Posted on 05/29/2017 7:56:37 AM PDT by Louis Foxwell
Main Menu Memorial Day in a Divided Nation An important lesson for the left. May 29, 2017 Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.
It has been over 150 years since our nation’s last civil war. Time enough has passed that we have come to associate the holiday once known as Decoration Day with the graves of soldiers fallen on other continents far from home.
It is important to honor our wartime dead. But Memorial Day has a powerful meaning that we have forgotten. It was the holiday that reunited our country after the Civil War. It began when Americans, from the North and the South, entered the cold gray stone fields of the dead, and decorated the graves of the fallen from the Grand Army of the Republic and the Confederacy with freshly cut flowers.
They followed no presidential order. They acted under no regulation. Instead the mothers and wives of men who would return home no more brought flowers to the graves of their fallen sons and husbands, and to the resting places of the young American men who might have slain them, who had been the enemy, but who still deserved honor and respect.
Those women, of the North and the South, brought America together.
Today a new breed of leftists gleefully tears down Confederate memorials. And it will not end with flags and statues. They will not be satisfied until the cemeteries that were once decorated have been desecrated. It is ominously fitting that the event which marked the end of one civil war now arrives to foreshadow the beginning of another war between brothers.
On a Memorial Day long ago, President Theodore Roosevelt praised the Union soldiers who “left us the right of brotherhood with the men in gray, who with such courage, and such devotion for what they deemed the right, fought against you.”
The Right of Brotherhood is what binds a nation. It cannot be imposed by force even when a war is won. It can only be won through mutual respect. Out of the brutality of the Civil War, came respect for the courage of those who fought and died on both sides. And once more, we called each other brothers.
"They not only reunited States, they reunited the spirits of men. That is their unique achievement, unexampled anywhere else in the annals of mankind," President Wilson said in his Memorial Day address.
Like the American Revolution, the aftermath of the Civil War was indeed a unique achievement. It is now vanishing before our eyes. And Memorial Day has become a sad reminder of its diminution.
A day once marked by mutual respect for the courage of former enemies is now being ushered in with the deliberate desecration of Civil War memorials in New Orleans. And beyond this ugliness, Memorial Day sharply divides the country between conservatives who believe this country is worth fighting for and leftists who see it as a racist colonial monstrosity that must be erased with open borders and terror.
While there are no armies of the Blue and the Gray exchanging fire on grassy hills, earlier this month cities across America remembered the courageous men and women in blue murdered by the racist supremacist and separatists of Black Lives Matter who deny that the lives of other races matter.
Last summer, Black Nationalist terrorist Micah Xavier Johnson murdered five police officers in Dallas. They were remembered on Police Memorial Day. In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio intends to march in the racist Puerto Rican Parade honoring FALN terrorist Oscar Lopez Rivera. FALN was responsible for maiming NYPD police officers including Angel Poggi who lost an eye and Richard Pascarella who lost his vision and five fingers.
When Bill Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama freed FALN terrorists, it was a declaration of war on Americans. Once again heroes in blue were being murdered by racist separatists backed by the Democrat political faction. Every police officer in blue murdered by left-wing racist terrorists is another casualty in the new civil war being fought against America by the radical left-wing “Resistance”.
We will never know how many men in blue fighting to preserve the unions of our communities against racist criminal terror were murdered or imprisoned through the actions of Barack Hussein Obama.
The left-wing tactics of racist terror are a deliberate effort to divide us.
Over 150 years after the Civil War, the Democrats have once again refused to recognize the Republican winner of an election. They have endeavored to bring down a democratically elected government by any means. Meanwhile their sanctuary cities and states are in a state of rebellion. Their judges seek to rule as unelected tyrants and their media urges on “Resistance” street violence on college campuses.
Millions of Americans on both sides recognize that a conflict is underway. Many of them feel helpless to stop it. And they wonder what can be done to avert it.
Memorial Day’s origins offer us one answer. Mutual respect.
Certain disagreements are intellectually, culturally and emotionally irreconcilable. The Civil War emerged out of such a conflict. The civil war we are sliding toward now is being born out of another. But mutual respect can make coexistence possible even in the face of fundamental divisions. And where there is no such respect, even minor differences become impossible to reconcile except through force.
The left expresses its radicalism as violent contempt. If it wants to understand where Trump came from, it need look no further than the contempt that its political and cultural leaders express for opponents. Its conviction of moral superiority makes it impossible for it to accept President Trump or his voters, and leads it to assault Trump supporters, vandalize memorials, attack the Constitution and openly plot subversion and secession.
Memorial Day arose not only as a way to honor those who fought for our side, but even those of our brethren who fought on the enemy side. Its lesson is that heroism does not occur only on the battlefield, but in the aftermath in which after trying to kill each other, we learn to live together as one people.
It takes one sort of moral courage to win a victory and another form of moral courage to rebuild afterward. Victory demands conviction. Rebuilding requires that we cast aside the conviction of superiority that war requires and to understand that our enemies are men like us.
The left is convinced of its utter moral superiority and the total moral inferiority of its enemies. Its utopian projects are pursued with ruthless violence and secured with unlimited power. Its enemies exist only to be brutally ground under. Those who are not of the left have no right to exist upon the earth. They are accorded no rights, no freedoms and no respect. Only a choice between slavery and death.
