America's Second Civil War

[Right_in_Virginia]

America's Second Civil War
Townhall, Aug 18, 2017, Pat Buchanan

"They had found a leader, Robert E. Lee -- and what a leader! ... No military leader since Napoleon has aroused such enthusiastic devotion among troops as did Lee when he reviewed them on his horse Traveller."

So wrote Samuel Eliot Morison in his magisterial "The Oxford History of the American People" in 1965.

First in his class at West Point, hero of the Mexican War, Lee was the man to whom President Lincoln turned to lead his army. But when Virginia seceded, Lee would not lift up his sword against his own people, and chose to defend his home state rather than wage war upon her.

This veneration of Lee, wrote Richard Weaver, "appears in the saying attributed to a Confederate soldier, 'The rest of us may have ... descended from monkeys, but it took a God to make Marse Robert.'"

Growing up after World War II, this was accepted history.

Yet, on the militant left today, the name Lee evokes raw hatred and howls of "racist and traitor." A clamor has arisen to have all statues of him and all Confederate soldiers and statesmen pulled down from their pedestals and put in museums or tossed onto trash piles.

What has changed since 1965?

It is not history. There have been no great new discoveries about Lee.

What has changed is America herself. She is not the same country. We have passed through a great social, cultural and moral revolution that has left us irretrievably divided on separate shores.

And the politicians are in panic.

***
"Where does this all end?" President Trump asked.

***
While easy for Republicans to wash their hands of such odious elements as Nazis in Charlottesville, will they take up the defense of the monuments and statues that have defined our history, or capitulate to the icon-smashers?

In this Second American Civil War, whose side are you on?


Read more:  https://townhall.com/columnists/patbuchanan/2017/08/18/americas-second-civil-war-n2370179

[Right_in_Virginia]

[Texas Yellow Rose]

Bookmark

[TomSea]

http://www.gopbriefingroom.com/index.php/topic,277398.0.html

Please merge per whom created earliest thread.

[Hondo69]

When ISIS was smashing ancient artifacts and blowing up temples what did the media say about them?



They called their destruction an attack on all humanity.  The destroyers were called thugs with a neanderthal mentality.  The United Nations condemned their actions as war crimes.

From Newsweek - Ultra-radical Islamist militants in northern Iraq have destroyed a priceless collection of statues and sculptures from the ancient Assyrian era, inflicting what an archaeologist described as incalculable damage to a piece of shared human history.

[Hondo69]

Attitudes toward slavery have shifted throughout America's history.

1780's - The slavery issue threatened to derail the Constitutional Convention.  To avoid an impasse the Founders had no other option than to punt on the issue.

1790's - The invention of the Cotton Engine (gin for short) reduced the manpower required to harvest cotton in the South.  As a result, the South greatly softened their stance on slavery.  Many Southern slave owners either granted their slaves freedom or shipped them North where slaves were increasingly becoming in high demand.

1830's - The great expansion West required manpower to harvest thousands of acres of crops (mostly wheat).  Northern states (territories) that were previously neutral or anti-slavery therefore shifted their stance on the issue and became much more pro-slavery.  During the 1830's various types of reaper machines hit the market thereby reducing the demand for hand labor.  Some of the North's pro-slavery factions began to soften their stance on slavery just as the South had done four decades earlier.

Of course there were pockets of hold-outs that retained their pro-slavery stance in both the North and the South.  These pockets of hold-outs were on a collision course with history.