Do people just stick flags on any grave now? As in, Great Aunt Bessie is buried in this churchyard, let’s stick a flag on her grave?
Had they won, we’d all be eating grits for breakfast.
Have you stopped and thought about that?:mad:
I’m not bothered about US flags being put on their graves. I do, however, feel that we shouldn’t name elementary schools after them.
Maybe, but that’s what they fought for. If you want to put flags on their graves to honor their service, put the flags on there of the country they died for, not the country they fought against. Putting American flags on their graves is just mocking them.
If they ever did anything honorable that we wish to honor them for, then honor them with the symbol of what they did. I’m told, for instance, that Lee served his nation well before his treason, and if we wish to honor that, then we should do so with an American flag.
But there was no honor in the Southern treason. If that’s all a man did of note, fine, don’t punish him for the sake of restoring national unity, but absolutely don’t honor him, either.
My answer would be #4 but with additional information to explain my opinion (which may fall partially under #4 as well as #6).
I think we all agree that many atrocities occurred during the Civil War and the reasons for the war were many and some despicable. BUT it was also a very different time and the ideals and beliefs of people were shaped far more by their family, peers and (to be honest) their ignorance.
Ultimately, I believe that Confederate soldiers were fighting for what they believed was right. That, in my opinion, makes them Americans.
Even as a fourth generation Georgian and a sixth generation Southerner, I’m eternally grateful that The Union won. But I still think that there were honorable men on both sides of the battle…
Memorial Day here is a sort of amalgamation of remembrances of The Dead, stemming from our civil war. It’s been broadened somewhat and for many is a day for the remembrance of just those who are generally dead, in service of country or otherwise. The Little flags I’m talking about, however, are specifically those at military cemeteries, or less ceremonial graves of servicemen.
USA can be confusing even if you’ve lived here your whole life. It is at once a single place and 50 very distinctly different places. Racism, provincialism, faith, and generosity abound all over but in vastly different manifestations depending on where you are. Focusing on the civil war–150 years ago: how do you handle that? There is STILL animosity and only grudging acceptance of the outcome. The southern lands remain part of The Union, so they are inhabited by US Citizens. But there are horrifyingly vast numbers of graves belonging to people who fought to prevent that very situation. Do we consider them traitors, although their reality was not nearly so black & white? Or do we consider them Americans who fought for one manifestation of America but lost? And if so, how do we do that and call them “Americans nonetheless” without minimizing the war to the level of a championship game, the slaughter and rot of men on both sides and the causes represented by their flags? It’s a scar in a very real sense because it is a lasting effect of a division now closed, but inflexible and given to irritation when stressed.
- “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
I will not gainsay Abraham Lincoln, and neither should anyone else.
He just said, “Let’s end this war and put it behind us.” But by the same token, from the Confederate perspective, he spoke only for the Union. Did Jefferson Davis ever make a similar appeal?
I like this idea. Not only does it remove the question of whether or not they were American soldiers, or “soldiers who were Americans” and any attached questions about the legitimacy of putting US flags on their graves, but it also reflects where most of their actual loyalties lay anyway, and nearly all of them (on both sides) served in state units, not Union or Confederate ones.
And Lincoln bought a bullet for his troubles. Their officers should have been lined up against a wall and shot like the war criminals they were. The grunt soldiers deserved no veterans benefits and they deserve no American flags - now or ever.
I wrote in another thread, all the rebel states should have been demoted to territorial status and made to re-earn their way back into the union.
They did quit using this one because the other side thought they were offering surrender.
I completely get this. What I’m questioning is whether planting Union flags on the graves of Confederate soldiers is an effective way of going about this, or even a rational way of attempting to. From my perspective, as a non-American, it looks more like a “Hah! In your face, loser!” kind of gesture to the dead.
I’m already against the next war, and I’m sure as Hell not going to hold a grudge for a war that happened before my grandfather was born. We have made peace with the peoples we fought from the nation’s birth to the Vietnamese, who were killing our guys when I was a teenager.
All except the people of the long-dead Confederate States of America. It makes no sense to not forgive the rebels of long ago. The British forgave the American rebels, who were surely traitors to the crown. Why can’t you forgive the rebels of the misguided war in the 1860s?
It is not a matter of “making nice with former foe” - it is desecrating the memory of those who lived and died as CSA supporters.
Do we put French flags on the graves of SS troops killed in combat? They lived and died Nazis.
At least leave them to their contemptible “Ideals”.
If you were a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (look it up if you don’t know), would you want a Spanish flag on your grave?
It’s irrational virtue signaling. Irrational in the sense that they assign motives to these people that fought in the Civil War haphazardly. Without any sense of how a poor person fighting a war would think. They’ll link lengthy statements about why some of the states seceded and think that each and every soldier was willing to do die for some rich land owner’s right to own slaves. The truth is more complex than that.
It’s not like the Union soldiers were all motivated by the noble intention of emancipation. Men had to be conscripted in the north and that got ugly. New York City wasn’t the most loyal of regions. But by condemning the South and its soldiers one can signal to others that you think the right things even if it’s intellectually inconsistent with the support of the American Revolution and ignores that it’s disingenuous to distill complex histories into a pithy sound bite.
I’m glad the South lost for practical reasons. A United United States was going to be more viable and powerful than a large group of perpetually fighting mini nations like Europe of the time. Continuing to demonize the South to this day is counterproductive.
They kind of were–“readmission” took until 1870–despite the paradoxical Union war doctrine that secession was impossible.
Right. Presumably a Second Republic flag would be appropriate, if putting flags on war graves were a thing there.
Not quite analogous, I think. The Spanish civil war wasn’t a war of secession, and the contesting sides had no arguments about what Spain was, or what it meant to be Spanish. Their dispute was about how Spain should be governed.
If flags-on-graves were a thing in Spain, each side could reasonably lay claim to have been seeking to serve Spain and could use the current Spanish flag to signify that. (Happily, the current flag is not the flag that was employed by either side in the civil war.)
As for international volunteers on both sides, they were presumably fighting not for Spain but for a wider cause, defined in terms of political ideology - socialism, anarchism, Christianity, whatever. If their graves were to be marked with flags, they’d presumably want flags which pointed to those causes, rather than to Spain.
Well… my understanding is that Spanish Fascists did use bicolor flags, like the Bourbon monarchist ensign and the present state flag. Emblems were changed up.
But I’m not versed in the subject, and I can’t speak to how either veterans of that war, or modern Spaniards, would view the symbolism.
I meant readmission on a case by case basis.