Sorry, but “what they believed to be right” to me is far more important than that they followed orders. We could do with a lot fewer people who are willing to follow orders when they’re told to do something that conflicts with what I consider the right thing to believe in. One step is to stop honoring people for that.
I repent and will immediately start lobbying for a memorial to those 19 heroes who died for what they believed was right on 9/11/2001. :rolleyes:
Sorry, bro. You can’t liberal-guilt me into agreeing with you. I’m not that much of a Kumbayah singing liberal pussy.
Neither have I and I have lived the majority of my life in the States:dubious:
I’ve never heard of it in Tennessee. I’ve lived here 70 years. Must not be much publicity for it. We were already out of school by June 3. Most Southerners were. It’s not a state holiday. And Tennessee is not “Deep South.” It’s known as the “Mid-South.”
I wish it were “Deep South.” There are lovely traditions and advantages associated with the cultures of states further south.
Looking at this list of Civil War monuments in Kentucky, I see that the most recent dedication was in 1934. No other state seems to have a similar wiki article, so if there are new monuments being built, I’m unable to find it.
Nor I, but there’s plenty of monuments out there. The one in my county just has an excert from the poem Bivouac of the Dead.
They were traitors, but one can honor their courage and sacrifice without honoring the treason. Don’t forget that our founding fathers were traitors, though for a far nobler cause. Also:
That’s a fine point; for someone like Robert E. Lee, the choice was between betraying his state or his nation. At the time, the former seemed more heinous.
Killing or dying for an ignoble cause should not be honored or respected or celebrated. All those things are encouragement. We should instead discourage it.
Lee should have been hanged. I would be in favor of honoring his execution.
One day you’ll figure out the difference. I won’t be holding my breath.
I think the political dichotomy has reached nonsense level when some half-wit can seriously suggest that saying dead soldiers are worthy of respect is the mark of a namby-pamby liberal.
You keep using these words. I don’t think any of them mean what you think they do. Bro.
Veneration of a warrior caste goes back to pre-modern times. It’s not the cause that’s being honored, respected, or celebrated; it’s the warriors themselves.
Was the South not sufficiently devastated in losing the war, that you demand more blood be spilt?
I don’t think spilling more blood would have helped, but more should have been done to change the South. It was governed, essentially, as a brutal, oppressive, white supremacist region for nearly a hundred years after the Civil War. It wasn’t as bad as slavery, but it was pretty bad.
Evidently Acsenray would prefer that racial and sectional strife go on forever, instead of merely a very, very long time.
The presidential elections that immediately followed the war (1868 and 1872) traded away the progress of Reconstruction for the election. Once the US leadership had abandoned the South to its former masters, nothing else could result.
Yes, it was, but that was not the result of failing to execute Confederate leaders, and doing that wouldn’t have benefited anyone or anything.
In Virginia, Confederate Memorial Day officially takes place on original-recipe Memorial Day.
Please, explain how they differ from Wehrmacht soldiers and Confederate soldiers. I have no romantic ideas about their valor in a lost cause. In fact, I detest them and do not wish a dime of our governments’ money nor a moment of our governments’ time wasted on their memory. They are the creepy uncles of our nation’s history and should be swept out like the trash they were and forgotten.
No, it is you that misunderstands. It is the anti-American rightwingers who promote Confederate ancestor worship and attempt to bully us into silence because they think we are all namby-pamby panty waists who will faint when we are spoken to loudly. They forget that, in its heart, the American Civil War was between the conservatives of the South and the liberals of the North, and that the Confederacy was not only beaten by a superior military but also ministers, former slaves, and women who changed public opinion.
We could celebrate two National Traitor and Enemy Combatant days, one for those enemies of the US who stood for demonstrably bigoted ends and the other for those who did not. All have virtue to a degree after all.
So on one day we’d celebrate the common soldiers of Hitler and Pol Pot as well as slaver defenders and on the other day we’d salute Benedict Arnold and enemy combatants in Mexico and the Philippines. Sure, not all of them would be American, but again that doesn’t mean they don’t possess some degree of virtue.
We could all use a couple of extra holidays, right?
Right. Bravo!
[rant on]
And it BELONGS in premodern times. Keep it there.
“Warrior Caste”***?? Really?
Warrior &^%$# Caste? “Veneration”???
No. A million times no. Not in America.
American soldiers are NOT a Warrior Caste. They are and have been the children of farmers and storekeepers and seamstresses and shop mechanics and nurses. Our neighbors. Ourselves. It’s Joe and Jane from the school graduation class picture.
Venerated Warrior Caste?
Not in America. Certainly not in the 21st Century.
Not in EARTH in the 21st Century for God’s sake.
Honor for the dignity of those who serve, of the veteran, and specially of the fallen fighter is righteous. Idolatry is not.
Venerated Warrior Castes grow to believe themselves endowed with the right to be the ones in charge and prevent the people from making mistakes. THE PEOPLE grow to believe the Venerated Warrior Caste knows better. Until the bayonets turn on them.
The fallen fighters who had to fight a doomed struggle for an ultimately wrong, unworthy cause are due the proper solemnity of commemoration. But not to be used as instruments for others to express that they are proud they stood for that wrong, unworthy cause.
Sherman left the job half-assed unfinished.
[rant off]
Sorry, it just got me too riled…:o
For a start, the Wehrmacht and Confederate Army were uniformed regulars, who fought other uniformed regulars in accord with the laws of warfare of the time. The 9/11 hijackers were irregular terrorists who attacked civilians.
Well, there you are, then. If you don’t think valor in and of itself is worth celebrating, so be it. Others disagree.
What a strange perspective. It’s like you don’t understand humans at all. Do you really expect a region to bury about 300,000 of their young men and do nothing to commemorate them?
Hey, good luck with that.
You don’t think the military in America is venerated? It sure seems that way to me.
And yet, no one’s building memorials for farmers and storekeepers or seamstresses in comparable numbers. Clearly, soldiers are special in some way.
I think you mistook my point…that urge to venerate warriors clearly exists. Perhaps it’s hardwired in some way, or perhaps societies that didn’t practice it were wiped out by those who did, and were thus able to get more young men to fight, and fight harder.
So, if you ask the South to cease honoring their Confederate war dead, you’re fighting upstream against powerful cultural forces. The cause being horrid isn’t enough to overcome those forces.
You’ve answered your own question, but are too tightly blinkered to see it.
You’ve also continued to distort what I’ve said in your running attempt to box in a peculiar meaning of what “memorial” means.