LogFAQs > #884890581

Far-Queue posted...

And your point on Native American monuments is just silly.

To be fair, plenty of them fought against their "their" country (and/or vice-versa) because many of them never considered it THEIR country in the first place (and/or vice-versa).

We could probably lump the Mormons in there too, considering most of their early leadership were blatant separatists and we had to force them into the US more or less at gunpoint, and the only reason it didn't turn into a major war was because they were fully aware of how outnumbered and outgunned they were (which still never stopped minor guerilla actions or more passive resistance).

People wanted to build a massive monument to Crazy Horse in South Dakota to act as a "counterpoint" Mount Rushmore, and he's got multiple smaller monuments and honors named after him (and he even had a commemorative US stamp at one point), in spite of the fact that he was responsible either directly or indirectly for the deaths of hundreds of US soldiers.

Regardless of whether or not you agree that the Confederates had the "right" to secede in the first place, whether the secession itself was a valid act or if on a technical level the South never actually stopped being part of the US and was merely "occupied" by "hostile insurgents", or what you might think about the underlying motives of the "rebels", the fact remains that very few of them would have considered themselves rebels or traitors at all, and if the South had won the war, every single one of those political and military figures would be viewed VERY differently through the lens of history.

History is subjective as hell. And even people who UNDERSTAND that to some degree rarely ever really think about just how subjective it is. Most of our history prior to the last few hundred years is very much written by "the winners", and even history that is more seemingly "politically neutral" is still being written by people with axes to grind and agendas to push (and unconscious biases of their own coloring their perception).

And perception absolutely tends to change over time. How Americans see a lot of political, social, and historical issues today isn't how they were perceived a hundred years ago, and likely won't be the same way they're perceived 100 years from now. Humans in general tend to be ethnocentric as fuck so we're programmed to always think of our own perception of things as the "right" one, but that's never been how the world really works.


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