Holding grudges for thousands of years is just so strange to me.

When I hear about the centuries old battles between Sunnis and Shiites and warring factions, I am always glad I don't live there. If I did, I imagine that I'd leave on the next bus, but maybe I wouldn't. Maybe I'd be just as swept up in these ancient grudges as they are, and stick around and fight the perceived enemy.

We often marvel at how long these grudges have gone on, but we are engaged in archaic grudges ourselves, many of us. Mel Gibson bears a grudge about something that happened two thousand years ago. To this day many Christians are still mad about the Jews betraying Christ, and to this day many in the south are angry about the north in the U.S.

It's natural to hold a grudge, especially when you've been terribly wronged. I can understand black or native Americans holding a grudge, after all, look what they suffered through. But when you are mad about some religious slight that you had absolutely nothing to do with thousands of years ago, and you still haven't resolved it or dealt with it, and you kill a hundred people a day over it, maybe you need to call it something other than a grudge.

All this is horrible enough without our men and resources being utterly wasted on these ancient, ugly grudges, dying because the Sunnis and the Shias can't work it out.

In my tiny brain I see that one Iraqi sect dominated and oppressed another sect and now the put upon sect is fighting back in revenge attacks or something like that. And my tiny brain understands that each of these murders requires reciprocation and retaliation involving horrific torture. Do I have it right so far?

I don't want my sons to go over there and get involved in these horrible old battles that they had nothing to do with, so many thousands of years before any of us were born.

If I was at a party and a gang war suddenly broke out and people started torturing and murdering, I'd leave, but that's just me.

Do what, lose a war again?

If I hear someone say "The South's gonna do it again!" I respond with, "The North will too."

am amazed and amused by those comments. A few years ago, during Georgia's State/Klan flag brouhaha a local columnist made the comment of how queer it was that southerners could still be so proud of "coming in second in a two-way war." But whether or not they actually know the term, a lot of these folks have embraced the whole notion of Lost Cause theology, the idea that the civil was had NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with slavery (really!). What gets me is listening to them yammer on and on about their "heritage," when their own interest in that heritage is concerned with nothing before 1861 or after 1865.

Anyone who has any real knowledge of the history of those days knows that slavery was the most inflammatory issue, and that abolitionists were the singlemost important pro-war group in the North.

Hell, the country had an armed insurrection, even before the Civil War, led by an abolitionist, because of slavery.

there are a lot of them, they've been at it a long time (since the civil war ended), and they've got a boat load of folks on their side. Which doesn't mean it's not laughable. They'll say that cecession and confederacy had nothing to do with slavery or bigotry, yet their constitution enshrined slavery, the images on their currency celebrated slavery, and quotes about from CSA leaders about the need to preserve slavery and/or keep down the black man. Sadly, there are millions down here (and elsewhere) who think that this love of bigotry and intolerance is somehow a glorious cornerstone of their 'heritage,' and the rest of us must accept this, lest the more clever rednecks among them turn "political correctness" against us. I miss home.

But you've got that backwards.

"Revisionists" is not a pejorative term, and that is the sense in which you are using it.

Revisionists are responsible for having challenged the dominant schools of thought on causation in the Civil War, which some will summarize as Lost Cause mythology. And Lost Cause adherents today discount these people as "mere revisionists" or some such thing. Look into the "Dunning School" of historiographical thought and how historians, primarily starting in the 50's and 60's (but with some notable earlier examples) began to directly challenge this. "Dunning" is still alive and well in various circles, sometimes in mutated form, especially among Libertarian types.

And, FWIW, abolitionists were not, as a whole, pro-war, and were in fact fairly fractured on the issue. That changed for the most part after the war actually began, but prior to it, abolitionists were some of the strongest advocates of some sort of peaceful settlement ... or no settlement at all other than "good riddance" as famously indicated by Garrison's "erring sisters, depart in peace" comment.

I could use this as tangent from which to discuss just how pervasive Lost Cause ideology was and to what degree it infected our understanding of the war and its causes, but I'll leave it at this. The notion that abolitionists were "pro-war" is actually a pro-slavery invention and paranoia. John Brown was seen as a representative example of the abolitionist movement, when in fact he was a fringe minority. Southerners used the supposed desires of abolitionists to subjugate the South violently to whip up support for secession and then war, and all else became self-fulfilling prophecy.

In my experience, revisioninsm is the revising of the truth. Those who use the non-pejorative use of the term are simply acknowledging the revision of the revision of the truth. The historian's job is to find the truth, not the revision. The good news is we're both right. I have a history degree but I admit I have only heard revisionism used as a pejorative. I believe the usage you use is confusing. Just my $0.02 worth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revisionism

Re: Pro-war abolitionists.

After the Fugitive Slave law was passed, abolitionists became the singlemost important pro-war group in the North. If they were not, I await your next lecture.

Note this part of the article:

"Revisionism can also refer to the reexamination of past historical events as in to question conventional wisdom on a subject and determine what really occurred during an historical event as in historical revisionism."

Conventional wisdom in the early part of the 20th century was that the war was all pretty much a big mistake, that slavery had little to do with it, and that Reconstruction was a failure because the freedmen had proved themselves incapable of the responsibilities of being citizens.

Early historians who challenged and "revised" this view of history, among them WEB Dubois, were largely dismissed as "revisionists" using your meaning of the term, i.e. "revising" the truth. This is incorrect. What they were revising was the manner in which facts were being interpreted, noting, for example, that one of the reasons freedmen were having so much difficulty fitting into society was that whites were doing a fine job of keeping them out of it using methods up to and including outright murder.

It is a misinterpretation of history to refer to abolitionists, as a group, as "pro-war" at any point prior to secession. Some minority elements among abolitionist circles were in favor of violent insurrection against the government if it continued to do nothing to put an end to the institution, John Brown among them, but this is quite different from being pro-war in the context of the Civil War. As noted, abolitionists were fragmented, as was Northern opinion in general on the subject of war with the South. Not until Ft. Sumter did Northern opinion gel into a pro-war stance on a large scale.

Now, I'm sorry you see this as a "lecture," by which I infer negative connotations. I'm simply frustrated by the misuse of the term in the context of historical analysis. Were it not for revisionists, we would still be taught that Native Americans were savages, that enslaved people were better off as slaves, and that slaves were generally happy with their lot. Pretty much everything I gather you believe to be true about this period has come from the work of self-described revisionists, e.g. Kenneth Stampp, Thomas Connelly, Leon Litwack, George Frederickson, Eric Foner, et al.

Of course one can revise the revision, which can be negative, but revisionism itself as a term to describe historical analysis is a neutral term. The quality of the work is what should determine its worth, positive or negative.

however, a lot of people do leave Iraq and other similar warzones. I would guess that most can't leave though due to the usual reasons of family/finances/visas etc.

Harder to live.

How you are inculcated as a child determines to a large extent how you will feel about these things. Certainly adults can break free from their cultural indoctrination, but that is the exception rather than the rule.

The conflicts in the former Yugoslavia have roots over a thousand years old, based in events that almost no one understands on any rational level and which even those who study the issue in an academic contest have trouble sorting out completely, generating vicious arguments on cause and effect and responsibility. The people who have grown up in this environment without the benefit of viewing these difficult issues from the outside can hardly be expected to react much better.