In a 1922 essay about Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in his book Prejudices: Third Series H.L. Mencken asked, “Am I the first American to note the fundamental nonsensicality of the Gettysburg Address”? One example of the nonsense of Lincoln’s rhetoric as explained by Mencken is as follows:
“Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination – that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves”
(“Nonsense on stilts,” by the way, was a phrase coined by nineteenth-century writer Jeremy Bentham to describe social contract theory. Today we would probably say “nonsense on steroids”).
Now along comes historian Paul C. Graham, a little over a century later, who has expanded upon Mencken’s essay in a short book entitled Nonsense on Stilts: The Gettysburg Address & Lincoln’s Imaginary Nation. It is easy to come to the conclusion after reading Graham’s book that it is hard to imagine a larger collection of falsehoods ever packed into a single political speech anywhere at any time than the Gettysburg Address. In essence, the Address was a radically false rendition of the American founding designed to fool the public into believing that the founding fathers did after all create a highly centralized, monopolistic superstate with virtually unlimited powers. That is why the totalitarian-minded “Pulitzer prize winner” (as Graham calls him) Gary Wills celebrated the Gettysburg Address as “a giant, if benign, swindle.”
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https://www.lewrockwell.com/2024/02/thomas-dilorenzo/nonsense-on-stilts-the-rhetorical-cornerstone-of-the-american-welfare-warfare-state/
