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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, some 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.
The left-wing tactics of racist terror are a deliberate effort to divide us.
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.
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.
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.
Beautifully-said Mr. Greenfield on this Memorial Day,
Another brilliant insight, yet demonstrably true,
I’ve been thinking today about the only kid from my neighborhood who was killed in Vietnam. Handsome devil, motorcycle rider. His parents owned a small business in the neighborhood, pillars of the community. They always seemed optimistic before their son was killed. Afterwards there was always a sadness in their faces that I saw, though they tried not to show it. I don’t think they ever recovered, nor did the kid’s brother.
I saw the same thing on the faces of parents whose son died in a motorcycle accident. Did he die for something or nothing? If he died for nothing then that’s a nothing the living made.
Sounds like something hard to recover from.
Yeah, and his brother got heavy into hard drugs, and lived as a recluse. I used to walk by his house frequently and sometimes got glimpses of him.
There can be no respect, brotherhood, peace, accommodation, or compromise between rational selfishness and altruism, it’s either one or the other. Altruism leads to the slavery of socialism, rational selfishness leads to the freedom of capitalism. A mixture leads to civil war.
“From her start, America was torn by the clash of her political system with the altruist morality. Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society. Today, the conflict has reached its ultimate climax; the choice is clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequences of freedom, justice, progress and man’s happiness on earth—or the primordial morality of altruism, with its consequences of slavery, brute force, stagnant terror and sacrificial furnaces.” – Ayn Rand
It’s divided for a reason. Reasons maybe every bit as valid as in 1861 but what’s lacking is the conviction which you won’t find unless you’re on the wrong side.
Thanks Una! Where is Hitchens when we need him?
Memorial day in a nation that has no meaning for the dead except that they died for the cause of a delusion which the living can dissipate if they choose by making America more meaningless in the greater scheme of things.
It was a nice article; I would suggest that people research the history of the Civil War to really understand it. As for myself, the south should have been allowed to form a new country to reflect the wishes of the people in those states. That is what a democracy really means. Government of the People, by the People, and for the People.
Instead, from the beginning it was a government of the politicians, by the elites, and for the special interest groups.
As time went the elites became the lobbyists as well as the elites.
And then we would have been living next to a slave state.
To The March Hare:
I suspect the South as a new nation mostly likely would have freed the slaves over time and sent them back to their own country. The reason being that machines would have replaced the work they did such as the cotton gin. By sending them home, it would prevent racial problems in the future.
As for the new United States, I do not know how they would have handled the slave issue. If they freed the slaves and allowed them to stay, then they would have to deal with the problems as it exist today.
There are other possibilities as well such as a war between the new countries in the future.
I have said this elsewhere before. I cannot remember if I have said it here before too. If so, I apologize. We were one nation for about seventy years or so from about 1775 until the 1850s. I do not think that we have really been one nation since then. Since 1865, we have been one nation first held together by force of arms, and afterwards by a variety of other things one of which was the mutual respect of Americans for each other which the subject article mentions. But I think that we have mostly lost all of that now. (And the man I hold most responsible for the damage that has been done and the loss of national mutual respect by Americans for each other is Barack Obama.) Our country now is at least two peoples (probably more), and I think that political and religious conservatives will NEVER unite to join with the political and religious leftists. I cannot foresee the circumstances that would cause that to happen (except a religious revival of our countrymen–and I can already hear the snickering now from the nonbelievers concerning such a thing). I can only foresee our country’s condition becoming worse and worse with each passing year, and then it will break apart one day over something or another (just what exactly will not really matter). I think this will happen quickly when it finally happens. And I think it will happen soon. And when it happens, I think that it will be a long time, if ever again, we are the fifty United States. This is what I think.
We have to have another civil war before we can call one another brother again as there issue that divides us–freedom vs. slavery is unsettled. And if the left wins, there wont be anyone to call brother because of all the thoroughgoing Bolshevik murderer types who’ll prosecute such a war.