Are Principles a Luxury?

Case in point: [principle stated]

“Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right — a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit.”

~ Abraham Lincoln, (speech in Congress January 1848)

VS, [principle tossed]

Under the direction of this same Abraham Lincoln, "... the U.S. government lobbed more than 5,500 artillery shells PER DAY on the CIVILIAN Population of Charleston .."

After an attack by Union ironclad ships in 1863 failed to gain control of Ft. Sumter, General Quincy Gillmore set in action a plan to reduce Charleston with artillery fire into the city. The first of the shelling began in August 1863 from near Morris Island with the Swamp Angel, an 8 inch Parrott rifled cannon which could fire 200 pound incendiary shells (authorized by Lincoln himself) 4-5 miles into Charleston, ranging as far north as Calhoun St. (some a little further). After the Swamp Angel was disabled on its 36th round, the shelling was halted (with the exception of 3 rounds fired in October) for a few months.

Then in November of the same year, the shelling was renewed with intensity, forcing the majority of the population of the city to move north of Calhoun St. to get out of range.

Nice touch "Honest" Abe ...

So in 2018, ".. will they do the same now that members of the South Carolina legislature have introduced a bill that would require them to begin discussing secession again? 

Will the military/industrial/spying complex once again engage in an orgy of civilian murder, rape, and theft? 

Or will it keep that kind of behavior reserved for the Middle East?" - Thomas DiLorenzo

What will government stop at? NOTHING!

Truth is what Robert E. Lee spoke in 1867:

"Americans are forever proclaiming our boastful aspersions to the world . . . that our government was based on the consent of the people,” though in fact “it rests upon force, as much as any government that ever existed.”

~ Letter from Robert E. Lee to E.G.W. Butler, Oct. 11, 1867

"[H]ad the Confederates somehow won, had their victory put them in position to bring their chief opponents before some sort of tribunal, they would have found themselves justified . . . in stringing up President Lincoln and the entire Union high command for violation of the laws of war, specifically for waging war against noncombatants.”

~ Lee Kennett, Marching through Georgia: A Life of William Tecumseh Sherman, p. 286