Man, The Gettysburg address has to be one of the greatest speeches.. - The Civil War (1990) Discussion

[–] KnackerSack 18 years ago

Lincoln himself was dissapointed by his delivery of the speech,'That speech won't scour' were his words as he sat down,even as a foreinger i find that speech moving, Kennedy at the Berlin wall annnounucing that his proudest boast was 'Ich bin ein berliner', (i am a small biscuit) now that takes some beating.

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[–] NoahBody 17 years ago

Kennedy at the Berlin wall annnounucing that his proudest boast was 'Ich bin ein berliner', (i am a small biscuit) now that takes some beating.

But it was Reagan's speach (a speach cowardly colun powel tried to edit) actions and drive that tore down that wall. Pretty typical of history. Liberals huff and puff, but the results come from the conservatives.

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[–] bhoover247 17 years ago

Colun Powel?? Spell checker is your friend.

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[–] H.Bosch 17 years ago

Yeah, Lincoln, there was a real conservative, I tell you. A firm beliver in not changing anything, not upsetting the status quo...

And FDR, hell, he never got anything done. Typical liberal, no real action, just words...

Omnia Mutantur Nihil Interit

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[–] 17 years ago

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[–] rmax304823 17 years ago

The USSR spent itself into oblivion in 1989. The process of outspending them last more than 50 years. There were virtual revolutions in countries like Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. And you give the credit to Ronald Reagan for tearing down that wall? The same Reagan who refused a joint nuclear reduction offer from the USSR in Iceland? The Reagan who, when the USSR unilaterally ceased its state-sponsored broadcasts into the "free world", dismissed the move as "propaganda"?

Well, whatever. I'm sure glad the cowardly colun powel didn't get to edit that speach you're talking about, whatever it was, because if that huffing and puffing cowardly liberul had had his way we might still be fighting the Cold War. We sure got results from the neoconservatives after 9/11.

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[–] Fingaroo 17 years ago

I give Reagan credit for being one of only two important world figures (the other being Pope John Paul II) who foresaw the USSR's collapse and acted to hasten it. Even otherwise savvy foreign policy leaders like Margaret Thatcher considered the USSR as more or less a permanent fixture on the world stage. I have to laugh at all of the media/talking head and academic types who smugly say now that the Soviet collapse was a foregone conclusion. Where the hell were they in 1982? They sure weren't talking like that then. Anybody of importance who says that they saw it coming back then is a liar.

As far as Gorbachev's Icelandic offer goes, Reagan was right to distrust that snake. Remember how later he ended up sending tanks into one of the Baltic countries? Why would Reagan give somebody like that any military concessions when in a couple of years he knows that the whole rotton house is going to come tumbling down without a shot being fired?

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[–] NoahBody 15 years ago

ROTFL rmax304823 outs herself as a "Truffer"

Strap on the tinfoil folks, it's a CONSPIRACYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

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[–] NoahBody 15 years ago

rmax304823

The same Reagan who refused a joint nuclear reduction offer from the USSR in Iceland? The

Reagan standing up to the soviets at Reykjavik still stands as one of his 'gold star' achievements.

Your political lie distorts the facts and denies the clear historical fact that in 1986 Reagan had proposed banning all ballistic missiles,

Your lie further ignores the human rights violations that Reagan was standing up against, but the soviet monsters would not address. "At Reykjavik, Reagan sought to include discussion of human rights, emigration of Soviet Jews and dissidents, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. "

Reagan's strength in the face of soviet aggression,led to the INF Treaty (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty), which was signed in Washington on December 8, 1987.

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[–] hachmom-1 13 years ago

Reagan's Speech would not have been half as effective if Kennedy's speech had gone before. Reagan could demand Gorbachev tear down the wall because Kennedy had pointed out how evil it was...("We've never had to put up a wall to keep our people in")

It is not our abilities that show who we truly are...it is our choices

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[–] KnackerSack 18 years ago

As an Englishman whatever the adverse occasion i've always known that i can fall back on Shakspeare or Churchill for a decent quote,however the Gettysburg Address is somewhat cheapened by the fact that it took nearly 100 years for some of 'The People' to get anything like a vote in any state that wasn't on the East coast until 1960

'Who is your daddy and what does he do' ??

