Lincoln (Photo credit: ehpien)
Suzanne Fields thinks every school child ought to rush out to see the latest Lincoln movie:
Every school child with enough smarts and curiosity to get beyond the latest video game of “Call of Duty” ought to go see “Lincoln,” the movie, and check out the references and his own attention span. It requires patience, but it shows through dramatic action how a self-taught rustic from the deep backwoods had the emotional and intellectual discipline to overcome poverty and grow up to be a president to rank among the greatest.
She even praises him while he’s riding through a battlefield filled with the corpses of young men who “died for freedom”:
The most poignant evocation of war shows Lincoln riding through a field of ripped and rotting corpses, and Lincoln takes off his stovepipe hat in homage to the dead, North and South and Americans all. This is not a hymn to “arms and the man” so much as a long mournful dirge played on the strings of banjos, fiddles and the keys of a parlor piano. It’s as gritty and earthbound as the America of Mark Twain.
Tom DiLorenzo takes a vastly different view, and he has done his homework. It’s too bad that Fields apparently isn’t aware of how slanted and disingenuous Spielberg’s movie really is. Here’s what DiLorenzo thinks about the movie. He pulls no punches:
The new Steven Spielberg movie about Lincoln is entirely based on a fiction, to use a mild term. As longtime Ebony magazine executive editor Lerone Bennett, Jr. explained in his book, Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream: “There is a pleasant fiction that Lincoln . . . became a flaming advocate of the [Thirteenth] amendment and used the power of his office to buy votes to ensure its passage. There is no evidence, as David H. Donald has noted, to support that fiction”. (Emphasis added).
The Lincoln movie is based upon a novel written by a discredited author:
The truth … is precisely the opposite of the story told in Spielberg’s Lincoln movie, which is based on the book Team of Rivals by the confessed plagiarist/court historian Doris Kearns-Goodwin. (My … review of her book is entitled “A Plagiarist’s Contribution to Lincoln Idolatry”).
The movie is a myth based on falsehoods, according to DiLorenzo:
It is a myth that Lincoln toiled mightily in his last days to get a reluctant Congress to pass the Thirteenth Amendment, as portrayed in the Spielberg movie. What he did spend his time on was micromanaging the waging of total war on Southern civilians, who he always considered to be American citizens, since he denied the legitimacy of secession.
More importantly, as documented by historians Phillip Magness and Sebastion Page in their book, Colonization After Emancipation, Lincoln spent many long days at the end of his life communicating with foreign governments and plotting with William Seward, among others, to “colonize” all of “the Africans,” as he called them, out of the United States once the war was over.
The Lincoln movie, in other words, is not only a work of fiction but of false propaganda promoting the myth of Lincoln.
I went to see Red Dawn instead.
Sign up to to receive Bob's explosive articles in your inbox every week, and as a thank you we'll send a copy of his most popular eBook - completely free of charge!
Latest Comments