- Almost all who visit Gettysburg, best preserved of all
the Civil War battlefields, find it a deeply moving experience. This is
truly hallowed ground. Here, tens of thousands of Union and Confederate
soldiers fought the decisive battle of America's bloodiest war.
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- From the first clash of the Army of the Potomac and the
Army of Northern Virginia, to Lee's attempt turn the Union flank at Little
Round Top on the second day, to Pickett's Charge against the Union center
on Seminary Ridge on the third, to Lee's bleeding retreat back over the
Potomac as a frustrated Abraham Lincoln wondered why his newest commander,
George Meade, had not finished Lee's army with its back to the swollen
river -- it is an incredible story, told wonderfully well by the guides
at Gettysburg Battlefield.
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- Now the story of the heroes in Blue and Grey is to be
replaced with propaganda. The 1.8 million annual visitors to Gettysburg
are to be indoctrinated in the politically correct history of the war.
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- "Gettysburg to Tell Story of Slavery During War,"
was the headline The Washington Times put on its story about how the National
Park Service "has embarked on an effort to change its interpretive
materials at major Civil War battlefields to get rid of a Southern bias
and emphasize the horrors of slavery." A $95 million visitors center
and museum is going up to recast the battle in a new light.
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- "For the past 100 years," says Gettysburg Park
Superintendent John Latschar, "we've been presenting this battlefield
as the high watermark of the Confederacy and focusing on the personal valor
of the soldiers who fought here. ... We want to get away from the traditional
descriptions of who shot whom, where and into discussions of why they were
shooting one another."
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- Why the change? Unhappy that so many visitors to Gettysburg
are white males, and so few are African-Americans, Latschar called in three
historians to study how the Park Service was presenting the battle. The
three wise men decided that the interpretive programs at Gettysburg had
a "pervasive Southern sympathy." (How one can hear of 15,000
men and boys walking across a mile of open field into cannon and musket
fire, in the name of God, country and Gen. Lee, without being put in awe
and admiration, escapes me.)
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- Latschar then visited the Holocaust Museum and was inspired:
"Our current museum (at Gettysburg) is absolutely abysmal. It tells
no story. It's a curator's museum with no rhyme or reason."
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- But one visits the Holocaust Museum to learn about the
fate of the Jews under Hitler. One does not go there to learn about Dunkirk
or D-Day. And Americans who cherish the battlefields of the Civil War --
Vicksburg, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Antietam, Manassas -- do not go
there to be instructed on the evils of the Confederacy. Moreover, to convert
every battlefield into an endless seminar on the evils of slavery and the
South is a fine way to turn these sites of national unity into cauldrons
of national division.
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- President Bush should stop the politicization of Gettysburg.
To let it happen would be an abuse of office. It would be to permit ground
made sacred by the blood of soldiers to be exploited by ideologues to reopen
old wounds. The old battlefields will become new battlegrounds of the culture
war. Does America really need that?
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- There are places to argue the great issues of 1861. Did
the South have a right to secede? Was the cause of the war slavery, or
secession, or Lincoln's refusal to let the South go in peace? Or was it
tariffs, or a desire of the South to separate from a North with which it
has less and less in common? Did Lincoln fight the Civil War to free the
slaves? Or only to restore the Union?
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- The forums in which to debate these questions are books,
editorials, classrooms, columns, seminars, TV shows. But for the Park Service
to impose its orthodoxy on these questions and pervert battlefields to
indoctrinate visitors in the party line is to dishonor these hallowed grounds.
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- That slavery is wrong no one today disbelieves. But when
the South fired on Fort Sumter, there were eight slave states in the Union,
only seven in the Confederacy. It was Lincoln's call to arms to invade
the South that pushed North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee and Arkansas
out of the Union.
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- In waging cultural war to abolish the West, Gramsci and
his Marxist comrades dictated that all social institutions should be captured
to advance the revolution -- from children's classrooms to college seminars.
Now, Civil War battlefields are to become indoctrination centers of Political
Correctness, unless we stop it.
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- -- Pat Buchanan has been a senior adviser to three presidents,
twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, and the presidential
nominee of the Reform Party in 2000.
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- © 2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
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- Comment
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- From Richard Storey
- 1-6-3
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- Dear Jeff,
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- "Now, Civil War battlefields are to become indoctrination
centers of Political Correctness, unless we stop it." Buchannan is
right. And in response to the Cultural Marxism of the Park Service and
its propaganda campaign against the South, I will respond with my feet.
I will not attend any park or monument that's been propagandised by these
Marxists. Perhaps, if enough people did likewise, they might get the message.
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