Posted on 06/11/2020 8:18:23 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
This week, if there had been no pandemic, I would have been on leave, heading for Gettysburg in Pennsylvania - the site of the famous battle in the American Civil War of 1861-65.
For some reason this conflict captured my interest as a child. I've always wanted to attend the Gettysburg College Civil War Institute's annual summer school. Sadly, that has been cancelled this year because of Covid-19.
On frequent trips to the States, I used to buy a historical magazine about the war whose masthead slogan proclaimed: "For those who still hear the sound of the guns."
This reference to the echoes of the conflict through the ages is, I think, why the war still fascinates me today.
As the Black Lives Matter movement demonstrates, for many Americans there is still unfinished business from the Civil War years.
The benefits of black emancipation were partial and never fully realised. Oppression, disproportionate poverty and racism continue to this day, more than 150 years after the conflict ended.
Other Americans who still hold to the myths about "the old South" take a very different view. And then there are the hardcore right-wing and racist militias, who freely use the symbols of the Confederacy to symbolise their own cause.
Indeed, the Civil War is rarely out of the news, be it for controversy over statues commemorating Confederate leaders or famous generals or, most recently, for the long-standing naming of a small number of US military bases after rebel commanders.
In the wake of George Floyd's killing and the wave of protests that have followed, the questioning of the visibility of the Confederate's public heritage has reached a new intensity.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
I’m a Yankee who was fortunate enough to live most of my adult life immersed in the history of this great Commonwealth of Virginia.
I have donated thousands to preserve battlefields all over the country.
I take this tyrannical Taliban-like history erasing personally.
These reruns bore me. “New intensity”... it’s the same garbage from 2015 and 2017.
I was told by someone years ago who traveled to Europe extensively that if I wanted to see racism, go to Europe.
So do I.
Oh, what BS!
Where? All about 10 people.
I wonder why the Left makes such a boogeyman about so-called Right-wing militias while actual live, real-time Left wing Antifa militias are out and about making actual autonomous zones in the heart of our cities.
Could the BBC be any less lame?
er... MORE lame.
And half of them are FBI informants.
You mean like England’s “golden past?”
Shall we get rid of the pictures of dead presidents on our currency too? Actually the currency itself is a symbol of discrimination. Why not just rid of wealth altogether? Let’s just get rid of civilization.
For over 150 years no one had a problem with battle flags, statues or military base names, until someone decided to make it a problem.
Tell me Brit, all about modern American oppression of blacks!
No. Go to Japan.
“dark past”
Nope. No bias there.
This is ALL coming right out of our universities, if we don’t start taking back our education systems this will get worse we need to defund these universities PERIOD!!
They were already supposed to supplant Jackson with PC Harriet Tubman this very year.
You guys keep blaming colleges.
It is MUCH worse than that, it is insidiously long through all forced lower education. Never mind the parents who have these self-righteous views.
IMO, these Leftists think they are striking at the heart of President Trump’s base destroying statues, history and names in the South. They are making stereotypical assumptions/generalizations about HIS base. They do not seem to realize just how many of us there are and where we are.
Sure hope people have some of the history hidden somewhere.
They are acting like pre WWII Germany.
Britain’s “dark past” was 20x worse. Ask a few ghosts of headless rulers.
A,erica’s? How about democrats?
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