Words sometimes get in the way of what we mean, especially where they're shouted instead of quietly spoken. If people would ratchet down the volume a little, and especially go easy on the hyperbole, I think they'd find themselves closer in agreement than they realize. A case in point is the trend toward reinterpreting history to conform it to the current flavor-of-the-month socio-political thinking. I'll bet you can't find a single "Yankee" on this board who endorses the wholesale "sanitizing" of Civil War symbols in the South, or anywhere for that matter. It's been said that a victorious army is ennobled by the quality of the army they defeated. In other words, Russia's million-man army did not achieve greatness by stomping the Republic of Georgia's puny 30,000-man national guard recently. They came across merely as bullies, not as conquering heroes.
On the other hand, take a look at the staggering effort it took for the North, with all its resources of men and treasure, to defeat the South, an upstart country with a hurriedly patched-together government and a provisional army composed mostly of simple yeoman farmers. It should have been a piece of cake. If it had been, the war would have been a parenthetical sidenote in the history of the U.S. Army. Instead, it took four long years for them to defeat a people who just wouldn't quit, who contested the might of the United States every inch of the way with a ferocity and dedication that stunned everyone. That is the reason why the modern U.S. Army displays battle streamers on its colors, commemorating their hard-won victories on battlefields all over the South. They were earned the hard way. That's why postwar G.A.R. conventions had nothing but praise for the Southern soldier, even if they criticized the cause for which they fought. The Southern soldiers who fought to the bitter end made the Northern victory harder to attain, and therefore more precious.
So, to my way of thinking, to sanitize the history, monuments and traditions of the Southern side of the Civil War only serves only to cheapen the victory that the North achieved. That constitutes an insult to the memory of all those brave boys in blue who had a tiger by the tail for four bloody years. And for that reason, I think, every "Yankee" Civil War student whom I've ever known and talked to is as mad as the rest of us.
THAT, in part, is why I study the Civil War. Not to use as it a rallying cry for a new revolution, but to try to understand why my great-great-grandfathers fought so ferociously.
I was criticized somewhere in this thread for studying the history and wars of other countries. Well, I do so because valuable lessons can be learned from that history. People who expand their reading list will see that this political correctness nonsense is not a home-grown, modern American phenomenon. Throughout history, revolutionary changes have, time after time, resulted in the pulling down of old statues, the destruction of records, the renaming of cities, etc., to erase the peoples' memory of their past. Once the link with the past is broken, "redirection" of the peoples' loyalties and beliefs is made much easier. It's an age-old phenomenon that has now raised its ugly head in the United States -- and throughout Western civilization actually -- but its goal is the tried-and-true same.
Well, George, I'm ranting again, but I hope you can catch my drift.