Reply to Arlington has asked Virginia to rename Jefferson Davis Highway

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
F U PC people.  THis is another reason why I'm voting for Trump.  
Recognition of history is more important to me than you bigoted SOB's that only want to live PC[/quote]

Yes, because I'm sure Germany has so many roads and buildings named after Hitler or other Third Reich top officials that still remain today.

[b]Jefferson Davis = treason.  Pure and simple.[/b]
[/quote]

Not treason to his state. I'm not sure why you assume that the federal association should be thought to automatically take president over the state association. If a Frenchman today participated in a movement to have France secede from the European Union, would you call him a "traitor" to the E.U.? That's what the United states was like in 1860. It wasn't hat it is today. One's state citizenship was far more important in relation to federal citizenship. A Virginian who sided with the union would have been as much or more of a "traitor."[/quote]

WTF???  It's 2015 - the civil war ended over 150 years ago.  And, the STATE of Virginia is PART OF THE COUNTRY OF THE U.S.A.!!!  The E.U. is a mechanism of common commerce in Europe; if any country wants to go back to carrying it's own currency for any reason it does not mean they are enemies of those countries that remain in it.
[/quote]

I think you missed the point.  People in 1860 didn't view the relationship between the states and the federal government in the same way that people do now.  I am fine with judging everyone by an objective standard, but you also need to appreciate the cultural context in which people made their decisions as you make those judgements.  People back in 1860 -- all people, northerners and southerners alike, felt more loyalty to their state than to the USA writ large.  For me, the "slavery is an absolute moral evil" criticism is a lot stronger than the "treason" one.  Empires rise and fall, and no state or political subdivision deserves absolute loyalty.  Most confederates fought because they were being loyal to their state -- they viewed themselves as a new version of the revolutionaries that fought King George.  Of course, on an elite level, I absolutely agree that the war was very much about slavery and rich plantation owners trying to perpetuate their immoral way of life.  But the average soldier was not of that class, did not own slaves or benefit in any material way from slavery and viewed themselves as defending their homeland against an outside force.  I can both appreciate their bravery and sacrifice of those men while recognizing that the war was a tragedy, slavery was immoral and that the ride side won in the end.  I don't think we should be creating any new confederate monuments, but I don't feel the need to needlessly antagonize people in order to score some scorched-earth political victory.

By the way, it's not clear that life for, say, coal miners and steel mill workers in the North was significantly better than that of that of slaves or sharecroppers in the South (see, e.g., Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" or, on a similar vein in another country, anything by Emile Zola).  I'd rather work in a coal mine in Ohio than as a slave in a plantation in Virginia, but I wouldn't like either life.  I am fine recognizing the ills of the robber barons without putting the institutions they founded in the crosshairs (e.g., Carnegie Mellon, Rockefeller University, etc...).  [/quote]

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