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[–] Fingaroo 17 years ago

Well d woco, if you are an honest Englishman then you will be heartily ashamed of the pivotal role your country played in the African slave trade. Chattel slavery was, after all, originally an English institution rather than one native to America. Try to remember that fact the next time you are tempted to climb on your high horse and deliver a lecture on race relations.

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[–] peterz95 17 years ago

And let's not forget India.

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[–] KnackerSack 17 years ago

We were the first so called civilised nation to realise the abhorrence of slavery and are rightfully commemorating the 200th aniversary of it's abolition in this country this year,as for India i'll quote Churchill at a dinner given at the American embassy in London in March 1945 when asked by the Ambassador's wife "Prime minister what are British intentions with regard India after the war"? to which the great man replied "Madam under the British Raj the population of India has almost doubled,i fear your own Indians haven't faired quite so well".

"I'm as mad as hell and i'm not gonna take this anymore" !!

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[–] Fingaroo 17 years ago

d woco, you wrote: " We were the first so called civilised nation to realise the abhorrence of slavery and are rightfully commemorating the 200th aniversary of it's abolition in this country this year..."

I'm sure that is a great comfort to all of the Africans who were carried away to North America on English ships for 300 years.

The USA has plenty to be sorry for regarding African slavery, but so does Great Britain and other European nations. That's why we find sanctimonious scolding on the subject from our friends across the pond to be a bit galling.

I share your admiration for Winston Churchill and his oratory. He and Lincoln were both masters of the language.

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[–] KnackerSack 17 years ago

Have you actually researched Britain and the slave trade ?,after our abolition we became the worlds self appointed 'anti slave police' ,the royal navy saved thousands from a life of servitude,we went at it with the passion of converts,so yes my forebears made a mistake but they redeemed themselves long before my generation came along,by his own admission Abraham Lincoln announced the Emancipation proclamation as a device of war 'to deny the enemy the materiel to wage war'.

"I'm as mad as hell and i'm not gonna take this anymore" !!

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[–] rmax304823 17 years ago

Slavery was not an original sin for Americans. Other nations were involved. But there had never been a society like the Confederacy that had so MANY slaves, with an economy founded on slavery, that lasted on into such recent history. Slavery was one of the horrors of the rest of the civilized world and one of the chief moral reasons why neither England nor France intervened to broker a peace that would create an independent Confederacy, even though Europe was starving for cotton at the time.

Blaming England or any other country doesn't expiate the sins of the United States. We're accountable for our own mistakes.

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[–] Fingaroo 17 years ago

"Blaming England or any other country doesn't expiate the sins of the United States. We're accountable for our own mistakes."

I agree entirely. I just find it hypocritical when citizens of other countries self-righteously harp about the sin of slavery while conveniently ignoring the vital role their own countries played in it.

By the way, I don't recall British or French regiments being sent to help the Union smash slavery, so I guess there were limits to their superior morality after all. I hope that those who consider slavery to be purely an American disease will at least have the honesty to admit that the cure was wholly American as well.

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[–] KnackerSack 17 years ago

Not once did i say slavery was a 'wholly American disease', and if you read my previous postings with a clear mind you'd realise that 'finger doo'!!! , what i resent is you accusing me of being on some kind of moral high horse,this is a thread about your civil war ? 1861-1865, your slaves weren't declared free until 1863, why did you go to war again ??,btw the cure to slavery wasn't wholly American either ,it was called world opinion back in the days when you used to care about it.

"I'm as mad as hell and i'm not gonna take this anymore" !!

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[–] Fingaroo 17 years ago

"btw the cure to slavery wasn't wholly American either ,it was called world opinion back in the days when you used to care about it."

Are you being serious? The final cure for slavery in the US was a whole lot of American men carrying rifles. Evil never has paid much attention to "world opinion", either then or now. You can look to the events of the 20th Century if you need more examples.

