Wisconsin students protest Lincoln because “he owned slaves”
The coming dark age: The American Indian student group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is protesting a statue of Abraham Lincoln because “he owned slaves” and because there were Indian wars during his administration.
The activist group is now demanding a disclaimer be put up saying Lincoln was complicit in the murder of Native Americans.
Why would they be so angry about Lincoln?
“Everyone thinks of Lincoln as the great, you know, freer of slaves, but let’s be real: He owned slaves, and as natives, we want people to know that he ordered the execution of native men,” said one of the protesters.
For a college student to believe that Lincoln owned slaves is to illustrate an appalling level of ignorance. Moreover, the claim that Lincoln “executed” Indians is to also demonstrate an almost incomprehensible ignorance of the history of the American west. The author at the link gives an accurate though simplified history lesson:
During the war, Minnesota was in a state of chaos due to soldiers abandoning their posts and armies moving east to join the main war effort. On top of that, the Office of Indian Affairs was mired in corruption that was exacerbated by wartime negligence. As a result, money promised to the Sioux tribe in Minnesota in exchange for its land wasn’t coming through, and many of its people starved.
This led to a bloody uprising called the “Dakota War,” which the U.S. government eventually put down.
Over 300 Sioux were sentenced to death for connection to the rebellion. Lincoln saw this as extreme, however, and pardoned all but 38 of the alleged perpetrators, whom he believed were guilty of the worst crimes such as rape and murder.
It was the largest mass hanging in American history, but it could have been much worse if not for Lincoln’s compassion. He believed that the Sioux were getting a raw deal, but needed to ensure peace on America’s borders in a time when the future of the United States was seriously in question.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
The coming dark age: The American Indian student group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is protesting a statue of Abraham Lincoln because “he owned slaves” and because there were Indian wars during his administration.
The activist group is now demanding a disclaimer be put up saying Lincoln was complicit in the murder of Native Americans.
Why would they be so angry about Lincoln?
“Everyone thinks of Lincoln as the great, you know, freer of slaves, but let’s be real: He owned slaves, and as natives, we want people to know that he ordered the execution of native men,” said one of the protesters.
For a college student to believe that Lincoln owned slaves is to illustrate an appalling level of ignorance. Moreover, the claim that Lincoln “executed” Indians is to also demonstrate an almost incomprehensible ignorance of the history of the American west. The author at the link gives an accurate though simplified history lesson:
During the war, Minnesota was in a state of chaos due to soldiers abandoning their posts and armies moving east to join the main war effort. On top of that, the Office of Indian Affairs was mired in corruption that was exacerbated by wartime negligence. As a result, money promised to the Sioux tribe in Minnesota in exchange for its land wasn’t coming through, and many of its people starved.
This led to a bloody uprising called the “Dakota War,” which the U.S. government eventually put down.
Over 300 Sioux were sentenced to death for connection to the rebellion. Lincoln saw this as extreme, however, and pardoned all but 38 of the alleged perpetrators, whom he believed were guilty of the worst crimes such as rape and murder.
It was the largest mass hanging in American history, but it could have been much worse if not for Lincoln’s compassion. He believed that the Sioux were getting a raw deal, but needed to ensure peace on America’s borders in a time when the future of the United States was seriously in question.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
The town in northern Ontario where one sister of lives was aptly named Sioux Lookout. Rape etc was common for the Sioux.
The history tells where the Sioux were expected and all the women and children were placed on an island and the Sioux were ambushed. Ojibwa is the native “clan” in the area.
Let us see the Sioux apologize for this. No, it is simply a money grab or Obama doing community organization through the Bill Ayers old connections.
Phill O:
I did not know you were a purveyor of “Fake news” and revisionist history, it is well known that only the European white man in all of history has ever committed atrocities and abuses against his foes and those he found himself in a dominant position over. Think of Columbus, the Founders, Lincoln, Hitler, D.J. Trump etc.
You really should be reeducated, I am certain Berkeley must offer such a program.
