Jotun wrote: ↑Sat Mar 18, 2023 1:11 pm
What they are doing is removing honors granted by a government of seditious, treasonous losers. Given how much the majority of the esteemed US members here rail against small potatoes being "treason", you are awfully lenient when it comes to the Confederates.
Nobody who fought openly for the Confederacy was ever charged with treason, partly because of a desire to reconcile, but also partly because actually getting convictions would be extraordinarily difficult, even in states where secessionists only formed a rump government and the majority of the state remained loyal to the Union.
In 1861 a lot of people had a hard time saying where citizenship began, and where it ended. The Civil War fundamentally changed the relationship between both the states and the federal government and between each of the several states, and arguably not for the better. Before the Civil War, federal documents said "The United States are," and afterwards said "The United States is." I frequently jest that the United States can't even do imperial decline properly because it does bread and circuses abroad while doing imperial overstretch at home; whatever truth is in that statement grew out of the aftermath of the Civil War.
Nobody really had the same understanding of what it meant to be an "American" that we have today. The vast majority built their identity around their state.
The South did not intend to levy war on the United States. (Now, there was much hypocrisy in this statement; they damned well had intended to levy war on any states that seceded over the Fugitive Slave Act, as had been threatened--but hypocrisy is endemic to politics, and is not treason.)
Part of the reunification of the United States after the Civil War was to readmit the states as states, and to regard those who fought for the Southron cause as Americans--misguided, to be sure, but still Americans. Many went on to serve in the federal army during westward expansion. The war had been fought, the outcome decided, and everyone would live with the result. Respect would be given to all who fought on both sides, particularly the common soldiers; none of them had wanted to do so; they were forced to do so by their respective governments; and did so for the most part honorably and bravely, in the best traditions of American soldiering, whether they wore blue or gray. That was an unspoken part of the deal.
Well, the deal has now been altered, and Southern whites should merely pray that Washington does not alter the deal further. Southern "states" are merely administratively convenient designations for conquered provinces. Southern whites should recognize that they are not actually "Americans," nor will they ever be. They are a conquered people.
Vae Victus, baby. They are guilty of choosing their ancestors unwisely, and it is a blood guilt that cannot possibly be redeemed or atoned for.
That's the logic Washington has chosen. Nothing can POSSIBLY go wrong from there, right?
