He never was charged with that crime, and I don’t think he plausibly is a traitor by the definition in the US Constitution.* Israel has never been our de jure enemy, and I don’t think we have treated it as a de facto adversary since the 1950’s**.
According to Justice Department sources, Pollard tried to sell secrets to China as well as Israel. But this was eight years after Mao died, and I wouldn’t think China at that point was one of our enemies. One of our competitors, yes.
By that standard, I doubt anyone could be a traitor. The traitor concept only makes sense if one can’t unilaterally discard one’s nationality.
Philby certainly was disloyal. I’m pretty sure that if the USSR and Britain had gone to war, he would have sided with the enemy. But willingness to commit a crime isn’t the same as committing it.
As for Lee, he was, in 1860, what amounts to a dual citizen of Virginia and the US. He had to be disloyal to one of them. And, given his code of honor, which forbade sitting out wars, he had to commit treason against one or the other. I just think he picked the wrong state to betray.
“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”
** The US had an arms embargo against Israel starting at its founding, and Eisenhower tried to impose sanctions in 1956. This is pretty much how you treat an adversary. But an adversary is not the same as an enemy. And, by the 1970’s, Israel certainly was not a US adversary.
I’ve honestly made a really serious effort to understand this statement and I just can’t make any sense of it at all.
von Stauffenberg attempted to assassinate one of the most evil and destructive people to ever exist in modern history, a man who was quite literally tearing apart Western civilization and destroying his own country and murdering millions. His act, while treasonous, was for the greater good.
Lee joined up with the side that wanted to continue enslaving human beings. His act, which was treasonous, was not for the greater good.
Because Lee thought he was opposing tyranny, just as much as Stauffenberg thought. Lee believed he was acting for the greater good, and he was far from a lone nutjob in this belief.
I’m not stupid enough to say that the Confederacy is as bad as Nazi Germany. I’m only noting that, subjectively, to the minds of many southerners, it was sufficiently bad as to warrant open armed opposition. I don’t even agree with that; I think the Union had the higher morality. But millions felt otherwise, and they weren’t (and aren’t, even today) all bad people because of this belief.
If we can’t hold people accountable for poor judgment, just what are we holding them accountable for, anyway? The guy Stauffenberg was trying to kill, Adolf Hitler, thought he himself was the bee’s knees.
Except for outright psychopathic serial killers, how many people DON’T convince themselves they’re acting for the greater good?
Nor were most of the soldiers in the Wehrmacht, or even the Waffen SS, bad people. Only a lunatic thinks every German soldier, sailor and airman was a fiend.
Robert E. Lee was not the same as some kid from Alabama who signed up in the thrill of 19th-century volunteerism. He was sufficiently educated and informed to know that what he was doing was wrong. He had personally sworn an oath, in the eyes of the God he claimed to believe in, to defend the United States of America from its enemies. Other men in his situation did the right thing and fought for the Union. Lee acted treasonously, broke his solemn word, and offered his services to an immoral cause. He may have been an upstanding citizen before and after the war, but that does not change what he did during it.
Didn’t he resign his commission? Isn’t that essentially serving notice that he feels he can no longer honor the oath? Is the oath forever? Are there no circumstances under which you would allow the justified severing of the oath?
In this post you make a much better case for Lee’s treason. In the previous post [that I replied to], all you offered as evidence was a letter to the Editor of the NY Times. I was nitpicking the proof, not the conclusion.
The way I read it in Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People, Lee’s drawback as a commander was that he was too gentlemanly to make his junior officers understand clearly that his orders were not suggestions. That’s why he lost at Gettysburg. The Union would have had the “benefit” of that side of him too.
Most biographers believe that he had serious health problems at Gettysburg (including recovery from a probable heart attack a few weeks before) that also clouded his judgment.
A little of that is intrinsic in the ideology of the war. The South was composed (largely) of very individualistic people, filled with the spirit of chivalry and honor, who were fighting for self-determination (except for slaves, yes, I know…) The North, in large part, was industrialized, and much of the army was made up of factory workers, who were already highly trained in taking orders, and they were fighting for a more centralized system of national government.
