Shot At Dawn

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

I think it’s absolutely bizarre to somehow believe that your decisions should not be open to question by your descendants, or that the living have no right to judge the dead. I don’t think i’ve ever heard a more ahistorical, narrow-minded, self-interested viewpoint.

Admittedly, we need to take into account the totality of the circumstances in which historical figures lived, and understand the social, cultural, political, and intellectual contexts in which they acted, but the idea that we somehow divorce ourselves from any judgment just because we are separated by time is asinine.

I don’t care how culturally acceptable or ingrained holding slaves was in the United States during the colonial and early national period, i have no reservations about making a moral judgment about it, even though it’s well over a century ago.

Presumably, your ranting against this sort of historical judgment is based on the notion that, because their circumstance were so different from ours, we can’t properly understand their choices and hence have no right to judge them? If this is so, do you extend this prohibition to other cultures in our own time period? Do we, for example, have any right to condemn female genital mutilation, or modern examples of slavery? After all, the places where such things occur are probably just as culturally different from the 21st century United States as early nineteenth century America.

I’ve always found it difficult to know exactly where to draw the line when it comes to issues of historical and cultural relativism (and, as a historian, this is something i think about a lot). Different people are likely to make judgments in different ways, and to place different levels of importance on certain acts and certain types of differences. There will always be shades of grey, or issues where we don’t know whether to criticize or accept difference. But to make a blanket statement that the present has no right to judge the past is, in my opinion, profoundly misguided and even dangerous. Especially when you accompany such a position with the laughably arbitrary notion that WWI is in the past, and WWII is not.

May i suggest you read Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz; you might be surprised at how NOT “in the past” some events really are.

22

So as I said, this sort of retroactive judgment seems to most of us useless, unfair and unwise. We were not there. The dead cannot defend themselves. There is plenty of injustice to be corrected in the here-and-now.

Perhaps now we can convict our ancestors for killing off the Neanderthals?

23

What a beautiful non-response. Kudos.

24

Good on you Cicero for the work you and the rest have done on this issue. There were New Zealanders executed under British military law during World War I who were also among those receiving the posthumous pardons.

The NZ government at the time should have followed the Aussie government’s lead, and not have their men put under British penalty.

25

Thanks Ice wolf. After the Breaker Morant affair Australia would never subject itself to the British military system in the context of capital punishment.

Unfortunately, this thread has gone to areas well outside it’s intention.

26

Why not take a look an make a judgement upon the past misdeeds of our society ? or any other for that matter ?

There are quite a few conflicts where the perpetrators were never held to account, even when it would have been possible, simply because of the culture of the nation.

We in the UK have yet to really take a long hard look at ourselves in relation to Ireland where events are well within memory, its likely that we will not for some time to come, if ever.

We can look at Japan, where there is still unwillingness by those people to truly examine the role of their forefathers, soon it will be too late and it will be history.

Turkey still denies the Armenian genocide.

More recently, certain Serb miltary leaders, right down to individuals at the sharp end of carrying out horrendously brutal acts are still protected by their government, and yet there is no reason for them to do so.

We are right to scrutinise the behaviour of past individuals in a positions of power and apportion guilt and blame, we are also right to acknowledge their victims and express our sympathy too.

Its not just a case of stating that things ocurred because it was the ‘standards of the day’, many things were criminal actions then and still are, or do we go back to the US deep South and exonerate all the hicks with their pickaxe handles assualting blacks because ’ that was the way things were’

27

casdave has already given context for my quote about Field Marshall Haig. It wasn’t a typo, and I had thought it was one of the most well-known sayings about the War. It’s from (Baron) Beaverbrook’s Men and Power 1956. He also says

28

Thank you. I was on my way to work, and had little time. Oddly, I am in much the same sitaution now. Sorry.