Catalonia Succession: What Would Lincoln Do?

Thomas DiLorenzo
Sep. 28, 2015

Now that Catalonia has voted to secede from Spain, the U.S. government must be contemplating a response. Fresh off the pope’s worshipful quoting of Abe Lincoln before Congress, and giving a speech from one of Abe’s own lecturns in Philadelphia, our politicians must be asking themselves (and answering): What would Lincoln do?

The answer is obvious. If he were the Spanish government, he could call up an army of at least a million men to invade Catalonia, bomb and burn its cities and towns, plunder everything of value, burn its crops, gang rape its women (especially gypsies), and generally terrorize and wage total war on the civilian population. He would probably have trouble getting Spaniards to treat their fellow citizens in this way, so he would have to invoke conscription, order daily firing squads of deserters, and employ many thousands of foreign mercenaries by promising them free land in conquered Catalonia.

Some freedom-loving Spaniards might criticize all of this, so in order to save the mystical Spanish union, all opposition newspapers would have to be shut down, their editors and owners imprisoned, and all communication censored. Citizens would be hired as spies to report on dissenters, who would be imprisoned without due process. “Treason” would be redefined as “criticizing the government.”

Any Spanish politician bold enough to speak out against all of this would be deported, and then falsely blamed for organizing draft riots from abroad. A blockade of Catalonia would be enforced, depriving it of food, medicine, and other essentials of life, while its infrastructure would be bombed back to the stone age. Generations of public school children would then be forced to sing a song about how all of this was a sign of “the glory of the coming of the Lord.'”

That’s what Lincoln did.