Berkeley’s slogan? “Let There Be Light”, now doesn’t that make sense seeing that they are so open to the free speech of all? How inspirational.
Cotour: You break me up laughing! Yup, I need a re-education for sure!
As funny as you may find my tongue in cheek sarcasm there are those of a particular political philosophy and ignorance that actually believe that my joke is a reflection of reality. They believe that Lincoln had slaves, that the Indians or Africans for that matter were angelic and lived in a totally non violent utopian world where the abuse of their fellow man (and woman, and often) never existed, until the white man appeared.
That is what is being sold at the universities of higher learning and we can verify it by the ridiculous story’s that emanate from them, so counter intuitive that you would think that they are in fact fictions of the imagination of a psychotic and mentally ill writer. Alas, it is no fiction.
From the article: “But the iconoclasts do not just see Confederates or Christopher Columbus or Lincoln as problematic. The movement is about more than these individuals. It’s an attempt to delegitimize and erase the very foundation of our civilization, which to them, is irreparably flawed.”
So, let’s take a look at this “irreparably flawed” foundation of our American portion of civilization.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZSQJxc_P4o (7 minutes; Bill Whittle: “Government”)
“Good government is not a player; good government is the referee. … Try to imagine a Superbowl where both teams are comprised exclusively of referees and there are 22 penalty flags being thrown on every single play. If you can then also imagine that there are 100,000 referees in the stadium and each one of them is constantly screaming out 100,000 rule changes and two or three players are shuffling around looking frightened and confused then you can understand why conservatives don’t like big government.”
These Wisconsin students are protesting big government, where a Lincoln can execute anyone he pleases, yet they are promoting big government, where on a whim, statues can be removed.
They want to be the arbiters as to which statues can be erected, as well as the arbiters of other aspects of life that allow or limit freedom. These students were insisting upon actions that “decolonize” the campus.
For three decades, Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” has been teaching our children that the United States is the root of all evil. “A People’s History”? Why does that sound communist to me?
No nation is perfect, but the United States has been the first or early adopter of what most of the world now holds as virtue.
Slavery abolition started in the US even before there was a US. Jefferson and Washington had both tried to end slavery in Colonial Virginia but King George overruled Virginia’s law that would have ended slavery. King George is the reason why slavery was more deeply ingrained in the American Colonies than anywhere else in the world, thus the hardest place to end it. Look at the Declaration of Independence, and you will see that the very first grievance is about that very problem. It comes before all the other grievances, including the dissatisfaction with mercantile economics, which limited colonial trade to only the low prices that England would pay while direct trade with the rest of the world would pay much more.
Jefferson’s and Washington’s top grievance against the King was his refusal to allow them to free their slaves. They are not the horrible humps that is being taught, these days. By the way, the family that claimed to have Thomas Jefferson’s DNA does not.
There are many terrible lies and vile myths told about the founding of this country, and it needs to stop.
The rest of American history, while still not the perfect country, is full of other newly invented virtues:
The US conquered Mexico in the Mexican American war, but the US gave back to Mexico what she had not already asked Americans to settle, asked in order to control the Indian problem (then treated those settlers as property). Not keeping conquered land is a US concept. It is now a UN mandate.
The US is said to be colonialist (apparently even colonizing the University of Wisconsin campuses), but it was the US who first released a territory, the Philippines, upon a mere request. The US was so committed to her independence that even the Japanese conquest of the Philippines during a world war upset the schedule for her independence.
Capitalism is not the evil economic system as is being taught. Even socialism was tried in America. The Pilgrims signed a contract to work hard for seven years then evenly distribute the fruits of that labor. The result was that those who worked hard complained that those who did not would share equally with those who had done the majority of the work. The hard workers learned to not work hard at all. As a result, half the Plymouth Colony died that first year.
William Bradford released everyone from that socialist contract (socialism did not have a name back then) and employed a free market capitalist system, in which people kept the fruits of their own labor and could work together, combining their “capital,” to produce more than one person could alone. The result was so much prosperity that the Pilgrims invited the neighboring Indians for a three day feast that we celebrate today as Thanksgiving. The Pilgrims were thanking God for free market capitalism, because they didn’t have any “other people’s money” for socialism to work for any length of time.
