No, the issue was state independence, written into the Constitution, insisted upon by some and denied by others. This issue was troublesome at least since Jackson was finally elected. It took a very credible threat by Jackson to use all possible force to prevent hostilities from erupting much earlier, because everybody knew that he’d do it for sure. It took all political skills of Clay and Calhoun to keep this issue on a back burner for two decades. It took arranging presidential elections to keep the South happy. It finally erupted after Lincoln’s election, because he was considered a non-entity and unacceptable to the South.
Was it not 50-50 by states’ count, with strict parity insisted upon, while attempted to be broken, by both sides?
If you do a search on tomndebb’s fine work, you’ll find that every blessed one of the Southern states’ secession laws explained that the preservation of slavery was the issue, and “states’ rights” was simply the mechanism used to justify acting accordingly, saving slavery at the expense of the democratic experiment itself. I already gave you the Lincoln quotes explaining that more eloquently than I can.
YOU said the country was slave-holding. It was not.
The plan for ending slavery was not defined at the Constitutional Conventions, as you ought to know. The discussion about banning it in the Constitution as written was intense, but ultimately they decided that it would have to be dealt with at a later time.
Now, after our discussion, what of the Gettysburg Address do you think is left as a lie? Not the of/by/for the people part, surely.
New Iskander: There’s a difference between ideals and reality, and sometimes we need to accept a solution that gets us 40% of our ideals simply so reality doesn’t blow us away totally. The Declaration of Independence was a statement of ideals and grievances, written by men who had to deal with harsh realities. If we still don’t live up to it, that’s an indication that we need to try harder, not give up.
No, when a king thousands of miles away decides to impose arbitrary force on colonists who don’t have the right to be heard in the king’s court or parliament. That was what the `patriots’ wanted long before they decided to dissolve the bands: A fair shake, and an equal voice. They wanted to be British subjects, not simply colonials.
Read Locke, especially his Essay on the Rights of Man. The notion that people are born with freedoms and have the right to defend those freedoms with force was radical at the time, but it has been accepted nearly everywhere since the Amercian Revolution. Now, only the most despotic of regimes would dare deny it, for fear of mass protests and/or revolts in their own land. And that is a good thing.
They listed the causes right after the preamble, as you well know. Some of them were inflated, but none of them were outright false. Unlike the causes for some wars I could name.
Again, you have to go back to Locke and Co. Those were the ideals, the notions they were fighting for and the notions they would die for. Remember that: Merely signing the document would have ensured their drawing and quartering, let alone actually waging open revolt against their king.
And here we disagree. I agree wholly with the Declaration of Independence, even though I know it has never actually been fully put into practice. It is an idealist’s document, and it outlines a goal to strive to, not a framework to implement. The frameworks would come later, as all of the people there knew. But the Declaration of Independence was the mission, the grand quest, the goal they would strive to achieve: A government that defended what Locke and Jefferson believe to be the basic rights and did no more. A world founded upon Age of Reason ideals, where every man had equal rights and equal standing under the law.
Was it propaganda? If that counts as propaganda, so does every public word ever spoken by Gandhi and Martin Luther King. So does every sermon by Jesus and every text ascribed to the Buddha. It wasn’t a reflection of realities, but a reflection of the goals. As a reflection of reality, it sucked and still does. As a reflection of dreams, it is mirror-perfect.
I still find the rhetorics laughable, no reflection on the Men behind them and their actions. “The notion that people are born with freedoms and have the right to defend those freedoms” was never and still isn’t truly accepted anywhere, beginning with “Ritalin babies” in US as one example out of millions. Those might have been noble ideals, but they were utterly discredited by French revolution and subsequent events. I actually see the ability of Patriots to prevent their new country from falling into the state of bloody anarchy and/or despotism, despite the pernicious twist of the ideas they professed, as their greatest personal accomplishment.
The Declaration itself could be cut down to “F–k King George!” statement, painted on the wall of Governor’s mansion; after that all could proceed with a serious business of fighting the war. That would be candid and succinct. But no, what would posterity say? “F–k King George!” wouldn’t look good on those phony parchments everybody is so fond of hanging everywhere nowadays, I guess.
You’re thinking of “the Blood Libel”, the claim that Jews used the blood of Gentiles (usually babies in the stories) as part of the Passover observence. Despite being explicitly repudiated by the Catholic church as a lie of Satan, it persisted for centuries in medeival Europe. Probably there are still people spouting it.
One of my favorite lies was in the 50’s when President Eisenhower boldly claimed that we weren’t flying spy planes over the Soviet Union after the Soviets claimed they had shot one down. That was just before they produced the pilot. That lie was important to me because I lost my innocent belief that the Americans always told the truth and it was always the evil Commies that lied.
Regarding U2/Powers incident, I read somewhere that Eisenhower was trying to improve US-USSR relations before the end of his second term, even contemplating official Moscow visit, and he did insist on termination of spy flights. So when Soviets announced that they shoot down US spy plane, E. was sincere in his claim that there were no spy flights. If this is true, E. was basically screwed by some powers inside US gov’t. There was no Moscow visit and whole world history took a different turn. Again, I don’t know how true this is.
Derleth got it right (and said it very well). Boiling it down to “F–k King George!” would have had all the moral impact of writing on a men’s room wall. The parchments weren’t phony just because the words were grand. They were necessary to give people a sense that they had a true cause. The only action “F–k King George!” might have elicited would be on a par with burning a sack of dog duty on the steps of Buckinham Palace. This was not ring and run, it was a call to real action, the aim of which was to free a people. Grand words are needed to motivate people to grand goals, then and now. There’s nothing phony about them, even if the writers and their actions are imperfect (read “human”).
