Here’s where your logic jumps the rails. If you consider them Americans at that point (they didn’t, Supreme Court decisions aside), then they weren’t fighting for the Regular Army (U.S.). If you means small “r” regular, then they were fighting for the official army of…who? Who in the aggregate? Certainly not for the U.S.
Certainly you wouldn’t argue that we should honor all Americans who die in battle, regardless of who they fought for, right? Otherwise we’d have to honor those who died fighting for the enemy in other conflicts–for example, U.S. citizens who defected to the Axis powers and fought for them in WWII. They were Americans fighting for a regular army other than the U.S.'s. What makes the Confederacy’s military force different? They were men who rejected their citizenship, fighting for a force that was not the U.S. Army, killing American soldiers.
So, I’d turn this on you. They are either not Americans, not in any meaningful sense having renounced their citizenship to fight against the U.S., fighting for the regular army of a different government. Or they were Americans, fighting for the official army of a traitorous and illegitimate government. Can’t be both, but either leads to the same conclusion. They were the enemy, killing U.S. soldiers.
Then Memorial Day is not the holiday for you, since honors those who fought (and died) without distinguishing between the relative goodness of the cause.
Then the Japanese officers, then the German, then the British, then the Indians…?
Except, we clearly do. That’s what the holiday was created for.
If there were thousands of Americans who fought for the Germans or Soviets, we’d have to confront that, but there weren’t. We don’t go case-by-case, Memorial Day honors a whole class of Americans.
Small r, yes. Irregular forces can be worthy of honor as well, but that’s a side issue.
They were fighting for the CSA.
Why are they different?
It was a purely internal conflict between Americans.
Over 2 million men served in the Confederate Army. This wasn’t a handful of cranks, this was the able-bodied population of half the nation. Some might decide they were all evil, but that’s absurd presentism.
It’s the latter: Americans, fighting for a traitorous and illegitimate government. The cause deserves no honor, the government deserves no honor, but the men? They do.
Some of these responses are reminiscent of the old generation of war films, where the German soldier is a snarling, inhuman thing bent on conquest, and the Japanese is a rat-like vermin filled with senseless hatred. We seem to have moved past this sort of thing when it comes to our foreign foes, but oddly, not our domestic ones.
We don’t disagree on the essential facts, it seems. The rest is opinion. Mine is that Confederate soldiers, by virtue of serving a traitorous and illegitimate government, killing American soldiers in the process, have rendered themselves unworthy of the honor Memorial Day provides. To include them (IME) would make the holiday, in its modern form, a farce. Luckily, we can all honor whomever we like, and for me, they don’t make the cut.
BTW, I don’t think there is any official legislatively defined purpose for Memorial Day, or at least I couldn’t find it.
In the name of rejecting slavery, secession, and the bitter racism behind it, now and then. If you call that “presentism” then I proudly claim citizenship in the present and reject the horrors of the past, thank you very much.
They can worship dead racists if that’s their thing, but I don’t see why the rest of us should be compelled to.
For those who think the CSA should be honored on Memorial Day: should Anwar al Awlaki be honored? He is an American member of al Qaeda and a US citizen. How is he different than a Confederate soldier?
I (obviously) disagree, I think the bravery, honor, and spirit shown by the Americans who happened to fight for the wrong side deserves to be acknowledged and celebrated, as each person wishes, just as Germans should honor their fallen (non-SS or other Nazi party) dead from World War Two.
Presentism is using present-day ideas and perspectives to analyze history. You can be and should be a citizen of the present and reject those horrors, but judging the people of the 1860s by your present moral code is misguided. It was a different world, and they were different people.
Wait… why not SS or other Nazi party? You’re not making an exclusion based on presentism there, are you?
Bullshit. Abolitionism was contemporary and predated the Civil War by many years. They failed the moral codes of their own day. Your fig leaf of “presentism” is an irrelevant red herring.
As a society we’re forced to tolerate military bases named after Confederate generals. We have no choice in the matter, so it is a form of compulsion that I do not appreciate.
No, it wasn’t. Despite all the historical revisionism, the Confederacy existed only to protect slavery.
As long as we are comparing it to fiction, throughout this thread I’ve gotten a definite feel of Warhammer 40,000 from the pro-“honor the Confederates” side. “Khorne cares not from whence the blood flows, so long as it flows”; what matters is that they fought, not why or for whom.
:rolleyes: No, it wasn’t, not that much. “All men are created equal”; they knew better, and were violating their own morality.
What about the Fort Hood shooter? If he’d been shot in action while murdering 13 US soldiers, would we memorialize him? What about Tories who fought against the American Revolution–do we honor them?
For someone to be an American, whether or not he renounces his citizenship, to take up arms against the US–that turns them into an enemy. They might be a righteous enemy, or (more likely) might not, but they’re not someone who should be honored on a government holiday.