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[–] KnackerSack 17 years ago

[you can look to the events of the of the 20th century if you need more examples]

I'm guessing you're refering to things like 'The Munich agreement' ?,when we had to sell our souls to Satan to try and maintain some semmblence of peace in Europe,btw have you read Roosevelts telegram to Chamberlain that he received on his return from Munich ? it read "good man" ,as you say world opinion pays little regard to evil.

"I'm as mad as hell and i'm not gonna take this anymore" !!

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[–] Fingaroo 17 years ago

"btw have you read Roosevelts telegram to Chamberlain that he received on his return from Munich ? it read "good man" ,as you say world opinion pays little regard to evil."

I have not read it. Can you provide a link?

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[–] rmax304823 17 years ago

The Munich agreement is always held up as an example of a gross miscalculation and is usually described as "appeasement." But I can't see that it was such a bad idea, for a couple of reasons.

First of all -- had it worked, World War II and its tens of millions of dead would have been averted. The gamble failed in 1939 but the payoff may have been worth it. We gave away Czechoslovakia to the Soviets in 1949 and that was an end to their Western expansion.

Second, what other options were there? An ultimatum based on Czechoslovakia rather than Poland? That almost certainly would have failed and the war would have commenced earlier but with the same initial results.

An outright declaration of war? Ditto.

Finally, yes, Hitler violated the agreement and it led to the war. Does anyone seriously believe that if there HAD been NO agreement, Hitler would have stopped anyway and there would have been no war? What was lost by signing the agreement, hoping for the best, and preparing for the worst?

And I still can't see -- and don't suppose I ever will -- how fingerdoo can claim that Reagan knew that if he only waited another few years the USSR would collapse, while no one else had the slightest inkling. (Not even the CIA predicted the fall.) Reagan was a popular president but was he God's conduit to the public?

Anyway, that all belongs to another thread.

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[–] Fingaroo 17 years ago

"And I still can't see -- and don't suppose I ever will -- how fingerdoo can claim that Reagan knew that if he only waited another few years the USSR would collapse, while no one else had the slightest inkling."

Don't feel bad. I don't know how he knew it either, but he did. I certaintly didn't see it coming. I don't necessarily think that he knew it would only be a few years. Perhaps he only suspected it. But he knew it would happen eventually.

Munich was a disgrace, and ended up being a disaster to boot. It led directly to the Soviet-Nazi peace treaty a year later, which in turn greatly hastened the French collapse in 1940 and the resultant Nazi conquest of Europe. The British, unlike the French, were under no obligation to help the Czechs, and at the time most British subjects could probably give a rat's ass about them. But I'll bet the same people who were praising Munich in 1938 were singing a different tune by 1945.

An attack on Germany by France in 1938 could have stopped Hitler, especially if Britain were allied with her. At the very least it could have lessened the bloodbath to come.

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[–] KnackerSack 17 years ago

We seem to be getting ever so slightly off thread,but i'm sure Abe wouldn't mind,btw finger doo i found out that though Roosevelt never sent a personal telegram to Chamberlain he did tell his secretary of state of his personal feelings regarding the Munich agreement which in turn were relayed to the U.S embassy in London and conveyed to the Prime minister,given Roosevelt and America's isolationist policy at the time it's hardly a conspiracy theory.
As for the Munich agreement, at the time for the first time in recorded history Britain craved peace and we thought we could deal with Hitler, even Mein Kampf stated that his intentions laid to the east our foreign office read it but obviously not the USSR's.
One book i wish all politicians had read at the time and i'd reccommend to anybody who wants to gain an insight to German thinking at the time is 'The house that Hitler built' by Stephen H Roberts ,published in Oct 1937,he was professor of history at Sydney university and he spent 2 years in Germany and interviewed all the leading Nazis including Hitler and it is scary how the predictions in his book came to pass (kind of like an informed H G Wells).

"I'm as mad as hell and i'm not gonna take this anymore" !!

