The Great Emancipator?

Economics Professor Thomas DiLorenzo on the Lincoln cult:

Lincoln was a masterful politician who could use tongue-twisting rhetoric to deceive the public better than any American politician in history. In this regard he was Bill Clinton times ten thousand. For example, referring to the part of Declaration of Independence that mentions equality (while ignoring the fact that the entire document was a declaration of the right of secession), he said: "The African upon his own soil has all the natural rights that instrument vouchsafes to all mankind" (emphasis added). The italicized words are the key to understanding Lincoln on this point. He considered black people to be some kind of alien beings, which is why he called them "the Africans." More importantly, he believed that they could never be equal here in America, but only "upon their own soil" or "in their native clime," i.e., Africa, Haiti, Central America, etc., as he often stated. Moreover, he also clearly believed that it was undesirable to attempt to enforce racial equality in the U.S., as he stated in the above quotation from the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Harry Jaffa has spent his entire career spreading the Big Lie of Lincoln as a champion of "equality" in order to justify the Republican Party’s foreign policy agenda of military aggression and imperialism in the name of spreading equality around the globe. (Spreading "equality" around the globe at gunpoint sounds a lot like the professed goals of 20^th-century communism, doesn’t it?).

Read the whole thing over at Lew Rockwell

Until maybe the last 4-5 years, I never really understood the fascination that people had with the Civil War. Of course, my public school education limited the reasons that we had a civil war to only one, to free the slaves. The idea of secession was never mentioned, or states rights, or the economic reasons behind the war.

But I still don't get the whole idea of recreating famous Civil War battles, someone needs to explain that to me, because that just seems stupid.