US History

To Forgive is not to forget, but it is the essential required ingredient to moving on…….


What the Democrats are doing in America with their nihilistic anti-statue drive, is ripping up ”the old understanding” between the South and North that helped mend the enormous rift created by slavery, and its ending through the blood drenched Civil War. 

Commenting to the post I ran, actually mirrored from the Gates of Vienna, with some thoughts of my own,

My views on the American Civil War have been tempered by the many historical books that I have read on the subject, and novels from the period from all different perspectives. One of my favorites is the three (massive) volume tome by novelist Shelby Foote, featured speaker in the now famous PBS 9 part series titled The Civil War.
I won’t dwell on the whether the Civil War was fought early on (primarily) about slavery or states’ rights, the end result of the 4 year conflict was the institution of slavery being rendered to the dust heap in American history, and rightfully so. My focus however is on the understanding after the hostilities were over, that being, of reconciliation, and afterwards, on mutual understanding and respect, for there was no other way going forward as a nation after the 200 year atrocity of slavery, and the massive blood letting tragedy of the Civil War that ended it.
What’s missing today is that sense of reconciliation, and needed understanding, the former being one of coming together as a family, a society of one, a union, and the latter being a respect of differing perspectives that were, and still are, wrapped in family, community and regional ethos. Letting bygone be bygones and agreeing to disagree. This is all being uprooted and ended with a resounding thud of the nihilists and deconstructionists of the Leftist era. They are ripping apart the national fabric on purpose and throwing it back into all of our faces, dancing not only the grave of Robert E.Lee, but upon Lincoln’s as well.

Dymphna from the Gates of Vienna offers some insights of her own, which I republish here in full.

Thank you for this.

Before I met the Baron I swore I would never live in The South again. The weather was(is) too hard on my Irish DNA. But I did meet him and “thy people shall be my people…” became my song. So here I am in the Sovereign Commonwealth of Virginia. Though it’s not so “sovereign” anymore, not with Northern Virginia being an annex of Washington D.C. now.

 

Even before the Civil War ended, the Federals began exacting their triumph over the Lee-Custis family. His wife watched from the windows of their home as graves were dug for Union soldiers who died in the camp hospital established on their land. That was a deliberate ploy by the Federals to make the Confederacy lose heart. And it was the start of what was to become Arlington National Cemetery.

 

Echoes of “The War” remain here because most of the battles were fought on Confederate soil. [And family DNA holds onto that horror the same way that the families of any large devastation carry the memory, in their epigenetic makeup. The survivors of the Dutch Starvation Winter during late WW II still carry the damage of that starvation. The great-grandchildren of those who were liberated from the Nazi camps have been found to exhibit some of the same “survivor PTSD” their ancestors had. ]

 

Cultural memory is a strangely persistent thing. Ask the (southern) Irishman what they think of the English…the latter destroyed every single piece of paper in the whole country that testified to ancestry – including baptismal records, family bibles, etc. The Irish were deprived of all cultural memories before the 16th-17th centuries. They were forbidden to speak Gaelic or teach it to their children. The Scots were moved into the north to take over the farms and property of Irish landholders…that is the same thing that was done to the Kurds, btw, only moreso. Kurds in Turkey are not permitted to give their children Kurdish names.

 

Suppression of cultural memories, destruction of icons, etc., only drives those memories underground. And doing this is so absolutely a sign of cultural Marxism, or in the case of the Kurds, Islamic tyranny, for they openly state they are Kurds first, Muslims second.

 

Lee didn’t like the statues. When invited to Gettysburg to attend the ceremonies unveiling the statues of all the Civil War generals, he refused to attend and called all such memorializations “divisive”. But back then he had fled to the relative peace of Washington College (later Washington and Lee – will it be pressured to revert to the original name?) in Lexington, Virginia. He didn’t experience the travails of Reconstruction that the deep South did.

 

If only Lincoln hadn’t been assassinated! From that death and absence flowed a great ruination which remains with us. Today I live among descendants of slaves who established their homes not far from the plantations where they worked. We celebrated our marriage in the black Baptist church which abuts our property. In their graveyard are the first stone markers set over the graves of those freedmen. Their first descendants were illiterate, so there is only the year, roughly hewn.

 

I also know the descendants of those who owned slaves. Neither side talks about it because there is no need to do so. We have statues of black leaders (local heroes) now; the fires are banked but they still remain.

 

On our website, Eastern Europeans re-fight bitter battles from half a millennium ago. Cultural memory thrives there…

 

Our American cultural Marxists are deeply ignorant of the human heart. Like the Soviet Communists, they refuse to consider history because they are busy revising it to better suit their own dogmas.

2 Responses

  1. Oh, my. Had I known you would post my comment, I’d have included a link to the house in Appomattox where the surrender of the Confederate troops took place.

    https://www.nps.gov/apco/learn/historyculture/the-surrender-meeting.htm

    That site describes the events leading up to and past the Surrender.

    Since we live not too far from McLean House, where the surrender was signed (and the next day, the details negotiated), we sometimes visit. The signing table has been removed to the Smithsonian but otherwise, the house, outbuildings, and surrounding park are carefully maintained.

    The Baron, having been for several decades a landscape painter, is fascinated by the painting of the event, which is quite large. It hangs in the main house at the park. Anyone visiting central Virginia would enjoy a side trip to the park. Not far from there is the new Confederate Museum, a private undertaking that the SPLC cannot eradicate.

    1. How wonderful for you to note that, I hope to one day visit that spot…and other areas of interest during that period. Real enthusiasts visit the battlefields in the months that they were fought in to get the real feel of the lay of the land and what they were experiencing at the time. Going to the Wilderness in the dead of winter or early spring will not give you the proper look and feel of that horrific battle ground.

Leave a Reply to Dymphna Gates Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.