Today I was watching the Steven Spielberg movie and I only have two things to say.
The first is about the ambition of transforming their American president in a world hero. It is not and never will be.
The history of American politics, with their crooks, racists, religious fanatics and fools, do not have and will never have any influence on other countries. In Brazil, for example, we had abolitionists far more important than Lincoln. Just to mention two, I quote: Cruz e Souza (
http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruz_e_Sousa), black freedman who was a journalist and is considered the greatest Brazilian symbolist poet of the late nineteenth century; Joaquim Nabuco (
http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joaquim_Nabuco ), politician, diplomat, historian, jurist and Brazilian journalist who led the abolitionist party and left an important literary and political work.
The abolition of slavery in Brazil was gradual and peaceful, not violent and traumatic as occurred in the USA. We Brazilians do not need a civil war with 600,000 dead to implement the abolition of slavery. Before the promulgation of abolition of slavery, two laws were approved in Brazil: freeing blacks over 60 years; and preventing new black children born of being reduced to the status of slaves.
Moreover, since the first African slaves arrived in Brazil occurred intense miscegenation between whites, blacks and Indians in Brazil, producing a huge population of mulattos. Even the same woman D. John VI, crowned King of Portugal in Brazil, had a black lover in the period he lived in Brazil. Several mulattos exerted important and vital functions in public life during the Brazilian Empire and Republic. The two largest Brazilian writers of the second half of the nineteenth century were mulattoes: Lima Barreto (
http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lima_Barreto ) and Machado de Assis (
http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machado_de_Assis ). Just to get a sense of political and social importance of miscegenation in the formation of the Brazilian people, just remember that the interracial marriages in the USA are something very recent and still arouse amazement.
In Brazil, when we watch movies like Steven Spielberg's LINCOLN we laughed a lot of the social, political and military bestiality in USA. But we laughed even the pretense that the Americans has to export its irrelevant historical characters.