ZGram - 1/7/2003 - "America to get a dose of 'Holocaust' manipulation?"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

1/7/2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

"History" in the making!

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Gettysburg About To  Become Politically-Correct Commentary by Pat Buchanan
1-5-3

           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.

           From the first clash of the Army of the Potomac and the Army of
Northern Virginia, to Lee's attempt to 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.

           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.

           "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.

           "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."

           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.)

           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."

           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.

           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?

           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?

           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.

           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.

           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.