This is at least the 2nd time you’ve said something like this. I don’t understand you, are you saying that you admire the men who started the American Revolution but that what they wrote was bullcrap? A rather cynical worldview, isn’t it?
By the way, the word rhetoric is not an insult.
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What connection does Ritalin have with freedom? Are you implying that freedom is a lie because children don’t have a choice whether or not to take ritalin?
Please explain how the Declaration of American Independence was discredited by the French Revolution.
or maybe the ideas were not so “perniciously twisted” as you think, maybe they were good ideas that inspired many good men to rise above themselves and work hard towards a better tomorrow.
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Very cynical. Tell me, has anyone in history, in your opinion, ever wrote a genuine, honest, document of belief for noble, altruistic reasons? Ever? I’m curious
I didn’t say Declaration was discredited, I said the ideas were, because they brought forth nothing but misery, murder and despoty everywhere outside US.
Priceless…
May be in spiritual sphere, but never in politics.
I’ll take bathroom wall politics every time. Bush had to go on TV with his “F–k Saddam, we are taking him out” statement and leave it at that. At least nobody would be left confused as to what is really going on.
People got a “sense that they had a true cause”, when Washington started executing defectors.
Or it actually happened and the people who were there and knew about it (like, y’know, Mary, and God, and later on, Joseph) told people about it.
[quote]
Just because millions of people believe something, doesn’t mean it’s not a lie; in fact it’s an even bigger lie.
[quote]
I admit, I’ve never seen a reverse ad populum before.
Oh, not this strawman again. The pope is not and is never infallible;l only some things he declares under extremely strict circumstances are, and is no virue of his own that determines that.
And modern Britain, modern Germany… modern France? These mean nothing? Men have always killed, elivered misery and injustice upon one another. The best and worst have done this. But simply bcause one does not perectly fulfill one’s hopes, or that other people twist them for their own darker schemes, does not mean those hopes are as worthless as brass.
New Iskander: The ideals of the Declaration of Independence brought together the radical notions of Locke and Rousseau with political reality and the idea that they may actually work. As a matter of fact, they have worked: the Americas, Europe, and bits and pieces of Africa and Asia owe their current political systems to the DI. That is the biggest success story of any comparable document, given the rather dismal failure of every single Marxist state.
For a revolution to be more than a simple feud between two oligarchs, there must be ideals. Some ideals work, others do not. Some ideals give rise to generally bad outcomes, others increase the amount of liberty on Earth. The DI both works and increases the amount of liberty. That is why it is still remembered and that is why it is not simply lies.
Did people ostensibly inspired by it create awful systems? Yes, in France they did. Robespierre and his cronies executed more than Washington could ever possibly have, even assuming Washington was as psychotic as Robespierre seemed to be. (He, of course, was not. For all of his problems, he was fairly sane.) But trying to use Robespierre to discredit the DI’s ideas is simply and utterly absurd. The ideas have gone on to do too much else.
What did they do? Look around you. Look in Europe and Asia, where people inspired by the DI’s ideas have thrown off the chains of ancien regimes of all styles. Look in Africa and the Americas (not just the USA, but in Latin America, where Simon Bolivar successfully liberated a different nation), where other former colonies liberated themselves. Look at South Africa, where Nelson Mandela used the ideals of the DI to successfully destroy Apartheid, or Gandhi, who effectively shamed Great Britain into liberating India and Pakistan. Hell, even France eventually came around to the DI’s way of thinking, and it hasn’t been more stable.
All of this is so obvious, I have difficulty thinking you’ve missed it. More likely is the idea that BMalion seems to hold, that you’re simply doing this for a game. If you are, I shall end this discussion. I won’t even take it to the Pit: You simply aren’t worth my time.
The Magna Carta is the “fountain of our liberty.” Not really, since it just benefited the rich.
Against all odds, the English defeated the greatest navy in the world in the Spanish Armada. It was defeated, but it wasn’t that great.
Captain Kidd was a pirate. Nope, pirate catcher.
Lawrence of Arabia was a great friend to the Arabs. Used 'em for politics.
The kilt is an ancient and honored tradition of the Scottish people. It’s only been around since 1727, and was invented by an Englishman.
Gandhi hated war and bloodshed. He volunteered to join in three wars: The Boer, the Zulu, and WWI. He also gave his blessing to a proposal to shoot ten Muslims for every Hindu who was killed in the state, and also said “I would not flinch from sacrificing a million lives for India’s liberty.”
I don’t believe that state of affairs in England owes anything to US Declaration of Independence.
The whole success of American revolution was due to inequality of men, because aristocrats like Washington, Adams and Jefferson managed to stay in control of things to the end of the war and rule the new country for long time afterwards. When “the principle of equality of men” was carried to it’s logical conclusion in France, Russia and many smaller countries, when royalty and aristocracy were swept of all powers, bloody anarchy inevitably ensued, followed by murderous one-party despotism, followed by protracted oppressive dictatorships.
When a certain theory produces a single success and multiple failures, when that single success is based on not carrying that theory out to the full extent, how can one claim the theory to be true?
I really liked your previous posts, and I said as much more than once. However, in your latest post you exhibit the typical traits of a true idealist. You get exasperated with my insistence on disagreeing with something that seems “obvious” to you, formulate a suspicion of my motives, which immediately turns into a firm conviction, followed by grave accusation and speedy sentence. I think the minds of Robespiere and Lenin operated on a similar pattern.
If you ever decide to resume this discussion, make sure to read more about “successes” of liberation movements in South America, Africa and Asia.