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Obama asked not to lay a wreath on the Confederate Veterans memorial.

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Posts

  • jothkijothki Registered User regular
    edited May 2009
    If you think about it, there's a bit of interesting moral philosophy behind pardoning and possibly even honoring rebels. Any rebellion that suceeds is generally considered legitimate afterwards. If failed rebellions are always considered illegitimate, then that means that legitimacy is only determined by success, that essentially, might makes right.

    By pardoning those that fight against you, you take away the difference in individual consequences between success and failure. Even if you feel that what they did was wrong and deserved punishment, you acknowledge that the only reason you're able to punish them is because you defeated them, and being defeated should by itself never be a cause for punishment.

    The same thing is true for memorializing those who fought for the Confederacy. Regardless of how they felt, we consider them Americans, and they fought bravely for a cause that was only tainted in legitimacy by its failure. Although I myself believe that the South was wrong in rebelling, there was no right or wrong within the battles themselves or those who fought in them. The soldiers may be condemned for joining the army, and the leadership may be condemned for starting the war, but the memorials solely deal with the fighting itself.

    I really need to stop writing this before tangets start to take over. I'm already pondering the nature of duty and responsibility within an army, whether joining is the last moral decision you get to make until you leave (beyond disobeying illegal orders or not commiting war crimes or the like) or whether every action you take as a soldier is inherently a moral one, and that you are completely supporting the cause of an army if you don't try to actively fight against any actions it takes as a whole that you disagree with. When you shoot someone on the field of battle, are you just carrying out your duty or are you actively killing someone with all of the moral consequences that that entails?

    jothki on
  • PantsBPantsB Fake Thomas Jefferson Registered User regular
    edited May 2009
    jothki wrote: »
    Any rebellion that suceeds is generally considered legitimate afterwards. If failed rebellions are always considered illegitimate, then that means that legitimacy is only determined by success, that essentially, might makes right.

    That would be the tendency but its definitely not an absolute. For instance, The Hungarian Uprising of 1956 was definitely legitimate despite its failure. There are many illegitimate rebellions that succeed, its just that they are often called coups.

    PantsB on
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  • RoyceSraphimRoyceSraphim Registered User regular
    edited May 2009
    PantsB wrote: »
    jothki wrote: »
    Any rebellion that suceeds is generally considered legitimate afterwards. If failed rebellions are always considered illegitimate, then that means that legitimacy is only determined by success, that essentially, might makes right.

    That would be the tendency but its definitely not an absolute. For instance, The Hungarian Uprising of 1956 was definitely legitimate despite its failure. There are many illegitimate rebellions that succeed, its just that they are often called coups.

    But is not history written by the victor?

    I personally honor those whom I hate and pray for them so that history might remain pure.

    RoyceSraphim on
  • RustRust __BANNED USERS regular
    edited May 2009
    The more you post the more you sound like someone spliced together a bunch of seventh-grade class rep soundbites.

    Rust on
  • BubbaTBubbaT Registered User regular
    edited May 2009
    PantsB wrote: »
    BubbaT wrote: »
    PantsB wrote: »
    Sheep wrote: »
    Memorial Day is for those US soldiers who paid the ultimate price in defense of the United States and its ideals. Confederates weren't American Soldiers, they were either Confederate soldiers and thus not American or traitors levying war against the United States and thus not soldiers. Therefore they shouldn't be honored. There is no logical fallacy there.

    No definition of Memorial Day that I've read is that specific, but merely "Any American that died in any war".
    No that's not what Memorial Day is. Its a day for fallen soldiers, not all war dead.

    But from the beginning, those soldiers included Confederate soldiers.
    For over 50 years Memorial Day was explicitly for Union soldiers! Confederate families were not allowed to visit Arlington to place flowers on the graves of Confederate soldiers into the 20th century. That account is just factually wrong, including placing Grant at Arlington in 1868, when the headline speaker was General James Garfield(before he was President), not Grant.

    ?

    The link I posted did not say Grant was President in 1868, nor did it say Grant was the keynote speaker.
    The ceremonies centered around the mourning-draped veranda of the Arlington mansion, once the home of Gen. Robert E. Lee. Various Washington officials, including Gen. and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant, presided over the ceremonies.

    Nor did it say Confederate families decorated graves at Arlington in 1868.
    After speeches, children from the Soldiers' and Sailors' Orphan Home and members of the GAR made their way through the cemetery, strewing flowers on both Union and Confederate graves, reciting prayers and singing hymns.


    PantsB wrote: »
    From the second Memorial Day celebration, or Decoration Day as it was then called
    Another lesson which we review to-day is the oft-told tale of history, that no nation can live that is founded upon wrong.

    There was a time when we refused to heed this warning. 'We stilled the voice of conscience, and defied the voice of God; we sought in the virtues of our fathers to find excuse for their errors: we put the Union before right, and with the memory of dead compromises sought to shut out the knowledge of living wrongs. We failed. Not until we stood squarely upon right and liberty did success follow our banners. Repenting of our sin, we live; while our foe, who clung to it, has perished.