Southerners didn’t like taking orders; that was a big part of what they were fighting for. If Lee had tried to enforce more discipline…he might have lost authority rather than gained it.
About a quarter of the population of the “non-south”, of those states that stayed loyal during the Civil War, lived in urban areas. Which means three quarters of the population did not. The US was still a rural society, and most of the army was made up of farmers.
Legally, the crime of treason is separate from swearing an oath to be a U.S. military officer. Lee would have been committing treason had he never been in the Army prior to the Civil War.
You have to admit that the oath is ridiculously pointless if you can completely betray it in word and spirit by just saying “Um, I quit now.” I don’t think that defense would convince very many people.
[QUOTE=Trinopus]
The North, in large part, was industrialized, and much of the army was made up of factory workers, who were already highly trained in taking orders, and they were fighting for a more centralized system of national government.
Southerners didn’t like taking orders; that was a big part of what they were fighting for. If Lee had tried to enforce more discipline…he might have lost authority rather than gained it.
[/QUOTE]
Your characterization of Northerners just isn’t true. The Union Army was one of the most egalitarian, difficult-to-command armies ever fielded by a major power in the modern history of warfare. Regiments actually elected their officers, and soldiers did not take kindly to being pushed around. The modern notion of the soldier as a professional who would unquestioningly carry out any legal order did not exist in America in 1861. Union officers had little choice but to be quite lenient in their treatment of the men for fear of widespread mutinies. The wildfire of volunteerism was not made up of men who joined up to be robots. Their sense of equality and democracy in all things was extraordinarily strong, even superseding the notion of military authoritarianism.
This doesn’t in any way contradict what I said. (Same for what Captain Amazing said.)
Following orders is very, very different from “being pushed around.” I don’t disagree with what you say, and what you say doesn’t disagree with what I said!
Okay, then as for 1 he is no worse (or better) than any man who took up arms against the Union. It was treason no matter what. Got it.
2. Really? No, it’s an oath that applies while you wear the uniform. When you’re out, you’re out. Otherwise, wouldn’t any veteran legislator who voted for an unconstitutional law be guilty as well? After all, they swore to uphold the Constitution.
Ok, I will more explicitly disagree with you. You said. “The South was composed (largely) of very individualistic people, filled with the spirit of chivalry and honor. . .” This was true of both armies. Both armies valued individualism.
You said. “The North, in large part, was industrialized, and much of the army was made up of factory workers, who were already highly trained in taking orders, and they were fighting for a more centralized system of national government.”
Very little of the army was made up of factory workers. The northern army was mostly made up of farmers, who had no more training or inclination to take orders Than their southern counterparts. And they weren’t fighting for a more centralized system of national government. Both governments centralized more as the war went on, as the pressure of industrialized modern warfare required better governmental organization. But I don’t know that northern and southern soldiers differed that much on their conception of the role of the government or of centralization.
OTOH, as I’ve very often read, at the time the Southerners were sure they could win a war with the North based solely on the fact that the South – “rabble” as well as “gentlemen” – had much more of a martial tradition than the North – partly cultural (the South having been settled by military-aristocratic Cavaliers and by Scotch-Irish fight-everybody-just-because clans), partly and more practically because the South had much more recent experience with Indian wars. But, “martial tradition” includes “obeying orders.”
No, I don’t think it does only matter in that case. The Civil War is one of those mythmaking wars in American history, and one of those myths was that the war was between the rural South, with old fashioned “rural” values and a way of life, on the one hand, and the industrialized/urbanized North, with modern “urbanized” values, and that the struggle was between two different value systems.
To an extent that’s true. The Union was more industrialized and urbanized than the Confederacy, and that helped them win the war. But the narrative overstates the differences. The US was still largely rural, and most of the recruits came from farms and small towns, and a lot of states, especially in the west, didn’t have big urban areas at all.
I know that was true in the irregular Indian-wars regiments for which Lincoln volunteered, but, by 1861?! Cite?!