http://www.navytimes.com/news/...-of-the-confederacy/

Excellent article here. Quote from the article "Naming ships after defeated enemies of the United States remains baffling to Earl J. Higgins, a 75-year-old retired Navy officer, author and lawyer who wrote about the issue earlier this year.

I am not suggesting any name changes, just thought this might be of interest.

75 years, and just now he's complaining?

Kept his mouth shut to reach retirement, and all the years since?

Nope. Not interested.

I posted the article because I found it historically interesting. To paraphrase Condi Rice, it is wrong to sanitize history to make you feel better.

The naming conventions of the Navy's ships have been screwed up for the last 20+ years anyways, this is just the least of the problems. If anything, whomever the new SECNAV is hopefully will lay the law down and require a level of consistency and expectation for these honorariums.

quote:

the names may have been the result of clout held by southern U.S. legislators.

AKA the Dixiecrat's

quote:

A Southern Poverty Law Center timeline shows a spike in schools named after the Confederacy — as well as other monuments and tributes — during the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s, the same decade the Navy commissioned the Lee, Jackson and Hunley.

That is, the decade that saw the Centennial of the Civil War and all its battles.

Personally, I think everyone should watch not only GWTW, but Birth of A Nation. Heck, I even walked out of Bob Hope's "Son of Paleface" because of all the racist jokes against Indians. Times have changed, we've changed; the truth is there are very, very few overt racists in the US today (at least among whites). The Civil Rights campaigns of the 60's were extremely successful...then came affirmative action...then Obama...50 years of progress in race relations set back to 1970 at best.

Hillary gave Trump the biggest boost of his campaign with her self-righteous "Deplorables" comment.

quote:

Originally posted by ZSMICHAEL:
I posted the article because I found it historically interesting. To paraphrase Condi Rice, it is wrong to sanitize history to make you feel better.

My comments, for the most part when an article is posted, are in response to the article, and not directed to the poster.

If it is in response to something someone posts, it should be pretty clear.

I certainly don't take posting of stories to be the poster's POV.

That said, my reply is not about the history, I do find it interesting, but the sniveling of someone so long in tooth, when he had opportunity to bring it up earlier in life, rather than being an also ran in a hot button topic.

And such "reports" are, in my opinion, shit stirring. (by the media)

And it is also my position that one stirring shit should have to lick the spoon.

The daily news about the destruction of our history and culture is really pissing me off. This must be what the Chinese felt like during the 1960's, or what a German felt like during the 1930's. This won't end well.

quote:

Naming ships after defeated enemies of the United States ...

The "enemy" being fellow Americans is a little different than naming a ship, for example, USS Tojo. And this has me curious, are there ships named after Indians/Native Americans? They were a "defeated enemy," but we have all kinds of things named after them and monuments to them, which some people also wish to remove. As well, humans have a long, if inconsistent, tradition of honoring worthy adversaries in battle.

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Thanks for that link. All of this is very interesting to me from a historical and psychological viewpoint. In addition to Navy ships, I never knew the origins of Army posts, ie Fort Hood, Fort Gordon, Fort Benning, as the article points out.

Since History is only taught in a limited way in today's schools, I can imagine the majority of Americans have no idea of the origin of these names.

That is ridiculous. Naming a ship after a battle where brave United States Soldiers, Marines and Sailors gave their lives for their country but didn't obtain a strategic victory is not a plug for the enemy.

We have had ships named after Chosin, Wake Island, and Pearl Harbor than doesn't mean we are venerating the Japanese Navy and the Peoples liberation Army.