PC Gone Too Far

I think you'll have a hard time finding where I expressed that sentiment. My use of the word "cherish" was about Confederate soldiers. I was responding to Genomicus's claim that to memorialize and cherish dead Confederate soldiers was to legitimize slavery.In case this comment is actually indirectly referencing one of my subsequent posts rather than the one you're replying to I'll add that "celebrate" and "forgive" are not synonyms.--Percy

Whilst there may, somewhere in England, be a memorial to soldiers in the American War of Imdependence, I can't think of any, nor find any in the UK War Memorials Database. Not really something to memorialise.We do have memorials to failed 'traitors', though. While trying to find some memorials from the American revolution, I stumbled across the Glenfinnan monument, via the rather laconic description 'Bad cause, great monument.' Erected in honour of those who died trying to reimpose royalist absolutism on Britain, it's a protected monument now, so you'd have difficulty getting rid of it.Edited by caffeine, : No reason given.Edited by caffeine, : No reason given.

Hi Percy, my 2 centavos. Ok, but the Wehrmacht did not have clean hands and where culpable of heinous war crimes of their own. Lest we forget.The time to honor the confederate war dead I believe is fading away into history. One of my ancestors from Kentucky served on both the Confederate side and Union Army later after the Civil War. Do we scorn the southern troops for doing what they thought was right? For fighting for their country? I don't, But nor should we honor them either for their cause was in the end less than honorable imo. A brave soldier is a brave soldier, but the cause in still important isn't it? The Civil War is perhaps the worst thing in American history to ever happen to our country. I believe the South, in a new form of rebellion, erected many many memorials to show the world they are not repentant and in fact just as adamant they were right in their cause. We know today that is not the case. It's time they came down. imo.Edited by 1.61803, : where for were

Not so hard I think. Your remarks have changed from talking about a particular monument that you take offense at people moving to now covering just about every civil war monument as well as every building naming. And as for the more pointed of my comments, how about these statements? I don't believe we need to have a monument erected for a soldier that had no control over participating in a massacre. At least not one that projects a one sided account of how brave the soldier was in defending his fellow soldiers from someone fighting back for their lives.Or this comment about how to view defending slavery: People who defended slavery or who owned slaves are rightly judged as having done evil. I need not apologize for not being born 200 years ago to recognize that. Statues celebrating those activities are just cause for taking offense by at least some people if not all people. Wasn't the purpose of at least some of those memorials to celebrate a southern genteel lifestyle where the darkies knew their place? Or to perpetuate a lie that slavery was not a reason for the war at all?What about the PC environment that got those monuments erected the first place? Where are your complaints about that?ABE: It seems to me that I could well say that to you.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

I think I covered this in part in another message, but I guess I'd ask which nation's army has never committed a heinous war crime? Switzerland, perhaps, I don't know, I guess it depends on where you draw the boundary line for heinous. Was My Lai or the bombing of Cambodia heinous? If so better tear down those Vietnam War memorials. And so on back through our history. I cannot more strongly disagree:

quote:

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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
- George Santayana

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We must never forget. No history should ever be allowed to fade. Historians life work is to enlarge and improve our historical knowledge, and archaeologists not only that but also to extend into pre-history what we can call historical, and of course also our knowledge of man's pre-history. Whether its Iraq or Vietnam or Korea or WWII or WWI or the Civil War or the French Revolution or the Revolutionary War or the Gallic Wars or the Peloponnesian War, they should never fade or be forgotten. Therein lie humanity's most important lessons and the truest insights into our character. A cause is not the person. People are products of their time and place. People of great honor and integrity fought for the South, as well as the opposite (and the same for the North). We cannot deem their memories unworthy because of accidents of birth. Yes, but in important ways it also defines us. Even if you're right, do you think only the repentant should be permitted to honor their dead? Should there be a repentance test? Should conquered peoples lose certain rights forever? No, of course not. As the South gradually resumed full membership in the Union they retained the right to manage their own affairs.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

Hi NoNukes,You're making things up again. I was never "justifying the celebration of folks who have committed the worst crimes imaginable." These are fabrications or misinterpretations of your own construction. When such thoughts strike you should realize they are better left unsaid. You need an internal censor.If it is now your thought to work at finding further evidence that that is indeed what I meant, could you just please stop now? You've done enough.--Percy

Yes but we are talking about a comparison between Confederate soldiers and the Wehrmacht vs SS.
My point was the all to common thought that the Wehrmacht was somehow not culpable in the the holocaust. And the answer is Yes, yes they were. Yes I agree. Bad phraseology on my part. Well we can remember them without building a monument to celebrate them can we not?

