http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3203
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3226 Hereward Lindsay
National Public Radio recently had two features on Abraham http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2082 within only a 3 hour period.
In the first feature, All Things Considered’s Michele Norris interviewed Steven Raab of the Raab Collection who is auctioning an 1861 Lincoln letter sent to James Gordon Bennett, editor of The New York Herald, then the most influential newspaper in the country.
Ms. Norris and Mr. Raab ooohed and aaahed over Lincoln’s sad difficulties because of the fact that some bad people in the press were slow in signing up for the “war on slavery.” (Dated 1861, the letter was http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2050 Lincoln came out of the closet on the emancipation issue. Raab was therefore wrong when he said that at that time the War on the South was being waged for the overt purpose of emancipating the slaves. That came later, although it was without doubt very much part of the real — as opposed to the overt — agenda.)
Journalist Michele Norris was simply enthralled as she conversed in rapturous tones about http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1417 and the press.The letter was worded in ambiguous and obscure terms as Lincoln promised not to “discriminate” against the newspaper…IF its editors could find it in their hearts to adopt a more amiable tone toward him and his political agenda.
Michele Norris — who may be just an historically illiterate journalist instead of the more typical malevolent NPR liar — asked what all this meant. Mr. Raab immediately reassured her that it was just part and parcel of the Great Lincoln’s friendliness and respect for the press.
No mention, needless to say, about the hundreds of newspapers in the North shut down by Lincoln’s orders, including the Presbyterian Church’s Christian Observer, which either was not offered a means to escape “discrimination” or rejected an offer they should not have refused. Anyone with a reasonable knowledge of the real history of the http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2452 will have little difficulty deciphering exactly what the President was telling the newspaper editor when he offered not to “discriminate” if only the editor would be more amiable.
Deepest apologies if this has upset Old Believer liberal NPR listeners, who still adhere to ACLU-type civil libertarian principles, with the disturbing fact that their great icon had no use for the Bill of Rights and was a thoroughgoing authoritarian.
The second Lincoln feature was on Valerie Jackson’s “Between the Lines” (Feb. 8, 2008) — a local NPR Atlanta feature. Valerie Jackson is the widow of Maynard Jackson, http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2421’s first African American Mayor.
It consisted of an interview by its enraptured hostess with one Susan B. Martinez, an “independent scholar, journalist and activist”, who holds a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University.
Dr. Martinez is a lapsed agnostic who converted in the 1980s to Spiritualism. She is now Book Review Editor at the Academy of Spirituality and Paranormal Studies.
More to the point, she is the authoress of a book entitled The Psychic Life of Abraham Lincoln.
The ditzy guest recounted the story of the birth of spiritualism in 1848 in the Burnt-Over District of western New York, the scene of so much of the loony religious and quasi-religious causes and movements of the 1830s and 1840s including abolitionism, women’s liberation, vegetarianism, the Great Awakening and — something I had not previously known — “Spiritualism.”
I had assumed that spiritualism was something that had always festered in the closets and margins of European societies. However, according to Valerie Jackson’s guest, it was specifically birthed by “the Fox sisters” who had been chosen by the Unseen Spirits to be the means of enabling the living to speak to the dead. The Fox sisters claimed to have received their Annunciation by means of “rappings” by spirits in the walls of their residence.
Once Spiritualism had made its alleged epiphany it spread like wildfire all over America and to Britain where one of its foremost advocates was Sir Arthur http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=879 Doyle, whose legacy to the English-speaking world is the priceless gift of the Sherlock Holmes novels that have been such a joy to generations of readers.
According to Dr. Martinez, Lincoln bravely hosted frequent gatherings of mediums, seers and necromancers at the White House where he engaged in séances often featuring not merely one but numerous mediums, all simultaneously putting the Illinois Railsplitter in contact with the dead and unseen spirits.
The Great Emancipator initiated and persisted in such spiritual gatherings in the White House despite the attempts by reactionary (and probably racist) political opponents to make hay out of his dabblings in the occult by appealing to prejudiced and narrow spirited elements of the electorate — by which Dr. Martinez presumably was referring to orthodox Christians of all denominations as well as sensible internally consistent agnostics.
And the séances were an enormous boon to Lincoln and to all mankind.
In fact, so the listener was informed, it was these mediums and mystics who guided and directed Lincoln in the great and beneficent course of emancipation and the struggle against slavery (and, by inference, racism). In addition they rendered invaluable aid to the Union cause by helping to enlighten pacifists to the fact that the war on the South was different by reason of its having been a Holy War, entitled to be an exception to opposition to wars in general.
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.com/authors/Lindsay-Lincoln.html