    That claim that Confederate dead were among the honored is baseless.

    What exactly am I supposed to be seeing here that proves Confederate graves were not decorated with dead plants?

    And that nation that was founded upon wrong includes New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, etc., just as it included Georgia and Virginia. The same American flag that flew in Washington flew in Charleston and Macon until 1861.

    BubbaT on
  • Edith UpwardsEdith Upwards Registered User regular
    edited May 2009
    Cultural Hegemony ITT.

    Edith Upwards on
  • DarkCrawlerDarkCrawler Registered User regular
    edited May 2009
    Eh. Civil Wars are kind of iffy when it comes to post-honoring.

    I don't see why the common confederate soldier shouldn't be honored. Sure, there were probably rotten eggs among them. A lot of them. But so were in the Union. I bet you would find a lot of looters, rapists, murderers and such among them as well. Yet they are honored the same. The whole excuse of "But there were some confederate soldiers who fought so they could keep slaves" kind of sounds bad to me because of this.

    Both sides were soldiers. Sure, one side fought for the Confederacy, but that alone doesn't make them evil. They were born American citizens after all, and are buried to that soil. I wouldn't really give a damn that for the last three year period of their lives they were drafted to the ranks of a rebellious fake goverment that decided to secede to preserve slavery.

    The Confederacy sucked. It's horrible and anyone who even attempts to defend it is a fucking retard. But I don't really blame the common guy for the games of the rich politicians.

    DarkCrawler on
  • Robos A Go GoRobos A Go Go Registered User regular
    edited May 2009
    What's honorable about fighting because you were manipulated by rich politicians?

    If it's really as you describe, then nobody should be honored.

    Robos A Go Go on
  • ScalfinScalfin __BANNED USERS regular
    edited June 2009
    What's honorable about fighting because you were manipulated by rich politicians?

    If it's really as you describe, then nobody should be honored.

    The difference is that the manipulation was telling them that they could profit from slavery through trickle down economics, so they were still fighting to profit off slavery.

    Scalfin on
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    The rest of you, I fucking hate you for the fact that I now have a blue dot on this god awful thread.
  • DarkCrawlerDarkCrawler Registered User regular
    edited June 2009
    What's honorable about fighting because you were manipulated by rich politicians?

    If it's really as you describe, then nobody should be honored.

    It's not honorable. Just like Vietnam wasn't honorable, or Iraq, or any of those other wars. It's the act of risking your life that usually gets that one. It's a cultural tradition, and I don't really blame people for extending it to Confederate soldiers as well.

    DarkCrawler on
  • PantsBPantsB Fake Thomas Jefferson Registered User regular
    edited June 2009
    What's honorable about fighting because you were manipulated by rich politicians?

    If it's really as you describe, then nobody should be honored.

    It's not honorable. Just like Vietnam wasn't honorable, or Iraq, or any of those other wars. It's the act of risking your life that usually gets that one. It's a cultural tradition, and I don't really blame people for extending it to Confederate soldiers as well.

    Right, but risking your life for no reason isn't honored, its just viewed as stupid or a MTV show. If Evel Knievel had died in a crash after jumping or if a criminal was shot while trying to rob a liquor store, they would neither deserve nor receive the honors given to someone like Pat Tillman. The thing that brings honor is willing to sacrifice and die for a cause or in service or defense of something. What you are sacrificing for is important. The soldiers who died in Vietnam or Iraq or WWII or the Mexican American war did so in service of the United States of America. The fact that our government failed them in spending them too cheaply or unnecessarily doesn't diminish them because they were willing to fight and die for our country, even if the actual conflict was not worthy of their dedication.

    And so on Memorial Day, we honor that sacrifice for the United States of America and for its ideals. Because ultimately, those ideals are what define the nation. We have no unifying ethnicity. Despite mass media's unifying nature, we remain a nation-state of multiple nations, with life in Georgia fundamentally different in many ways than life in the Pacific Northwest or New England or Arizona or Nebraska. What binds us are those ideals that the country was founded on and we continue to strive to meet - equality, justice, freedom.

    But the Confederates didn't fight for that cause. It wasn't merely their side of the conflict that was unjust. It was the cause for which they fought that was unjust and unworthy of our respect. It was based on a twisted ideology, and more than that it wasn't for the ideals that bind the nation together. They didn't fight and die for the United States they fought and died against it. They didn't fight for our ideals, they fought for an explicit rejection of those ideals. They didn't fight for us, they fought for them.

    PantsB on
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  • DarkCrawlerDarkCrawler Registered User regular
    edited June 2009
    Right, I read a bit about Memorial day and I guess it's a fundamentally an U.S. Soldiers remembrance. I don't know why, but I thought it was just general war memorial thing.

    So yeah, scratch my earlier posts. I can see why some people have problem with inculding Confederates there.

    There's a Confederate Memorial Day anyway.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_Memorial_Day

    DarkCrawler on
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