight you were having with someone elsewhere? dude...this is why I kick myself when I enter into the politics section. gonna go smoke a bowl
I like that he ended slavery....But, the way he ended slavery basically destroyed any hope of states rights and created a way too powerful federal government.
We were derailing the political meme thread, so it was suggested that we create a new thread to continue the discussion. I was not escalating any fight. I was continuing a discussion I was having with someone in a different thread. There's a significant difference. Believe me when I say that if I was fighting someone over the internet, you would not see traces of said fight in the politics section of Grasscity. Get a fucking grip.
Saying that a state has no right to secede from a union is like saying I can't leave your group if I don't want to hang out anymore. It's not what right the state has to leave the union, it's what right do you have to stop them.
[quote name='"bumtildeath"']Saying that a state has no right to secede from a union is like saying I can't leave your group if I don't want to hang out anymore. It's not what right the state has to leave the union, it's what right do you have to stop them.[/quote] I think that's the best way I have seen anybody put it so far.
Bush was a terrible president and Obama has been an awful one so far. But nothing can compare to Lincoln or FDR. We will see in the near future with the economic crisis just how authoritarian Obama really is.
It's still too early to call Obama the worst president in history. Maybe he'll turn it around in the second term.
lol FDR the worst president? you know most the american government was pro-nazi. If it weren't for FDR the nazi's would have won, and its possible we would have joined in with the axis. Say what you want about who you think the worst president is, but know that if certain things did not happen they way they did the world would probably be even worse off.
FDR was easily one of the worst, along with Lincoln. The typical "great" Presidents are just the most statist. Whoever expanded the state the most, killed the most, interfered the most with the economy (thereby causing great harm), etc., are the ones considered great. On the other hand those who were truly great, i.e., favored peace instead of war, kept government limited to it's proper Constitutional role, etc., are all but forgotten from the pages of history.
This is a good example of history being written by the victors. I can't think of another leader that is held in high esteem during a prolonged civil war. America demonizes other countries' leaders during a civil war for trying to maintain the status quo. We demonized Ghadaffi and Assad for abuses, while supporting the opposition forces. Yet when it happened in our country, we don't recognize that is the situation that happened. Part of the country left and formed their own political union, and Lincoln waged war on them. And also suspended habeus corpus and imprisoned people who were critical of the government. We always speak out against that when it happens in other countries. It is hard for us to look at the situation from the outside. It's hard to disabuse one's self from what they have been taught about Lincoln. Or what they haven't been taught.
The title of worst President firmly belongs to Lincoln, for without Lincoln there could be no FDR. That being said, FDR is easily the 2nd or 3rd worst president. The economic intervention of the New Deal prolonged the depression all the way till the end of WW2. Lest we not forget who signed the original marijuana tax stamp act into law either. He instituted an oil embargo on Japan knowing damn well that he would provoke an aggressive response in doing so, and looked the other way days prior to Japan attacking Pearl Harbor. The public was very much firmly against getting involved in "Europe's war", but he just couldn't resist, so he needed the right crisis to do so. To say that the Nazis would have won WW2 without our involvement is typical American hubris, since history didn't unfold that way, you can't say one way or the other whether it would have panned out that way. Had Woodrow Wilson not involved the US in WW1 and helped to institute the Treaty of Versailles we wouldn't have had a Nazi party to contend with, but that's a different discussion entirely.
^^The Germans would have still lost World War 2 without American involvement. Think about the timing of it all. The Russians won at Stalingrad before the Americans even invaded Italy. The Germans and Russians would have torn each other apart. With no American involvement, the war on the Eastern front would have been even more brutal, though the would Russians have won, though perhaps not totally. Stalin would have been significantly weakened and we wouldn't have seen the rise of his Iron Curtain across Europe. Death camps would still have been uncovered for the world to see in Poland by the Red army. etc. On Topic: Lincoln was a total racist who wanted to ship all the not-white people to Africa, thus Liberia.
The Nazis could NEVER have won World War 2 it was the Soviet Union that defeated the Nazis not the United States. Pretty much the rest of the world knows this its only taught in the United States that we were the saviors. The Soviet Union could never have been conquered by Nazi Germany.