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Lincoln’s Chickens Coming Home to Roost?

Lincoln’s Chickens Coming Home to Roost?: Pat Buchanan has an excellent column in today’s WND, American roots of 21st-century wars. He argues that Jefferson’s revolutionary view that peoples are entitled to “self-determination,” that “All governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed” is in conflict with the logic of Lincoln in the Civil War. “[I]f we are true believers in self-determination, was Lincoln right to send a million-man army to crush a people’s rebellion to break free of his Union, as our forefathers had broken free of the British Crown. If America was a “union of free and independent states,” why was the South not free to depart?” And these conflicting ideas have been playing out on the world stage since WWI, when “In the name of self-determination, Wilson helped to carve the new nations of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia out of the carcasses of the Russian, German and Hapsburg empires”; but, contrary to the principle of self-determination, in order to dismember Bismarck’s Germany “for the safety of France […], the Saar was put under French control, South Tyrol was given to Italy, 3 million Sudeten Germans were put under Czech rule, a corridor of German land and the city of Danzig were given to Poland, and the Prussian city of Memel was seized from a prostrate Reich by tiny Lithuania.” These Lincolnian actions of course helped a nationalistic Hitler rise to power in a humiliated Germany.

As Buchanan points out, states such as Israel, India, Russia, China, and Serbia “confront independence movements by Islamic peoples [e.g., West Bank Palestinians, Kashmir, Chechnya, Sinkiang, Kosovo] who are throwing in our face our own hallowed principle of self-determination, as Hitler did in the 1930s. And there is the same perplexity and moral confusion among Western elites now, as then.” Conversely, the states confronting independence movements invoke Jefferson’s opposite in their defense: “So, today, in Chechnya, Putin invokes Lincoln as Islamic rebels invoke Wilson and the young slave-owner Jefferson.”

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