Memorial Day in a Divided Nation: An important lesson for the left, by Daniel Greenfield. The American version of ANZAC Day.
Memorial Day has a powerful meaning that we have forgotten. It was the holiday that reunited our country after the Civil War. It began when Americans, from the North and the South, entered the cold gray stone fields of the dead, and decorated the graves of the fallen from the Grand Army of the Republic and the Confederacy with freshly cut flowers.
They followed no presidential order. They acted under no regulation. Instead the mothers and wives of men who would return home no more brought flowers to the graves of their fallen sons and husbands, and to the resting places of the young American men who might have slain them, who had been the enemy, but who still deserved honor and respect. …
Memorial Day’s origins offer us one answer. Mutual respect.
Certain disagreements are intellectually, culturally and emotionally irreconcilable. The Civil War emerged out of such a conflict. The civil war we are sliding toward now is being born out of another. But mutual respect can make coexistence possible even in the face of fundamental divisions. And where there is no such respect, even minor differences become impossible to reconcile except through force.
The left expresses its radicalism as violent contempt. If it wants to understand where Trump came from, it need look no further than the contempt that its political and cultural leaders express for opponents. Its conviction of moral superiority makes it impossible for it to accept President Trump or his voters, and leads it to assault Trump supporters, vandalize memorials, attack the Constitution and openly plot subversion and secession. …
The left is convinced of its utter moral superiority and the total moral inferiority of its enemies. Its utopian projects are pursued with ruthless violence and secured with unlimited power. Its enemies exist only to be brutally ground under. Those who are not of the left have no right to exist upon the earth. They are accorded no rights, no freedoms and no respect. Only a choice between slavery and death.
That is why the left wins its victories and then covers the land in blood. Its societies collapse into misery and repression. This was where the American Revolution differed so fundamentally from the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. We celebrate that difference on the Fourth of July. It is also where the Civil War differed from so many other civil wars not in its battles, but in its aftermath. That is the great moral victory that we remember on Memorial Day. A mutual victory of national reunification.
hat-tip Scott of the Pacific
