Archives For November 30, 1999
The POWs were denied food and medical treatment. The wounded were jeered at. To lower officer morale, the Nazis told British officers that they would lose their rank and be sent to the salt mines to work. They were forced to drink ditch water and eat putrid food.
“All these guys were abandoning everything they had, any worldly possessions, to get on the boat and get out, because they didn’t want the boats to get weighed down with their cameras,” says Delaney. “You’d expect it’d be the Army who would save the civilians, in this case it was the civilians who saved the Army.”
Holmes had definite moral views, but his sensibilities about war required magnanimity toward enemies, which included admiration for their bravery, the purity of their motives, and their willingness to sacrifice themselves for a cause. There was, moreover, a brotherhood of sorts among veterans, for they shared a common experience of walking through the valley of the shadow of death.
The great age of Civil War commemoration came as men like Holmes aged. In that time, Romanticism made lost causes into things of beauty. Isaiah Berlin has this to say about the Romantics: “You would have found that they believed that minorities were more holy than majorities, that failure was nobler than success, which had something shoddy and something vulgar about it.” We look upon the Southern cause with moral horror, for its purpose was to preserve slavery. A Romantic can be anti-slavery, but to him the “lost cause” is sublime, tragic, and heartbreaking, which is why the Alamo was not memorialized as a shameful defeat. We fail in our responsibility to history when we do not permit ourselves to see Civil War memorials from a Romantic point of view, and when we fail to recognize the phrase “lost cause” as a shorthand for a morally complex, tragic understanding of the South’s defeat.
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2017/07/romanticism-of-the-lost-cause
Cette proverbiale anguille sous roche fomentee par Pierre-Elliot Trudeau n’aurait-elle pas bafoue une des sacro-saintes valeurs canadiennes dont se targue Patrimoine canadien, la democratie!
Toute cette charade trudeauesque ne pourrait-elle pas etre consideree sui generis, a la fois comme entant anticonstitionnelle et anticanadienne, grace a cette meme Charte?
It is a growing trend that new equates to good and old to bad in today’s society. I witness this attitude a lot in historical discussions where people carry the notion that present and future attitudes on culture and society are simply better due to their newness. Don’t give up the classics due to their age.
https://aleteia.org/blogs/catholic-thinking/on-the-tiresome-notion-of-progress/
Acerbity [əˈsɜːbɪtɪ] 