GERMANY LOVES LINCOLN...oh...AND JAPAN TOO...and of course the United States (I mean we did give the man a holiday)
On this President's Day, I came across these two Op-Eds that are interestingly similar. Well first, I must note that in my coverage of the International Herald Tribune, I discovered that it may as well be synonymous to the New York Times. Yes, IHT is the "Global Edition" of the New York Times, but many of the stories are actually exclusively from the New York Times. I have yet to figure out how exactly the IHT is any more global than the New York Times, but let us focus on the Op-Eds at hand. I thought it was so interesting that on President's Day, they had to feature these two articles that essentially explained why the respective countries loved Abraham Lincoln, arguably one of the greatest presidents in U.S. history. Both were written by professors at universities in Japan and Germany. They gave the articles the social credibility needed to speak for their entire cultures. If the articles were to have been written by Americans, it would have been explicitly seen the our attempt enforce this opinion on the Japanese and Germans, but when members of their own countries attest to this fact, the rejection is not as readily launched. To add icing on the cake, the articles were featured in one of the most widely circulated publications in the world and the United States alike. The message to be conveyed to the American readership: THE JAPANESE AND GERMANS LOVE HONEST ABE...AND PROBABLY US TOO (especially if I'm hard-working like him)!!!!!
