I realize you could see my title and fear that I was after some trollish end, but such is not the case, I'm afraid. Intentionally inflammatory language aside, this diary and its comments poses an interesting question for me.
On the one hand, after many years, I've thrown off much of my decidedly Confederate upbringing. On the other hand, I don't see very much difference between the soldiers of the CSA and the soldiers of the USA, except the CSA soldiers were greater dupes.
If it does not bother anybody, I'm going to work out my personal feelings here. Perhaps someone else may gain some insight from them. (Or perhaps I flatter myself.) I'm not going to address the merits or flaws of the Confederate monument referenced in the original article. I know little about it, and I have no problem with ignoring or removing any monument dedicated solely to the Confederacy and not to the soldiers who fought in the Civil War. The Confederacy was a construct of men, and its passing is no more a thing to be mourned than the end of a book.
First, let me get out of the way the fact that I do think that Indian warriors ought to have their own Memorial Day. They fought valiantly to save their nation from conquering by a more powerful entity. It's worth remembering, too, that they had suffered an apocalypse just a few centuries before, as disease imported both intentionally and unintentionally by the Europeans laid waste to entire civilizations, especially in North America. The book Lies My Teacher Told Me was mentioned, and it paints a vivid picture of the kind of destruction the plagues left behind. Knowing this makes the valor of the Indians all the more apparent.
Now, the Confederate soldier. I've done a fair amount of reading on the Civil War, although probably not as much as some. I've also read a fair bit about the South, and of course been immersed in it, or at least that part of it that one can access when one is not well off, and has never been.
I have to say that to an extent the comparison to Nazi soldiers in WWII Germany is accurate. As with the Nazis, many of the rank-and-file were simply carried along in nationalistic (the word might be not entirely appropriate, but it will do for my purposes) fervor, led astray by the movers and shakers behind the movement. Many of these men, both Confederate and Nazi, would also have understood the point of view of the Indian warrior, had ingrained prejudice against the Native Americans not blinded them to the similarities.
Definitely Reconstruction was allowed to languish far too early, and had it been carried out as originally planned the lot of the freed slaves and their children and grandchildren would have been far different. People who might before the Civil War have been moderate or indifferent about race found in the defenseless blacks an easy target for offended dignity and sullen bitterness, and I think that is much of the reason for continued race problems today. Certainly it led directly to the Jim Crow horrors visited upon blacks by whites who might justifiably be called terrorists, the KKK. But a portion, some might say a great portion, of that bitterness about race came about after the Civil War, and to allow it to cast its shadow backwards in time to the soldiers who died on the wrong side in the Civil War is not being intellectually honest.
I notice that most of the Nazi rank-and-file were not prosecuted, just as many of the Confederate soldiers were allowed to go free. Simply being dupes, used harshly by their superiors, does not qualify them as terrorists or as war criminals. And although unlike in Germany efforts in Reconstruction went sour afterwards, and the attitudes of many of the defeated soldiers suffered a turn for the worse, that does not make them any less dupes at the time.
Also, it is probably not accurate to paint with a broad brush the Confederate soldiers as white supremacists. Almost all white people were at the time, including many who argued for the rights of blacks. It has even been noted that Lincoln was. One might indeed also call the Union soldiers white supremacist trash, because most of them were. White supremacists, that is. I don't know that I could call any human being trash without getting to know and hate him on a pretty personal level.
Is it inappropriate then to allow these defeated soldiers to retain some semblance of honor in death? It is true, there is no way to make certain that one is not inadvertantly including in any honor done for these men some who were violently racist, just as some of the Nazi soldiers would undoubtedly have agreed with the holocaust perpetrated upon the Jews, had they known of it. By and large, however, the common grunt in both armies undoubtedly felt that he was defending his honor and his "nation." And those in power did everything they could to foster this idea.
It is not for no reason that children in the South are taught that the Civil War was not fought over slavery. No doubt to the common Southerner even at the time slavery was not the principle issue. Events and propaganda had been cleverly manipulated to make the average Southerner believe that the North was unjustly imposing its views on a South that was already losing out in the ongoing industrialization of the world (because of their own elite, and isn't that ironic?), and no doubt many Southerners, few of them slave owners, believed it. After all, if the only few people you know of who own slaves are the rich and powerful in your area, people whom you never speak to and seldom encounter, but all your friends are furious at Northern intrusion and high-handedness, you'll be slow to believe it's about slavery. In the essentially feudal society of the South, stratified and codified with unwritten rules that must be obeyed, many whites lived daily lives little different from the lives of blacks, and certainly few of them could afford slaves. Here, too, the comparison to the Nazi soldier holds up; they were also prey to cleverly manipulated emotion. Slavery was an institution for the elite.
Germany has indeed come to terms with its past, for the most part. It must be said, the South has largely avoided doing so. To that end, it makes sense that much of the bending-over-backwards that the nation has been doing in the past century must end. Robert E. Lee, while in many ways an amazing and honorable man, probably does not need his birthday celebrated nationally. The Confederate battle flag (ironically, it wasn't even standard in the Civil War, but was the flag chosen for that awful movie The Birth of a Nation and so became synonymous with the Confedracy in the fervid imaginations of countless white supremacists in the twentieth century) probably does not need any protection or veneration, and could with justification be called the flag of the American Nazis. The South needs to stop having its ego stroked on the whole subject, because until it comes to terms with what happened, it will never be able to heal its racial divide.
But I don't find it inappropriate to honor the fallen grunts, men led astray or forced into combat on behalf of the elite. To say that poor farmers who never owned a slave would fight and die to defend slavery makes no sense. They fought and died for stupid reasons, true. They fought and died to defend a 1% who raised them to it, trained them to a peculiar code of honor and then callously manipulated it in an attempt to preserve their feudal empire in the face of an evolving point of view on race and in the face of an evolving economic system in industrialization. I'll even come out and say that I don't find it inappropriate to honor the common Nazi soldier, pulled off the farm and told he was going to save the homeland which had been ground under the heel of old European enemies for decades (what was done to Germany after WWI was pretty damn horrible, not that it justifies the Holocaust). They were all doing the same damn thing as the soldiers we do honor without question: obeying the orders that they superiors gave them even unto death.
What we're honoring is average people caught in the jaws of a game designed for the powerful, dupes lead to their death for the glory of people they never met, who never thought about them. I worry that if we do not honor the sacrifices of the stupid, the honor-bound fools who will always exist, there may never be lessons for the rich and powerful to see that the people they sacrifice in their games are people just like them.