Word: lincolns
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...true, as Columbia University historian Eric Foner asserts, that "there really is a genuine parallel between Lincoln and Gorbachev" ? That "Lincoln's position, like Gorbachev's, was that a union, no matter how it was formed, cannot be abandoned." Why do we praise Lincoln for launching a war to save the Union but denounce Gorbachev for much milder actions...
...didn't South Carolina also democratically decide to leave the American Union? By what right did Lincoln make...
...second, Lincoln's Union, unlike Gorbachev's, was a democracy. Lincoln fought to preserve the Union because he believed that secession meant the end of the great American experiment in self-government. If a minority (the South), upon losing an argument (the election of 1860), can just pick up and quit the Union, then the whole idea of republican government becomes a farce. If every disgruntled minority can take up its marbles and secede, then the monarchist and other reactionary critics of the (then) unique American experiment in republican government would be vindicated: man is not fit for self-government...
Moreover, today even Lincoln's action would be looked on with far more skepticism. Even if the union is democratic, it hardly seems to us today that it has the right forcibly to suppress the democratically expressed will of a minority for independence. If, for example, Quebec decided tomorrow to secede from Canada, the world would hardly countenance a Lincolnesque invasion of Quebec in the name of the Canadian federal union. Nor would Canada...
This tug between the justice of the Lithuanian cause and the need to preserve these other values embodied by Gorbachev is the source of Western paralysis over Lithuania. It is no use trying to justify that paralysis by denying, by appeal to Lincoln, the Lithuanian case. It won't wash. Our paralysis is justified only by admitting that the Lithuanian cause conflicts irreconcilably with other important values...