Anniversary of wars provides a time for reflection
- By Mitchell Blatt
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E-mail China.org.cn, April 19, 2015
That the southern states seceded from the United States largely in order to preserve slavery -- as they feared northern Republicans like Abraham Lincoln would try to restrict the immoral practice -- is a fact even if some southerners with a misguided affection for the Confederacy are offended by hearing it.
The United States has condemned Japanese prime ministers for visiting the Yasukuni Shrine in the past. But sprinkled throughout the United States, there remain shrines to war criminals and traitors from the American Civil War. In 2000, a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest was erected in Selma, Alabama, site of a historic civil rights march. Bedford, who would later be the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, presided over the massacre at Ft. Pillow, where hundreds of surrendering soldiers and black civilian Unionists were slaughtered.
Organizations called "the Sons of Confederate Veterans" exist throughout the country, even in states that didn't secede. The Delaware chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans built a shrine in 2007 to those traitors who joined the Confederacy and fought against their own state. Unlike the shrines in the South to soldiers who just happened to be living there and defending their homes, they went out of their way to join the wrong side.
Like the Japanese war museum, which refers to World War II as the "Greater East Asia War," the neo-confederate groups also have an alternative name meant to soften the war: the "War between the States." A monument in Edgecombe Country, North Carolina (inscribed in 1904) is dedicated to the "defenders of state sovereignty." Many places and even military institutions are named after Confederate generals, Beutler pointed out, as he argued for the naming of places after confederates to be ceased.
Since every American alive today is a citizen of the winning side, it shouldn't be a controversial proposition. Yet some people feel their grandparents or great grandparents who fought for the Confederates are being "blamed." To say that the Confederacy was wrong -- as it was -- isn't an attack on every confederate soldier.
Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki confronted this question in his final film, "The Wind Rises." How much blame should the designer of fighter planes Jiro Horikoshi shoulder for the destruction wrought by his A6M Zero? In the end, he was just doing a job, working for money and his country.
Yet it is also true that many individuals did make terrible choices that made them personally responsible for mass murder and other war crimes, and it is true that many of them had children. Adolf Eichmann deserves condemnation for sending Jews off to concentration camps. That he had four children doesn't make a bit of difference.
The author is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit: http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/MitchellBlatt.htm
Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.
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