Not as good as my Skyfall review, but I like it.  :-)

Thank you! I know so may people who think that Abraham Lincoln was essentially god incarnate, and if I say anything about his real flaws, they start berating me for being a southerner who obviously hates black people and thinks they should be slaves. In fact, if I say anything about the fact that this war was about taxes, and slavery was the issue used to stir people up about it, I get…well…called racist again, to put it mildly. So yeah, I was thrilled when you started addressing that Lincoln had real issues and that many parts of the North supported slavery. Thank you very much. :)

Sometime, I would like to see a movie about what really happened in the Civil War (or the War Between the States, whichever you prefer), one that addresses the real issues on either side and doesn’t paint everyone in the South as stereotypical, cartoonishly evil, whip-cracking assholes (which they were not; some were, but if you read writings by freed slaves from that time, quite a few of their owners weren’t sadistic and treated their slaves well). A Jefferson Davis movie would be great, for instance.

Ah, well. What’s the use in dreaming? Thank you again for your review of the film. :)

PS: The best book I’ve seen on the Civil War was With Lee in Virginia by G.A.Henty, a British author who wrote historical fiction for children. Most of his books are painfully stuffed with British propaganda, but his book taking place in the Civil War is fantastic. It gves a balanced view of both sides and doesn’t paint either one as monstrous.

Small dollops of truth to add to the cries of “this is revisionist crap” re: Lincoln.

“The Great Emancipator” only got round to freeing the slaves two years into the war, at a time when the North was LOSING, and even then it was just a cynical move to provide a rallying point for the ailing Northern cause.  There are many references in Lincoln’s works that showed he viewed blacks as inferior to whites, and we are supposed to think he was a living saint for freeing them.  We are not supposed to ask why such an obviously abominable practise was allowed to continue into the 18th Century, let alone well into the latter half of the 19th; or reflect on the amusing irony that even feudalist Russia abolished slavery before ‘the land of the free’ did.   We are also expected to ignore irritating facts like the Southern States’ legal right to secede, which was ignored, not to mention the valid and also totally ignored questions of state self-administration that were the real causes of the war.  Oh, and Lincoln’s despotic suspension of habeus corpus, which would rightly be called a war crime now.  None of the soldiers who fought for the Confederacy owned slaves, and not a single one of them went to war to protect that way of life.  Most of the people who DID own slaves were able to buy their way out of Confederate military service.  What next, a film about how Woodrow Wilson was such a bold visionary for allowing American women to vote in *1919*?  Wow, just two and half short decades after my country gave the vote to women, and even then the legalised crooks in power in the US at the time only granted women a severely restricted franchise.  They could call the movie “Woody The Coughing Racist”.