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[–] Fingaroo 17 years ago

Thanks, I'll check it out.

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[–] KnackerSack 17 years ago

One of my customers that knew about my interest in modern history left it to me in his will,i still find it strange reading about the pre-war Nazis in the present tense,btw Finger doo i've enjoyed our debates be a shame to end them.?

"I'm as mad as hell and i'm not gonna take this anymore" !!

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[–] Fingaroo 17 years ago

Don't worry. Ken Burns is about to release a similar series to The Civil War, only this one is about WWII. I'm sure there will be plenty of debate going on then! It's called simply "The War." You can read about it here: http://www.pbs.org/thewar/

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[–] KnackerSack 17 years ago

Should cause some debate,a bit like Ken Burns remaking 'The Civil War' and neglecting to mention the Confederacy.Btw have you ever watched 'The World at war (1973)?

"I'm as mad as hell and i'm not gonna take this anymore" !!

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[–] Fingaroo 17 years ago

I watched it when it first aired in the US in the early '70's. Then I bought the DVD set about a year ago ($95+--ouch!) An exceptional series. I especially liked the fact that so many high ranking officials (Lord Mountbatten, General Mark Clark, etc.) were still alive and agreed to be interviewed (well, I didn't see any Soviet generals. Only a few lower rank types. But that was their own fault!) It was of course told largely from the British side, but since it was a British production that made sense. And Lawrence Olivier narrates it. Good stuff.

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[–] KnackerSack 17 years ago

You're starting to scare me finger doo we're agreeing on something !! lol,tho i did like Stephen Ambrose's analysis in the final episode, and i paraphrase "The result of the second world war ? well the Soviet Union gained land ,the U.S gained a lot of money and influence and the U.K won the moral victory" ,but sadly very little else !.btw my Grandfather featured in episode 20.

"I'm as mad as hell and i'm not gonna take this anymore" !!

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[–] Fingaroo 17 years ago

Who is your grandfather? Let me know so I can watch out for him.

Going on vacation so gotta go. I'll watch it when I get back.

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[–] KnackerSack 17 years ago

Geoffrey Aspinall,the poor sod that had to bulldoze the bodies into the pits at Belsen,enjoy the holiday !! lol

"I'm as mad as hell and i'm not gonna take this anymore" !!

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[–] Hancock_the_Superb 15 years ago

Lots of faulty reasoning here.

The Munich Agreement was perhaps worth trying, but its success was pretty much dependent on Hitler being a rational actor who could be appeased enough to satisfy him, which history shows to obviously not be the case. Instead, the complete unwillingness of Britain and France to stand up to Hitler only emboldened him further. Saying "it worked" is just plain foolish; it deterred war for less than a year, it just changed the place it began.

It's very difficult to say what exactly would have happened had war broken out in 1938. None of the three main players in this debate had much of a military at the point in time, but France and Britain only needed enough troops and material to hold their own and check Hitler's advance. Let's not forget that the French, Soviets and Czechs had a mutual protection pact through much of the '30s. Hitler's military was still in the early stages of development; he lacked the tanks, planes and heavy equipment that would make the Wehrmacht such an indestructible force from 1939-1942. In fact a great deal of Germany's military hardware was constructed in the Sudentenland, so for that reason alone its loss to the Germans was catstrophic. But between France, Britain and Czechoslovakia for sure, possibly Poland and the USSR, and maybe even Italy (Mussolini was never close friends with Hitler, they were more allies of convenience than true friends), there would have been more than enough to check the German Army as it stood in 1938.

Further, despite claims of Chamberlain's apologists to the contrary, relatively little build-up of British military forces was actually done in the respite granted by the Munich Agreement. In any case the build-up was dwarfed by the HUGE expansion of the Wehrmacht in the same time period, and any gain in British and French military strength was certainly off-set by this.

"PLEASE DON'T DATE ME! I PROMISE I'LL WORK HARDER!"

