Posted on 01/05/2003 10:03:12 PM PST by kattracks
Almost all who visit Gettysburg, best preserved of all the Civil War battlefields, find it a deeply moving experience. This is truly hallowed ground. Here, tens of thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers fought the decisive battle of America's bloodiest war.
From the first clash of the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia, to Lee's attempt turn the Union flank at Little Round Top on the second day, to Pickett's Charge against the Union center on Seminary Ridge on the third, to Lee's bleeding retreat back over the Potomac as a frustrated Abraham Lincoln wondered why his newest commander, George Meade, had not finished Lee's army with its back to the swollen river -- it is an incredible story, told wonderfully well by the guides at Gettysburg Battlefield.
Now the story of the heroes in Blue and Grey is to be replaced with propaganda. The 1.8 million annual visitors to Gettysburg are to be indoctrinated in the politically correct history of the war.
"Gettysburg to Tell Story of Slavery During War," was the headline The Washington Times put on its story about how the National Park Service "has embarked on an effort to change its interpretive materials at major Civil War battlefields to get rid of a Southern bias and emphasize the horrors of slavery." A $95 million visitors center and museum is going up to recast the battle in a new light.
"For the past 100 years," says Gettysburg Park Superintendent John Latschar, "we've been presenting this battlefield as the high watermark of the Confederacy and focusing on the personal valor of the soldiers who fought here. ... We want to get away from the traditional descriptions of who shot whom, where and into discussions of why they were shooting one another."
Why the change? Unhappy that so many visitors to Gettysburg are white males, and so few are African-Americans, Latschar called in three historians to study how the Park Service was presenting the battle. The three wise men decided that the interpretive programs at Gettysburg had a "pervasive Southern sympathy." (How one can hear of 15,000 men and boys walking across a mile of open field into cannon and musket fire, in the name of God, country and Gen. Lee, without being put in awe and admiration, escapes me.)
Latschar then visited the Holocaust Museum and was inspired: "Our current museum (at Gettysburg) is absolutely abysmal. It tells no story. It's a curator's museum with no rhyme or reason."
But one visits the Holocaust Museum to learn about the fate of the Jews under Hitler. One does not go there to learn about Dunkirk or D-Day. And Americans who cherish the battlefields of the Civil War -- Vicksburg, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Antietam, Manassas -- do not go there to be instructed on the evils of the Confederacy. Moreover, to convert every battlefield into an endless seminar on the evils of slavery and the South is a fine way to turn these sites of national unity into cauldrons of national division.
President Bush should stop the politicization of Gettysburg. To let it happen would be an abuse of office. It would be to permit ground made sacred by the blood of soldiers to be exploited by ideologues to reopen old wounds. The old battlefields will become new battlegrounds of the culture war. Does America really need that?
There are places to argue the great issues of 1861. Did the South have a right to secede? Was the cause of the war slavery, or secession, or Lincoln's refusal to let the South go in peace? Or was it tariffs, or a desire of the South to separate from a North with which it has less and less in common? Did Lincoln fight the Civil War to free the slaves? Or only to restore the Union?
The forums in which to debate these questions are books, editorials, classrooms, columns, seminars, TV shows. But for the Park Service to impose its orthodoxy on these questions and pervert battlefields to indoctrinate visitors in the party line is to dishonor these hallowed grounds.
That slavery is wrong no one today disbelieves. But when the South fired on Fort Sumter, there were eight slave states in the Union, only seven in the Confederacy. It was Lincoln's call to arms to invade the South that pushed North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee and Arkansas out of the Union.
In waging cultural war to abolish the West, Gramsci and his Marxist comrades dictated that all social institutions should be captured to advance the revolution -- from children's classrooms to college seminars. Now, Civil War battlefields are to become indoctrination centers of Political Correctness, unless we stop it.
©2002 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
As it stands right now, the material available to tourists at Gettysburg does not valorize the South - it is all about the fighting men, the generals and the units of both sides.
