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19 January 2019 is Robert E. Lee’s Birthday in Florida and
Confederate Heroes’ Day in Texas. Or
maybe it’s the other way around. Either way it adds up to Grand Treason Day in
the United States—a day that honors those brave men who broke their oaths to
their country and took up arms against it in defense of their god-given right
to hold other people in servitude. The right to imprison other people and to compel
them to work for nothing but the bare minimum needed to keep them alive. The
right to beat them for trivial or imagined offenses, the right to mutilate them
for whatever reason, the right to work them to death in the name of profit.
There’s no nobility or honor in the business—just crass calculations of profit
and loss.
Not a fan. I will note that I have (or should that be had?) relatives—long
dead before I ever stepped onto the cosmic stage, needless to say—on both sides
of that conflict. No direct ancestors as far as I can tell—but their brothers
or cousins or the like. Hell, one of my direct ancestors apparently took part
in the institution of slavery itself—the 1840 census (this is from memory)
showed him as having an enslaved woman as part of his household. I suppose I
could celebrate my “heritage” in some manner, but I prefer merely to record it—treat
it as an object-lesson, I suppose, rather than a holy icon. It’s a matter of
taste, maybe.
Ah, but it’s all about heroism and valor and willingness to
die for your country, comes the rejoinder, not about the specific cause these
heroes embraced. Horseshit. The
German soldiers who fought for Adolf Hitler had all those things, and their
valor in no way ennobled their sacrifice. They fought in a bad cause, they died
for a bad principle, and they deserve to be smothered in obloquy, not held up
to the admiration of posterity. And so did the Confederates. It’s the least we
can do for their shame.
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