A history lesson

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I seriously doubt that there are any statues of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi let alone streets or providences named after him in Iran. He was the last Shah of Iran, ruling that country from Sept. 16, 1941, until his overthrow in the Iranian Revolution on Feb. 11, 1979.

 In 1703 Tsar Peter the Great renamed a tiny village in Russian and moved the government and the royal family there in 1710. He named it St. Petersburg, a roundabout way to name the city after himself.

After Vladimir Lenin died in 1924, St. Petersburg — also known as Petrograd, meaning city of Peter in Russian — became Leningrad to honor the leader of the Communist revolution.

Throughout all of history, the victors in any war set the rules and have historically eliminated the names, statues and all references to the vanquished.

More than that, the victor often eliminates their opponents,  simply murdering anyone who disagrees with them, as in Russia —up to 20 million —and in China. Mao is  estimated to have killed  65 million Chinese to create a new “socialist” China, according to the authoritative “Black Book of Communism.”

Have you ever wondered then, why are there statues of generals and other leaders who fought against the United States during the Civil War? 

Why are Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee carved on a mountain in Georgia outside of Atlanta?

If you think about it, this doesn’t seem logical. 

Why wasn’t Davis along with Lee and the other Confederate Generals shot immediately after the war for treason?

Lee who owned slaves before the war — because his wife inherited them — released them before the Emancipation Proclamation. He let his thoughts be known about slavery in a letter to the New York Times in 1858, three years before the war began. He wrote, “There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil.”

Not long after the war between the states ended, Lee became president of Washington College (later Washington and Lee University) in Lexington, Va. In that position, he supported reconciliation between the north and south.

The truth is, these self-righteous individuals who think they are better than everyone else, had they grown up in the south before the civil war, would most likely have fought for the Confederacy.

After five years of war and the deaths of 750,000 in the United States, President Abraham Lincoln did not want mass imprisonments or executions as so many have done before and since. He did not ask for war crime tribunals to punish everyone in the Confederacy. He did not want to see the defeated enemies of the United States chained and paraded through streets in the north.

According to historians, Lincoln’s priority —shared by Grant — was “to bind up the nation’s wounds” and unite the country together again as a functioning democracy under the Constitution. Extended retribution against the former Confederates would only slow down that process. 

It may, or may not, have been a mistake to allow statues of Lee, and the naming of counties and army bases after Confederate soldiers.

Lee himself objected to the idea of raising Confederate monuments, writing in 1869 that it would be wiser “not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife.”

The question is why are we fighting over them now. It seems to me that Lincoln and Grant had more reason to hate and despise the south than anyone has today. They chose reconciliation over vengeance. Many people today are full of hate. Hate for the United States of America and everything it stands for. Today they want to tear this country apart. There is no question what side of the political aisle this hate is coming from — the left.

Last week vandals cut down a 9/11 Memorial flagpole in a New York village.

This Tweet says it all, “The destroy everything & hate everyone culture has struck again last night as the Washingtonville NY Orange County 9/11 Memorial park was vandalized & AMERICAN FLAG CUT DOWN. These individuals obviously don’t know what sacrificing everything to save a fellow human being really is.”

This country is becoming divided between those who hate and those who love the USA. 

What side are you on?