Gettysburg does not debate the causes of the war. It does not embrace the Confederate myth of a noble struggle for states' rights nor does it peddle the Union myth of a noble struggle against slavery.
What it does is document WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED ON JULY 2ND, 3RD AND 4TH 1863. Which units, led by which officers fought where and when in the battle. That's all. This business about the "High Watermark of the Confederacy" is not Southern propaganda. It is merely an observation that at the moment of Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg the South was at the absolute height of its military fortunes in the War and that after Pickett's Charge the military fortunes of the South began to decline. That's an objective historical fact, not a statement of partisanship.
Let the causes of the war be debated in the classroom. Let the actual concrete events of the battle be described as accurately as possible on the battlefield.
It may also be naive to think that the staff at the park can entirely avoid the question of why the war started. People who don't know that will come and ask. The staff will answer that, either on the spot, or through an existing exhibit. And people will disagree about what that exhibit says.
I don't think Gettysburg needs a greater emphasis on slavery than it already has. And I'd hate to go to every park and get a lecture on race, class, gender and ethnicity. That kills off the real interest of history. But given developments after Reconstruction, the question isn't as simple as Pat wants to make it.
All this article and subsequent responses from some on here shows, is that the Yankee version of history still sucks as bad as it did years ago. It definitely proves that nobody knows about how the US government was set up, nor do they care to dig into history enough to find out. It can be used as a measuring stick or thermometer to find out how lukewarm most Americans are about finding out what actually happened. Most of these clowns think that once the States ratified the Constitution they were bound to it forever and signed away all their right of self-determination to the Federal Government. I'll bet Jefferson and Madison are spinning in their graves! If Americans would bother to research it, they would find out that it was quite the opposite. But then that would show that their "Saint" Lincoln had feet of clay wouldn't it?!
In a way I am glad there are still many ignorant Yankees out there, it makes me that much more proud of my Southern ancestry standing up to government tyranny.
Pat's right about some things.
He said the park officials don't like them to get into those discussions with guests, but I pressed him on issues like slavery, secession, etc. and he opened up.
They can crank out all the propaganda they like, but there are still individual historians who seek out the truth!
Translation: It doesn't fit the liberal agenda.
That sort of museum (and the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond is a good example) basically gives you "just the facts, ma'am", with lots of artifacts from the period with informative placards on their origin, provenance, etc., biographies of the participants, and a factual description of whatever historical events took place there.
Then YOU do the interpretation, if any is desired.
Of course, this means that you have to be SOMEWHAT prepared when you show up - i.e. have a basic knowledge of the history of whatever you're going to see.
Where modern museums get into trouble is by spoon-feeding "interpretations" to slack-jawed rabble who haven't bothered to learn the first thing about what they came to see. Problem is, "interpretations" are wholly a matter of personal opinion and prejudice, and like certain portions of one's anatomy, everybody's got one. I believe museums should stay the heck out of the personal interpretation business, and leave that for the historians to fight over in their learned journals, where nobody has to pay any attention if they don't care to.
He's a Klintoon appointee....there's the beginning of your problem. If he's a political appointee, he needs to go out on his derriere, as you suggest. If he has Civil Service protection, then his next pulpit needs to be Denali National Park.
Please support with evidence, meaning quotes or documentary evidence, your contention that Pat Buchanan is either a sympathizer with, or a supporter of, the Ku Klux Klan.
I assume you didn't mean to imply that he is actually a Klan leader. That will get you sued.
Waiting.
That, or removal of all the Confederate monuments, and placing a sign at the entrance, saying something like "Southerners: You Are Not Welcome Here."
What a nutbag Pat has proven to be.
But hey, now the <1% people have Tancredo.
Pitiful.
Exactly. Do the armchair generaling in armchairs, the pontificating in a pulpit, and leave the battlefields to people who want to go there and spend some time propitiating our ghosts and learning from their loss.
Lightning streaking across the sky bump.
BTTT.
Klintoon. See my #32.
You mean a museum of the 20th-century Holocaust, on the Gettysburg battlefield? Surely not: forum non conveniens. Or are you speaking metaphorically?
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