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First, the Union

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<i> Ron Dorfman writes about the media from Chicago. </i>

Lithuanian Americans, gathered last week at the Lincoln Memorial to support their kinsmen’s struggle for independence from the Soviet Union, stood in a grand tradition.

The Emancipator, seated in solemn reverie upon the throne of freedom, has served as a backdrop for the celebration of many liberation movements at home and abroad, including the Chinese students after the Tian An Men Square massacre last year.

But both the Lithuanian nationalists and ordinary American sympathizers with underdogs and freedom struggles round the world--including most of the media--tend to forget that Lincoln stood for both freedom and union, and that of the two he counted union more important in the political circumstances of 1860.

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As he explained it in a letter to Horace Greeley:

“If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that . . . . I have here stated my purpose according to my views of official duty and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.”

To preserve the Union, Lincoln was prepared to fight a bloody war against the secessionist South.

Can Mikhail Gorbachev do otherwise?

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