FWIW, I was under the impression that Decoration Day was originally started to honor Union dead, and in the South it was often freedmen and freedwomen who decorated the graves of Union soldiers who got the tradition started; decorating the graves of Confederate soldiers was a Johnny-come-lately move. At least that’s what the dude running the slave walking tour of Charleston, SC told me :).
Well, let’s see: he wasn’t engaged in honorable combat, but instead plotting terror attacks. He was party to a foreign side of a conflict, not a civil one.
Not the SS, because instead of honorable combat, they were engaged in brutal war crimes.
It seems self-evident, settled, and obvious to us now, but that wasn’t the case in the 1860s, or we wouldn’t have needed to wage a war over it. Do you want statues of Roman emperors torn down for approving of slavery? The Bible condemned for denigrating women? Your Western, early-21st-century morals are the product of your Western, early-21st-century life, they weren’t handed down from on high. If you were born in 1840, your outlook would be quite different. Give it a century, and our descendants will be appalled at what we believed in, just as their descendants will be shocked at their beliefs and practices, and so on, ad infinitum.
Then support political candidates who want them changed, I suppose. I don’t know what else to tell you about naming military bases.
The biggest problem in this thread, everyone is looking at the past in current eyes. If you asked a random Union soldier in 1861 if they were an “American”, they would probably say no. They were a New Yorker, or a Ohioian, or whatever state they came from. There is no difference between someone who was in the Confederate army, you ask them if they fought for the Confederate States of America, they would say no, I fight for Georgia, or Alabama, or Virginia. Back then there was no loyalty to the country, people were loyal to the States.
It is said (or at least I read somewhere) that before 1860 everyone said “The United States are”, after 1865 they said “The United States is”. The war defined our country. We are who we are because of that war, both north and south. Both sides made us who we are, so they both should get recognition.
If you limit the celebration to people who consider themselves “American” then you limit it to people who died after the Civil War. Which doesn’t make any sense based on the purpose of the holiday. We honor people who died in our current country, The United States of America, fighting for their homeland.
No, I think he shouldn’t be honored. He was a traitor, who defected from his homeland and fought for a foreign power. Memorial day is for people who fought and died for their homeland, that is now part of the United States, be it New Yorkers, Georgians, or Americans.
I don’t follow the logic here. I cannot fathom any context where slavery is acceptable. In fact, I think we should do the exact opposite of what you say. We should use our present day morals to base our choices on who we honor and who we do not. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s quite clear The Confederacy were traitors and were fighting for an evil cause. You can cling to your ideals, or you can choose to progress. Personally, the choice for me is obvious.
Which doesn’t preclude fighting for it for other reasons.
That is the spirit of Memorial Day, yes: honor those that fought, never mind the why or the for whom, both are questions with some unsavory answers in U.S. military history.
As did many of the men who signed the Declaration, being slaveholders, and going on to deny the vote to non-property-owners, and women as well, in the nation they formed. And some of these slave-mongers have holidays in their name to this very day, shocking as that might be to imagine.
If you’re ‘worshiping’ Lincoln and Union dead generally, you are doing the same thing. By modern progressive standards, nearly all white Americans, North and South, including abolitionists, were vile racists. (One major impetus for abolitionism was racism: we don’t want niggers living near us and working land that could be worked by white people. One major abolitionist ‘solution’ was shipping black folks ‘back’ to Africa, or perhaps to the Caribbean.) The history of slavery is American history–the Confederate period is just a fragment of the big picture.
I think this is getting close to the explanation for the vehemence we’re seeing from the Northern partisans here: you need to believe that ‘your’ soldiers were the “good guys,” as defined by their enemies being wholly evil and alien.
If you take this approach, the number of people in history that you can honor rapidly approaches zero. To our modern sensibilities, most of human history is cruel, blood-drenched, and greedy. We can either dismiss most people born before us as evil, or we can examine people and events in their proper context. The former is exceedingly vain and egotistical, the later allows us to conduct meaningful study of history.
Of course it was. They just ignored the obvious because they didn’t want to change. Do you think that people doing things that are widely known to be wrong is a modern invention?
If people were building new ones in admiration of them, sure.
Yes.
And so what? It’s called progress. If the people of the future aren’t better than us it’ll be disappointing, not horrifying. I condemn the people of the past as morally inferior because they were.
As a rule, if your philosophy matches that of an evil Chaos God, you might want to rethink it.
And I condemn them as genocidal slaveowning monsters when the subject comes up.
The “logic” is that if we admit that slavery was evil, then we have to condemn the South for practicing it; that’s unacceptable to some people, so they end up trying to twist history to justify slavery. As I said, this sort of thing demonstrates why it’s wrong to do things like honor Confederate soldiers; it leads right to defending slavery.
Meaningful study of history and honor are two completely different and exclusive concepts. I can understand and accept why Confederates were the way they were, however looking at it through the modern lens it is still easy to see it for what it is. Traitors who were fighting for the right to own slaves. A concept that blatantly disregards the very foundation of our constitution that all men are created equal.
Honest question, and maybe I missed this earlier, but why honor The Confederacy? What are the best reasons?