“…if a proud German were to say the same thing about the Nazi flag…”
This is a poor example. Many men in the German regular army served honorably and committed no atrocities or war crimes. Yes, they served a dishonorable war, but by and large it was the SS that did the despicable deeds and most directly served the despicable purposes. Hitler and Himmler recognized that the regular army could not on the whole be made to commit the murderous massacres of civilians they demanded; they needed the SS fanatics. (For the most part; there are always exceptions.)
Yet it still is frowned upon in Germany to speak of the honorable serviceman. It causes dissension for any Germans to publicly recognize honorable service or suggest that there are degrees of guilt. The accusation must be maintained that all of Germany must carry collective guilt for all of the atrocities forever. The German family cannot recognize a grandfather’s honorable service. This is highly destructive and simply wrongheaded.
The American Civil War is similarly complex. It was fought between recent countrymen, sometimes between brothers. There are example of sons killing their fathers in battle, or fathers killing their sons, unknowingly in the heat of battle. Secession was not a universal cause in the South. Atrocities were committed by civilians of differing loyalties in many Southern villages.
The Confederates in the Sunken Road at Fredricksburg openly wept as they slaughtered the Union soldiers vainly assaulting their strong position. General Lee was an honorable man, a union officer before Virginia seceded, whose devotion to the Union was second only to his devotion to his State of Virginia. He fought the war as honorably as he could, motivated not to preserve slavery but to repulse the North’s invasion of Virginia.
The Civil War was complex and tragic, and for the good of us all, must be understood and preserved. Those tearing down statues and digging up caskets to move elsewhere, those leveling denigrating accusations at anyone daring to speak of those complexities and tragedies, are doing no service to this country. They have enlisted in the service of those seeking to divide us and to erase our history and heritage from our collective memories, the better to manipulate us as they wish. If our past is reduced to cartoonish cruelties and wickedness and nothing else, then we have no identity worth preserving.
Long after the war ended, the aging veterans of Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg met for a reenactment of that event. As the Confederate veterans struggled forward over that open ground upon which so many of their own had fallen, the union veterans were overcome with emotion and rushed forward to embrace their once and still countrymen on that field of battle.
President Woodrow Wilson summarized the spirit: “We have found one another again as brothers and comrades in arms, enemies no longer, generous friends rather, our battles long past, the quarrel forgotten — except that we shall not forget the splendid valor." That is the spirit in which we should remember the splendid valor of those who fought that war.