Agreed. For example, as the German army marched into Poland and the Soviet Union in June of 1941 communication with Jews in the occupied regions ceased permanently. I do get your point, but when you get into the details, which army was innocent of any atrocities? Judging this army worthy of memorials and that army not is wrong because it is, well, judging. Especially the victors need to be careful of reading morality into victory. Rightness of cause is not what wins wars. Had the South won (and it *was* a close thing) slavery would still have been wrong. Well, nice of you to say, but now I'm not so sure. It occurred to me later that maybe you were more talking about the Civil War fading in our national consciousness, which the passage of time guarantees of all events. There's that word "celebrate" again, which I never myself used in this thread. I know it wasn't you, but I now feel it necessary to explicitly state that we're not talking about celebrating people who have committed atrocities.Having gotten that out of the way, I think people have the right to choose how they memorialize war dead, and going back to what I thought you might have been saying before, memorials can go a long way toward keeping the past in the national consciousness.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Typo.

I disagree. The subject was putting up memorials to treason within a nation. Again, I disagree. The colonists perpetrated war in order to secure basic fundamental human rights for an oppressed people. The Confederacy perpetrated war in order to continue their practice of enslaving, abusing and denying basic fundamental human rights to an oppressed people. That glaring fact is all that is necessary to separate the legitimacy of the two. I wouldn't call that a war memorial, but a grave marker.The Confederacy instigated the most horrific and damaging war upon the people of the United States that we have ever suffered in this country before or since. Their goal was to destroy the nation rather than seek any accommodation under the rule of law this nation represented. The committed treason. And all for the purpose of racial bigotry.War Memorials dedicated to treason and bigotry have no place in a nation struggling to evolve greater freedoms for its citizens. Those memorials, not just tacitly but explicitly, seek to justify, honor, indeed, to celebrate their treason and act as placeholders to glorify the racism that begot them.Gotta love a country that allows its most destructive enemy to raise monuments to their lost cause as well as allows an enlightened society to demand those monuments be seen for what they truly are and that they be removed.A man, no matter how honorable in life or how brave and selfless in battle, who gives the last full measure of his life for a despicable, dishonorable cause deserves nothing more than pity.Edited by AZPaul3, : titleEdited by AZPaul3, : spln

So is the Vietnam Memorial wall of names politically incorrect given that we were committing atrocities, killing women & children & ruining the country for shit reasons? Should that be moved into some museum of "Things this country did in the past that were very bad"?

I'll honor this as a request and not because I think you are right. I won't pick out any more of your words.What I will say is that we have indeed named buildings and erected monuments to people who did commit some of the worst acts imaginable. I don't see any room in your position for excluding monuments to those people. So yes, I do continue to hold to my position that you include some the worst and war criminals among those whose building namings and monuments we ought to leave alone simply because somebody 100 years ago thought it was a good idea.

The Vietnam Memorial is not a war monument dedicated to those who died answering the call in a just cause defending this nation but is a warning to future generations of the depths of stupidity, depravity and dishonesty into which your government can fall.It needs to stay right where it is for all the world to see and cry. A "black gash of shame."

I think what you actually did was to reemphasize it in different terms. The thing you said you'd do that you then did was this: This one you followed. You didn't quote any more of my words as launching points for what you think are the implications of my position.If I'm terribly woefully wrong about something, I wish you would wait until I actually say the thing before calling me out on it. People are raising issues I didn't originally mention, there's some obvious nuance, and there's a ton of detail that can be interpreted in different ways.--Percy

That is your viewpoint as a victor. You have a right to your opinion, but you can't ignore that you're doing what victors do, equating morality with victory, and measuring people by a cause whose importance in their lives you cannot know.A common question to Southern prisoners was what they were fighting for, and the answer was often, "Rahts - state's rahts!" Your average Southern soldier didn't own slaves and so didn't feel the potential loss of slaves as viscerally as did plantation owners and businesses. But he did understand that the federal government was trimming back state's rights, and he did share the popular Southern opinion that it was a grave threat to their way of life.You can reinterpret this as you will. Maybe the Southern soldiers were just expressing their love of slavery in a politically acceptable way. Maybe for them "state's rights" was just a code phrase for slavery. Maybe they understood that slavery made possible their way of life (indirectly, for most of them) and that state's rights were necessary if that that way of life were to continue. Certainly many Southern soldiers shared the common Southern belief that slaves were less than fully human and needed owners.But whatever the details we must eventually return to the fact that all people, including us with all our moralistic righteousness that our mores and judgments are the right and best ones, are products of our place and time. Depriving people of honor and memory because of accidents of birth is not something I could ever accede to.--Percy

I can respect this.However, times change, societies change, morality and "the common good" changes.These Confederate monuments are extensions into our time of the reverence and pride they felt in their cause. A cause that we, today, find abhorrent.We can no longer glorify their cause today as they did generations ago. Leave the soldiers to their graves as reminders of what happened, but the memorials justifying and glorifying why are anathema to today's society and need to be brought down.