In many ways I am glad that this misfit of a film is devoid of any entertainment value. Hence, I am not afraid it will dilute the memory of the many slaves who fought and died for freedom either on their own or with white folks who believed in the common humanity of man.
I am sure that not many outside the circles of the Lincoln Fan Club would give a rat’s ass about this film. It is boring, soporific and goodness if you didn’t believe vampires existed, see this set in 1868 – the cold absence of sunlight might just change your mind.
Lincoln is an idealism of the history behind the abolition movement. And if this romanticism is done in order to feed into the energy of the larger framework of civil rights for Gays, Women and other Minority groups today, then I can perhaps comprehend the goal.
However, I fail to understand all of its other intentions.
What Lincoln really is, is an ignorance of the sole economic reasons why the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was first abolished by the British Empire and why Lincoln employed the same economic tactic or expediency in pushing the 13th Amendment so the South’s economy may as well fall unto its knees.
Wars are won by derailing trains and sinking ships that feed enemy economies – the British did cut the Trans-Atlantic-Slave Trade; the allied forces cut supplies to Hitler’s Germany; and isn’t the USA today employing similar economic sanctions on Iran?
We know why Lincoln abolished slavery and it was not because he believed in the common humanity of men and women! For how exactly does his well tooted Euclid logic – the transition property of equality – suffice to convincing us that the black man and the white man are indeed human, hence equal, but not the woman and the man?
If Lincoln indeed believed in equality, how come this readily available dichotomy of his own society eluded him? Because giving white women equality wasn’t going to win the war! It was impractical.
Lincoln hence, the way Steven Spielberg has portrayed the man in the period he lived in, is an outright ungrateful lie!
And the other reason for telling the story this way beats me, except to galvanize the current generations of the descendants of oppressors with the sense to expunge any guilt and responsibility for what their forefathers did to powerless Africans in America.
‘It took us to enslave them, but it took us to free them as well’ – well, that’s some feeling of power over African lives, isn’t it?
Because if a true picture of the period were to be painted, it would perhaps bring to light the many revolutions that Africans launched in this country and died for. It will highlight the true encouragement to many Africans in America who emulated the feats of Haitians – who summarily defeated the French and marched on to at least freedom in as early as 1804.
Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln completely ignores all the African lives that were lost in opposition to slavery and the efforts by Africans in America to gain freedom.
The first scenes are heartbreaking and immediately you knew you were going to be fed another cupful of white paternalism – two slave soldiers looking up to Lincoln in his majestic seat literally begging for freedom!
I see why the Lincoln Club today would like to think Lincoln their hero in this regard since he, perhaps by virtue of this tale, stands tall from a lot that had no compassion for humanity nor comprehended the essence of humanity.
But if Lincoln represents any section of a compassionate white society back in 1868, where did that party disappear to during Segregation and Jim Crow? Where has that party vanished to when the Reagan and Clinton inhumane War on Drugs puts black men in a similar plight?
Why in the world has the US of A and the United Nations supported France to constantly pester and force reparations from Haitians since 1804 when white society in America has not paid a dime in reparations to Africans in America? Why?
No matter how much this Lincoln is hailed in Spielberg’s film, today’s inconsistencies about the West’s outlook on humanity paints a confusing picture and points a scalding finger at the untruths and mis-education of the present generations about their deadly past.
Since we are still plagued by these acts of insensitivity towards people who are not ‘white,’ I cannot imagine how this Lincoln plot fed into the narrative of 1868.
One day, hopefully, the blood of the millions of Africans who fought and died on the front lines with Lincoln in return for the emancipation act will be finally heralded as the biggest bargain in American history and neither as a one-sided all powerful white man’s humanitarian act nor the hand of a white god.
It was strictly business, and it was strictly practical – nothing more nothing less!
So I vehemently refuse the film, and it can (and probably will) go ahead and win this years Oscar’s best picture and many more – for the voters belong to that Lincoln Club anyway. Who else is praising this movie but white men? And I care less if that’s what it takes to entrench white paternalism some more in America. So be it.
I may be flabbergasted, but I am not at all discombobulated!
Director: Steven Spielberg
Writers: Tony Kushner (screenplay), Doris Kearns Goodwin
Stars: Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field and David Strathairn
The hypocrisy of this world is something that doesn’t seem to surprise me anymore. This kind of revisionist history where only a few despicable white men were involved in the slavery of black bodies is one that continues to be peddled across the country as truth. I don’t know what it is supposed to achieve fill the leaders of this country with the confidence they need to run away from the lingering problems of slavery in black communities.
There is a sense in America that African Americans should not be compensated for the evils of the past. That thesis is fed by this new rewriting of history so that white Americans don’t have to feel any guilt – after all, it couldn’t have been their ancestors, it was those white nuts down South.
This film was especially boring. Only an eye-candy for liberals in America who crave to believe that they saved Black people from slavery.
Who ever want to believe that Lincoln saved them, then good for them. They can knock themselves out.