By the way, the Indians did not teach the Pilgrims how to farm; they were already farmers. The Indians taught them the eccentricities of corn and how to catch fish — the fertilizer the Indians used, because corn drains the land of many nutrients. The modern claim is that socialism has been tried by the wrong people and that if the right people, Americans, were to try it, it would work this time; however if a system depends upon the “right” people to make it work, then it is not the system that works but the people who do. Free market capitalism, on the other hand, has so far worked no matter who tried it; even socialist India and communist China have prospered since they tried aspects of it, bringing half a billion people in each of those nations out of poverty. Free market capitalism has brought more people out of poverty than all other economic systems combined. This is why the founding fathers wanted to return to it, away from the king’s mercantile system.
Being free people, Americans learned many lessons from its own and other nations’ actions and incorporated them into its set of values. Zinn and the teachers who use his book fail to teach this lesson, and as a result the past couple of generations are less likely to be vigilant about keeping liberty and freedom. Who was it that warned: “eternal vigilance is the price of freedom”? We were not vigilant about Zinn’s faulty book.
(Another by-the-way: how “free-market” is a healthcare insurance system in which the government directs the population to purchase insurance no matter how little they need it and how little they can afford it, as well as directs the only coverage available. Quite frankly, I do not appreciate being treated as a hermaphrodite, being required to purchase insurance for treatments for conditions I cannot possibly ever have. This violates the founding principles of this nation, so do the students accept or reject such big government mandates?)
Why do American college students use the fascist, NAZI tactics of shutting down opposing views, even if it is in the form of a statue? Keep in mind that NAZI stands for Nationalist Socialist German Worker’s Party; they were and are socialists.
(Speaking of American college students, I guess there should have been a trigger warning in Robert’s post; I kind of got triggered, there. For any of you that my rant may have triggered, please consider this as a belated trigger warning. Meanwhile, I need to retreat to my safe space.)
All and every government entity that has ever been conceived or formed, from a group of indigenous people existing on any location on the earth during any time that human beings have drawn breath sitting around a fire, in a cave or sitting in a tree, to the highest levels of civilized civilization imbibing the finest wines, where individuals have been empowered by the group to lead or have taken power to lead through sheer force there has been abuse of power and corruption. This is an absolute statement of truth about the human animal.
Counter balancing this absolute and known human tendency and truth related to power and governance was as perfectly addressed by the Founders of the United States Of America as it could possibly be addressed. To look at someone else’s “grass” and think “Gee, I think because our governance / government is soo corrupt and perverted theirs must be better, lets do that”. Is a naive, ignorant and faulty thought process.
All and every government is corrupt from its inception, it can be nothing other than corrupt, the only question remains is how corrupt is it and how corrupt will it become.
So all of these, and we must be brutally honest about who these people and what their belief system naively teaches, Leftists, Marxists, Communists, Maoists, how ever and what ever philosophy they pledge allegiance to while offering it up as a reasonable and “better” alternative to the mess that we have before us are fraudulent.
We like our grass, we cut our grass, we do not need any other’s grass.
Our system is specifically designed and set up to be constantly in flux between this known enemy of freedom, corruption and abuse of power, and we deal with it by utilizing the tools given to us by the designers which is the Constitution, the counter balance to the nature of man related to power. Keeping this in mind we the individuals that empower those who seek power and pay for everything must at some point exert our power and insist, one way or another, and I mean really insist, that the light of truth be shone in the deepest and darkest corners of OUR corruption and abuse of power so we can once again heal ourselves as is the intent of the design.
And then we move on in time to the next corruption and perversion of power, this is our lot, this is our responsibility, this is our country and despite what we recognize and know about how perverted it is and can be it is the best that has ever been devised.
As counter intuitive as that may sound given the level of perversion we see plainly before us.
I should note that I have two nieces and one nephew who are full blooded Ojibwa (adopted). So my re-education might be less.