The American civil war then and now – interactive | Hacker News Reader

The American civil war then and now – interactive

theguardian.com

41 pointsyitchelle16 comments

Great content, but the auto-change on scroll was annoying. They should have at least implemented a small delay.

Anyone know why the trees at Antietam Dunker's Church appear to have shrunk? Or is that just a trick of the lens? I find the trees to be the most interesting part of these comparisons. The Brompton oak is beautiful.

They are almost certainly new trees - the originals having been cut down in the decades after the battle. I'm not sure when the programs started, but I know a lot of the battlefields have been intentionally restoring tree lines to their original appearance at many of the battlefields - although this is of course going to be a decades-long process.

They were all cut down over time, and then replaced. There is relatively little old-growth forest in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_old-growth_forests

This is really well done. I only wish they had a little more historical explanation to go with each photo.

I'm not sure if it was the Guardian, but there was a WWII article where they did a similar photo overlay effect. I can't find it. Anyone remember this?

I suppose you mean this one from The Atlantic:

http://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2014/06/scenes-from-d-day-t...

History really distorts things. Do we have to wait 200 years to see fights with ISIS in a similar "noble tragedy" kind of light, where there are no clear baddies and nobody's assigned blame for the killings?

Maybe some of those dead people were "baddies" fighting for something we don't believe in anymore? In that case, surely we should be celebrating the fact that they died. If not, then maybe we should be complaining about the violent people who killed them? It's not a natural disaster where nobody wants it to happen. Soldiers actively fought for some purpose or other that we presumably either accept or not today.

In the case of the American Civil War, we have ample context in these times to hold nuanced understandings of the matter.

The Confederate army was comprised of men, many of whom died defending their homeland from what they perceived to be the aggression of an imperialistic outside force determined to impose an alien set of values on their society, obliterating their capacity for self-determination. The sad fact that these men were commonly quite racist and supported the oppression other human beings (the slaves) does not erase that, and does not mean their deaths met in war were a form of high Justice.

We have been gifted with a powerful legacy, the triumph of the Union and the cause of freedom, and it would be an abuse of that legacy to trivialize the matter. Instead, if we choose to invest the death of one of an enlisted Confederate army private with dignity and respect, one of the "baddies", we are exercising the same respect for our common humanity that impelled our forefathers to sacrifice their lives lifting the slaves out of slavery to begin with.

Well said, thank you.

I'm unwilling to separate out "they were defending their values" from "their values included chattel slavery". I find nothing noble in holding values dear that are so wrong.

Can I ask your opinion on the American Revolution or Lincoln's actions in MN?

Well, no, and the point isn't to excuse them or call them noble for that, the point is that it's an exercise of our values to say that all men have dignity, and that even if we're fighting them it's not much better to dehumanize people for their values than it is for their race.

I mean, what do you think of people who claim we should blow up all the Muslims because they have inferior values? Little bit monstrous of them, right? Or take the Reformation writ large, nations alternately executing Papists and Protestants.

I'm ok with acknowledging the humanity of, but not the dignity of, a group of people who willingly, emphatically, repeatedly worked to deny others of their basic human rights.

We see words like "heritage" thrown around a lot with respect to the south. I like to remember what that heritage is:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/what-thi...

It's also important to note that there were a number of factors playing into the Civil War. Slavery was but only one of the factors, albeit the highest profile one (and likely the one with the longest and nastiest shadow when all is said and done).

I do agree your thoughts and want to push further - it is critical to not exoticize the Confederates into an 'other', unknowable, evil, "literally Hitler". The Confederates were as human as us all - they fought for similar reasons as people do today, with the common shared fate of soldiers everywhere: death, destruction of family, trauma stemming for years afterward, vast distortions of the previous culture from the scars of war.

We "simply" disagree today on certain key beliefs.

This immediately leads to the question: What beliefs today that we hold will be considered as bad as what the Confederates held?

It's also important to remember that almost all of those other factors boil down to slavery. Economic differences? Yeah - slavery. State's rights? Yeah - the right to choose slavery. And so on.

> Do we have to wait 200 years to see fights with ISIS in a similar "noble tragedy" kind of light, where there are no clear baddies and nobody's assigned blame for the killings?

I dare you to find any redeeming quality in ISIS.

The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant -- particularly as regards Iraq -- is "comprised of men, many of whom died defending their homeland from what they perceived to be the aggression of an imperialistic outside force determined to impose an alien set of values on their society, obliterating their capacity for self-determination." [0]

Its just as true of ISIL as it was of the Confederacy. (Now, to be fair, I don't see it as a redeeming feature of either entity, but clearly that's not a universally-shared perception in the case of at least the Confederacy.)

[0] as the Confederacy was described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9764589

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