Would you be offended if traveling through Germany you saw a sign that said "Sons of Nazi War Veterans"?
Today I was driving from Houston to Austin for a nursing school interview, and I saw a billboard on the way that said "Learn about your Texas heritage" with a Confederate flag in the background. And behind the lettering was a picture of the fluttering Stars and Bars ("Confederate flag"). Would something like that offend you? It did for me. Sure, people may have had ancestors in the Confederate Army, but the bottom line is the Confederates stood for treason against the United States and her government. It seems disrespectful for all the U.S. servicemembers today who are fighting for our Union and her citizenry. Also, as The Daily Show recently pointed out here quite well: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-december-9-2010/the-south-s-secession-commemoration The Confederacy was all about keeping slavery. Even the CSA states explicitly mentioned they were seceding because of the slavery issue. What do you think?
Religion & Spirituality - 9 Answers
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1 :
Sounds interesting.
2 :
There's nothing wrong with learning about your heritage as long as it was told truthfully, which is unlikely here. Difference here is...Hitler murdered millions of jews. Nothing to be proud about.
3 :
No, its part of history.
4 :
yeah, it probably would offend me. but if your question is about confederates, then why did you mention nazis?
5 :
You have a simplistic view of the civil war. The war was about states rights and agrarian culture verses urbane. Slavery would have died out after a couple of decades.
6 :
Every culture remembers their war dead whether their cause was just or not. There are many, many war memorials in Germany. None of them have the word Nazi, but that was the ideology they died for. You can respect their sacrifice, or their talent in battle, without agreeing with their cause.
7 :
It doesn't offend me. The Confederacy IS part of Texas' heritage. The American Civil War was more than about slavery, just like most wars. I WISH I WAS IN DIXIE LAND http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzeLoa1gwCU Heritage, not hate.
8 :
You can't even do the Nazi salute without being arrested (literally) so I doubt a sign like that would be up for long... Not that it would bother me
9 :
You're from the North, aren't you? We were traveling with a friend from New York a few years ago, and went to Georgia's Stone Mountain to watch a laser show. The show animated three famed Confederate generals riding into battle triumphantly, then showed the horrors of the war and the destruction, had Lee break his sword, and showed the country reunited. The message was clearly anti-war, but the friend from New York was offended and incensed. But that was because she, like so many people in the north, don't know the complete history of the Civil War. In fact, while it's true that slavery was a central issue (which was clearly wrong), the problem that so many southerners had was that they felt that a distant government without a vested interest in local dealings was trying to tell them how to live. That's the same ideological issue that drove the American Revolution, by the way. Few people in the north know that Confederate General Robert E. Lee wrote that the biggest mistake that the south made was in not freeing the slaves first, and then declaring war. Few people in the north realize that the Emancipation proclamation freed southern slaves, but not northern ones. At the time, there were more slaves in New York city than there were in all of Georgia. (This was an exceptionally astute public relations move by Lincoln, in my opinion.) Few people in the north realize that most of the people who fought for the Confederacy did so without owning a slave. Dr. Bob is a direct descendant of one such person who volunteered to fight and later lost his life in a battle leading up to the defense of Atlanta against Sherman. There is no record that any member of my family ever owned any slave, yet members of my family saw fit to defend what to them was their homeland against an aggressive government. It's not offensive to learn about that valor. The billboard you saw wasn't calling for the re-establishment of slavery; it was an appeal to learn about the history and the heritage of those who saw fit to fight and die in defense of something that had meaning to them. I find reprehensible the issue of slavery and think it that Lee was right. I can't take credit for any choice my ancestors made. But I am quite appreciative of the contribution to freedom that both they and members of the Union army made as they served their country valiantly. So the answer to your question? No, while I think that the Nazi movement was even more reprehensible than the southern Confederacy, I would not be offended to know that someone advocated learning about the heritage of people who fought for the German army. (Interesting note: I stopped working on a series of notes on psychological research on prejudice in order to answer this question, seriously.)
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