Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Deception:
"Lies,
Damn Lies and" Politics
- "We say of Old Abe it would be impossible to find such another ass
in the United States."
-
Richmond Dispatch, June1864
-
- "Mr. Lincoln did most foully traduce the motives of the men who were
slain at Gettysburg... the silly, flat, and dish-watery utterances of the man who has to
be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States."
Chicago Times, November 1863
- The inaugural address represented "the cool, unimpassioned,
deliberate language of the fanatic."
Richmond Enquirer, March 1861
- The "Lincoln Administration is cowardly, mean, and vicious,"
the blame for which must rest squarely upon "the incompetent, ignorant, and desperate
'Honest Abe.'"
New York Herald, April 1861
- "The people of the North owe Mr. Lincoln but eternal hatred and
scorn... As the Lord liveth, we shall pay him all we owe him some day -- him, and all the
bloody band of traitors."
Zanesville, Ohio Aurora, December 1863
- Lincoln "is a barbarian, Scythian, yahoo, a gorilla."
George Templeton Strong, New York lawyer, 1863
A few years ago, while visiting the Washington D.C. Lincoln museum that
is part of the Ford's Theater complex, I noticed something about the somewhat-large crowd
-- and myself -- as we moved from exhibit to exhibit: no one was saying a word.
We all seemed to sense that we had entered much more than a museum
-- a "holy shrine." An almost palpable somberness pervaded the atmosphere. I
remember remarking to myself, "We haven't really gotten over his death!" This
President has been dead for almost 150 years, but we still grieve our loss today,
find our spirits hushed as we contemplate his brilliance, his humility, his sacrifice.
But then we have the advantage of history's perspective, one
tempered by, to use Lincoln's phrase, "the silent artillery of time."
As the above direct quotes indicate, he was not universally loved in his own generation.
In fact, for a certain period at least, it may not go too far to say that he was the most
hated man in America.
There were vested interests aplenty, reasons enough for Mr.
Lincoln to be seen as a threat to at least half the country. Slavery, as we know,
was big business, and anyone directly or indirectly feeding at that trough "had no
choice" but to despise him. And, of course, simply being President precipitates among
many -- the also-rans, the wannabees, the armchair-quarterbacks -- a kind of envy,
jealousy, a sense of "but for you I would be on top" mentality, a degree to
which not to be seen in any other arena of American life.
As we read the introductory quotations, we may feel uncomfortable
speaking the name "Abraham Lincoln" in the same breath with such words as
"mean," vicious," "traitor," "fanatic,"
"ass," "incompetent," "ignorant," "silly," and
"gorilla."
- Armed with our long view of history, we now judge the
speakers of those words to be self-condemned, caricatures of puffery, hell-bent
intoxicated with and bribed by their own trinket-god self-interests.
Allow me to interrupt myself here in order to interject:
The purpose of this particular article is not primarily to encourage
discussion regarding a great hero of mine, the sixteenth President of the United States.
The topic here is "deception" -- that most venomous kind,
"deception in politics," what Mark Twain might have called, "lies, damn
lies" and politics. I hope you agreed with me in my assessment of the above
quotations. But I mentioned them here for one purpose only, which is to introduce a
larger, more immediately relevant issue:
Are we, today, guilty of doing the same things? At times, I believe, the
answer is yes.
Notice again what they said about Lincoln:
(1) They said he was "mean" spirited, devoid of
compassion, "cool," second-cousin to the Devil. Demagogues always
resort to such language when they lose an argument on the merits. Translate this to be,
"He's a threat to my vested interests; if he succeeds, I will be forced to give up
the plantation." Real leaders accept the fact, and prepare others to accept the fact,
that progress usually involves sacrifice, short-term pain for long-term gain. Such wisdom
and prudence is pronounced "mean-spirited" by the "I want it now"
crowd.
(2) They said he was "incompetent" for the job, a
bumbler, not up to the intellectual rigors of the job. Never mind that Lincoln
was one of the greatest writers, speakers, one of the greatest intellectuals of all time.
Nevertheless, it doesn't take political spin-doctors very long to trot this one out.
Character assassination is much easier than trying to defend the indefensible. So much
more efficient just to try to convince others that your opponent is a hayseed-lightweight
and proceed on that basis.
(3) They said he was a "traitor." A big part
of being a false-prophet politico is the rewriting, reinterpreting, and repackaging of the
writings of the Founding Fathers, the words of Scripture, the message of history, and the
meaning of life itself. Slave owners, of course, bought their own Ph.D.'s in order to
justify the unjustifiable. And guess what! If you reinterpret history and change the
definition of what it means to be an American, the logical conclusion becomes: Lincoln is
a "traitor." Beam me up, Scotty, no intelligent life down here.
(4) They said he was a "fanatic." This is a
favorite salvo of those under threat of the heavy wheel of progress. When they bring out
this gun, you can have a pretty good idea that you're dealing with paper-tiger
intellectual opposition. Translate this as: "There goes the plantation again! We're
scared spitless of this guy because if he gets his way, the people will find out what's
real and experience the truth and our game will be up."
(5) When all else fails, when plastic-veneer arguments are
peeled away leaving naked self-interest exposed -- take a page from Joseph Goebbels' job
manual and lie, keep on lying, keep expanding the lie, all-join-hands and lie, drum-beat,
coordinated-talking-points, mantra-style lie.
Unfortunately, this propaganda technique can be, in the short-term at
least, highly effective, as Hitler taught:
- "The
size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed... The primitive
simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one...
the intellectual level of the propaganda must be lower the larger the number of people who
are to be influenced by it. Through clever and constant application of propaganda,
people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to
consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise."
George
Orwell's 1984 "Big Brother" too:
- "If
the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say ... it never happened ...
[then] where did that knowledge exist?... if all others accepted the lie which the Party
imposed -- if all records told the same lie -- then the lie passed into
history and became truth. Who controls the past, ran the Party
slogan, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past...
'Reality control,' they called it ... It was necessary ... to rewrite a paragraph of Big
Brother's speech in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually
happened... This day-to-day falsification of the past, carried out by the Ministry of
Truth, is as necessary to the stability of the regime as the work of repression and
espionage carried out by the Ministry of Love."
When thuggish tactics such as these, dark stratagems passing as
legitimate means of executing the process of democratic government, are employed we should
all be concerned; more than concerned, we should be fearful: our liberties are
under attack. It is not inevitable that our freedoms, that America itself will survive --
the work and sacrifice of Lincoln teaches us this. Freedom must be defended in every
generation -- until that day when men are no longer self-oriented.
The following links, to be added to periodically, deal with
modern-day applications of the principles just reviewed.
A listing here does not constitute blanket endorsement of the totality
of an individual's life and work; rather, the emphasis here focuses on fairness and due
process, on the nature of proper political discussion, all of which constitute the sine
qua non of the continued success of our American society.
- Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Propaganda Minister: "...the rank and
file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be
essentially simple and repetitious."
- Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Propaganda Minister: "The most
brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is
borne in mind constantly...it must confine itself to a few
points and repeat them over and over."
|