To those who by persistence in doing good seek glory, honor and immortality, he will give eternal life. -- Rom. 2:7(NIV)
Wednesday, August 16, 2017
Renaming American military bases
The Army Times recently asked readers if the Army should rename military posts named after Confederates. From the comments I read, most people felt we should keep them the same -- that we shouldn't try to change history. [Source]
But I think we should rename them. This does not destroy or erase history, as if history could ever be destroyed or erased. Rather, this is a question of what we value in our history.
Three reasons we should change the name:
We shouldn't honor those fought in defense of slavery (Why not? Please see comment below)
It's unconscionable that we should expect black Americans to serve in places that honor those who fought to preserve their enslavement, and
It's offensive to those like me -- a person who continues to fight in defense of the Constitution -- to see a place that honors those who turned their backs on it.
It's not like we have a shortage of heroes from that era. If you want to remember the Civil War, why not choose from the more than 360,000 loyal soldiers who died during that period? [Source] Or one of the 1,500 Medal of Honor awardees? (Perhaps Or a few of the 15 MoH recipients from the U.S. Colored Troops?) [Source] Naming a U.S. military base after someone who fought against the U.S. military is equivalent to spitting in the faces of a veteran's surviving family.
Take, for example, Fort Hood, named after John Bell Hood, a Civil War general who commanded the Texas Brigade. In 1942, when World War II required new military bases, Texas was selected for one of the new training areas, and the state apparently picked Hood as a fitting person to honor.
Note that this was during segregation -- before the Army integrated races (1947), and way before the Civil Rights era (1960s) -- so the federal government was trying to be sensitive to the presence of federal troops in Southern states.
But with the developments we've seen in the past 70 years, these sensitivities are anachronisms, and we need to question the values that led to those decisions.
So who would be a fitting person Civil War veteran to replace Hood? Personally, I think General George Thomas, the Union General who defeated him in battle at Chickamauga and Nashville. The battle at Nashville was one of the few -- if not only -- times a Confederate Army had been truly crushed in the field. Hood retreated from the battle to Mississippi and ended up resigning his commission. (Hardly the stuff of epitaphs.)
Thomas was a Virginian who remained loyal to the Union, and was disowned by his family for that loyalty. Sure, there are others who've made greater sacrifices, but I think "Fort Thomas" would be a fitting, symbolic rebuke to what we've valued to up to this point.
Why not? Because Confederate soldiers fought on behalf of a system that is the diametric opposite of the Declaration of Independence notion that "all men are created equal."
While I'll grant that -- maybe -- there were people who fought for other reasons, protection and extension of slavery was the primary founding principle of the Confederacy.
As Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens put it in his "Cornerstone Speech,"
"Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."
The Confederacy wasn't just some "alternate government." It was founded on the principle that white people were superior to all other races, and that racial subjugation was a "natural and normal condition."
Think about all the concepts we've developed in the past 100 years that this defies -- self-determination, women's right to vote, desegregated schools, an integrated Army, equal opportunity, the United Nations, etc. All of these things are predicated on the idea that there is no class or group of people that's better than another.
So while Confederate soldiers might not have been fighting to own slaves, per se, they *were* consciously defending others' right to treat people as property, and to me that's unacceptable. If I said -today- what those people (the ones we've named military bases in the South after) said back -then-, I'd be fired, and rightly so.
Take, for example, Fort Hood, named after John Bell Hood, a Civil War general who commanded the Texas Brigade. In 1942, when World War II required new military bases, Texas was selected for one of the new training areas, and the state apparently picked Hood as a fitting person to honor.
Note that this was during segregation -- before the Army integrated races (1947), and way before the Civil Rights era (1960s) -- so the federal government was trying to be sensitive to the presence of federal troops in Southern states.
But with the developments we've seen in the past 70 years, these sensitivities are anachronisms, and we need to question the values that led to those decisions.
So who would be a fitting person Civil War veteran to replace Hood? Personally, I think General George Thomas, the Union General who defeated him in battle at Chickamauga and Nashville. The battle at Nashville was one of the few -- if not only -- times a Confederate Army had been truly crushed in the field. Hood retreated from the battle to Mississippi and ended up resigning his commission. (Hardly the stuff of epitaphs.)
Thomas was a Virginian who remained loyal to the Union, and was disowned by his family for that loyalty. Sure, there are others who've made greater sacrifices, but I think "Fort Thomas" would be a fitting, symbolic rebuke to what we've valued to up to this point.
1 comment:
Why not? Because Confederate soldiers fought on behalf of a system that is the diametric opposite of the Declaration of Independence notion that "all men are created equal."
While I'll grant that -- maybe -- there were people who fought for other reasons, protection and extension of slavery was the primary founding principle of the Confederacy.
As Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens put it in his "Cornerstone Speech,"
"Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."
The Confederacy wasn't just some "alternate government." It was founded on the principle that white people were superior to all other races, and that racial subjugation was a "natural and normal condition."
Think about all the concepts we've developed in the past 100 years that this defies -- self-determination, women's right to vote, desegregated schools, an integrated Army, equal opportunity, the United Nations, etc. All of these things are predicated on the idea that there is no class or group of people that's better than another.
So while Confederate soldiers might not have been fighting to own slaves, per se, they *were* consciously defending others' right to treat people as property, and to me that's unacceptable. If I said -today- what those people (the ones we've named military bases in the South after) said back -then-, I'd be fired, and rightly so.
They don't deserve the honor we've given them.
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