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[–] rmax304823 15 years ago

I can't really argue, not being a historian. I suspect my assumptions were more wrong than my reasoning. My overall impression was that the war in Spain gave the UK, Italy, Germany, and the USSR a chance to test out their machines and tactics. (The USSR did little.)

The Munich agreement provided a respite for the UK and a chance for Germany to further develop its inventory.

I don't know what would have happened if the UK had lost "the battle of Britain" in 1940, but Britain ramped up its production of fighters. The Hawker Hurricane first flew in 1937.

As for the Spitfire, Wikipedia says: "By 1938, with the increased belligerence of the Nazis, the Government and Air Ministry were anticipating that a new war was inevitable. To help build Spitfires in the numbers which were now required, on 12 July 1938 a huge new facility was started at Castle Bromwich, Birmingham. This was the first "shadow factory" to be built, supplementing Supermarine's original factories in Southampton."

I've always had the overall impression that Britain was preparing for war -- not to say that Germany way not.

Of course the Munich agreement was based on a faulty assumption. There was no way of knowing it at the time, and war is a terribly drastic step for a nation to take, maybe worth avoiding by one last roll of the dice.

You're almost surely right in saying that, had the Allies cooperated, they could have defeated Hitler in a short time before Munich. But, then, for one or another reason, gullibility included but not exclusively, they didn't.

I don't think of myself as an apologist for Chamberlain. I don't care about him one way or the other.

Let me put it this way. If the Allies had been able to follow their "mutual protection pact", World War II would have been shorter, as you say, but we would still have had World War II. If there were no way of avoiding war, it's kind of contradictory to blame the Munich Agreement for somehow precipitating it.

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[–] lostto 14 years ago

many often cite Lincoln's second inaugural speech as his greatest, but I loved the First Inaugural...especially the lines re: "the mystic chords of memory...by the better angels of our nature". My jaw dropped in amazement the first time I read that paragraph. Some more contemporary amazing speeches:

MLK's "I have a dream"..amazing on paper, but its his powerful, emotion-choked delivery that makes it so breathtaking.

Robert Kennedy's speech to an african-american crowd in Indianapolis announcing MLK's assassination is credited by some as being a main reason that city didn't have the violent response seen in many other US cities that night. Its simple, and rather than talking down to his audience he challenged them with a complex but very appropriate and comforting quote (perhaps introduced to him via the boarding school and Ivy League education his family's wealth afforded him).

The chief prosecutor's (Robt Jackson) opening statement at the Nuremberg Trials is eloquent.

Mario Cuomo has given several beautiful speeches, including the 1984 Dem Convention keynote address.

No historical or contemporary public figure has ever reached the heights of eloquence Lincoln so often did. For years its been a dream of mine to own a good copy of the multi-volume "The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln", so I could read his lesser known works.

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[–] zumbinis-1 13 years ago

Maybe the searchable online version of Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln would interest you, lostto, in the meanwhile:

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/

Also, Abebooks.com showed some booksellers with sets and volumes for sale;

http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?sortby=1&tn=Complete+works+Abraham+Lincoln

Finally, a quick look at Google listed free epub editions of volumes 2 and 7.

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[–] lostto 13 years ago

Wow, I had no idea it existed on line...thanks!

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[–] Florida2 13 years ago

President Lincoln being the humble man he was, he incorrectly thought the speech was a failure because of the lack of response - of course as he learned afterwards the lack of response was because the crowd was overwhelmed by what he said, and proof once again that quality is always better than quantity (a/k/a a short speech that really says something is always much better than a long speech that says little or nothing)...

A great documentary series and my wish is that all students are shown this series in it's entirety, not only to show them the horrors of war, but to drive home the point that Hollywood has made war seem romantic, when in reality all wars are of horror, as explained in Part 7 (the fall of Atlanta):

"I happened to see a room full of rotting arms and legs..."

Horrible just to read that, but incredible when you think these things actually happened, and though all involved are now deceased, you have to feel sorry for everyone involved because of what they did experience, and no doubt how it affected them for the rest of their lives...

Glades2

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[–] 13 years ago

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