That is why the left wins its victories and then covers the land in blood. Its societies collapse into misery and repression. This was where the American Revolution differed so fundamentally from the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. We celebrate that difference on the Fourth of July. It is also where the Civil War differed from so many other civil wars not in its battles, but in its aftermath. That is the great moral victory that we remember on Memorial Day. A mutual victory of national reunification.
The Civil War saved the Union. But the mutual respect of Decoration Day preserved it. If the Union is to survive, the Democrats must learn to respect those they have come to consider their enemies. History teaches us that mutual respect can either avert a civil war. Or it must be learned after a civil war.
This Memorial Day, let us hope that it will not take another civil war for respect to prevail.
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>It is ominously fitting that the event which marked the end of one civil war now arrives to foreshadow the beginning of another war between brothers.<
I understand the sentiment but I can hardly consider leftarded scum as brothers and sisters.
Anyway, I’m ready.
But at what cost?
Agreed.
Unfortunately, our schools have stopped teaching our history and what made America what it USED TO BE. Hiding behind the idea that our history offends you is ludicrous. Today's America is NOT the same country I grew up in and perhaps never will be again. Sad but true. Perhaps after another civil war, the cycle will repeat itself and liberals and conservatives can come together once more.
Never happen.
Indeed it did.
Slavery and secession were not the end game, they were only the tools used by those who sought the destruction of our American Republic. And how close they came to achieving it. America is now at a similar crossroads, but the enemy takes a much more subtle approach. It's stealth existence has given cover to it's totalitarian objectives.
There have always been, and will forever be, forces antagonistic to the cause of freedom. We can never destroy these forces, but we must place every obstacle we can in their path. The most formidable obstacles are the strong unbending hearts of people who love freedom above everything.
Leftists have moved into the land of blood and hatred. They are, with their spiritual bretheren - Marxists, the Reich, Mao, Papa Doc, and sundry tyrants - inhabitants of a world that does not permit the continued existence of any who disagree with them. Leftists are in league with Muslim terrorism as enemies of their enemy, not fully understanding they are the enemy of their new Axis of Evil. Tragically, it will be necessary to utterly defeat leftists in our midst. They leave us no other choice.
Bttt.
5.56mm
I’m hopeful. Thanks to 0bama, and a handful of other various and sundry crazies, the wind has been taken out of the sails of the Socialist Democrat Party. (1,000 Dem seats LOST in 8 years, the 6 or so special elections since the Presidential Election have ALL resulted in WINS for Conservatives; 2018 is going to be fun!!)
It is up to us, now, to continue the trend and make sure they stay OUT of power long enough for us to right this ship, again.
I believe there are still more Patriots than Socialists in our country; the Socialists just make a lot of noise and have the Enemy Media pimping them 24/7.
We have G-d and Trump on our side! :)
"One, man, plus truth, is an army."
I wonder if one day being a leftist is akin to being a murdering traitor to America with the appropriate death sentence given within one month of sentencing....
It may indeed come to that one day at the rate things are going. Already, in my mind, a dem is synonymous with enemy traitor.
Depending on their crimes thus far a decision may be made to attempt to re-educate those who might be saved like some cult members not too far gone. That twig is being bent more and more. One day it will break. This widening division is already destroying friendships and even families.
We have crazed leftists calling for the impeachment of a good President who has done nothing wrong; only things they personally don’t like. If that same standard were used against them; they would be out of office in a split second with all benefits and pensions forfeit. They would only be allowed to collect Social Security and pay for Medicare like anyone else. It’s how it should be anyway. Being a pol was never meant to be a career. Look how it corrupts (almost) everyone in it for any length of time. The least stained among them appear to be the House Freedom Caucus from my point of view.
Agreed.
CWII PING!
Additional Reading: Matt Bracken's short essay "The CW2 Cube: Mapping the Meta-terrain"
The Finnish Civil War of 1918 lasted but three months, during which around one percent of Finland's population perished. In Finland, however, only around one death in four was what could reasonably be considered a combat casualty, the rest being captured POWs being placed against the nearest woodpile and shot, or being bayonetted by rookies getting their introduction to the realities of their new way of life. Others died in the subzero confines of POW facilities or from lack of any food or medical care.
Civil Wars are most uncivil. And the price goes on for generations, and the pendulum often swings back in return.
Or within one minute of apprehension at a county line roadblock.
It would save time and money but alas; we are a nation of laws so even with obvious traitors the process should be served.
I've always wondered about that. But at what cost?
I've always wondered about that, too. What exactly was this "Union" that was "re-constructed"?
In the aftermath of its display of military might, The Union, in winning the Civil War, clearly accelerated the process of centralizing and consolidating Federal power.
Without the upheaval of the Civil War, I feel like the process of "nurturing" the expanding federal Leviathan would have been somewhat slower...
Only so long as that Constitution from which those just laws is not rescinded, suspended, nor abrogated in any way. Any such dimunition, and the entire constitutional compact is thereby null and void, invalid and without any binding authority whatsoever. Nor can it be restored by simply slapping a Band-Aid over the fatal injury, to be legitimate, the entire ratification process by the states would have to be repeated- and we both know how unlikely that would be to take place.
And until then, the kid gloves are off.
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