The Flag: The Wrong side of History

TL:DR

Let us put this to rest: 

This is a clip from the past. It has been redacted.
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... who claimed they were just 'following orders' truly believed and took pride in what they were doing, researchers have claimed. 

Landmark studies on human behavior in the ... and ... had founded the theory that people carried out evil acts because they naturally follow orders from figures of authority.

And ... famously tried the defense at the ... trials.

But ...psychologists have challenged the fifty-year-old findings after going back and re-examining the original experiments. 
... began their research ten years ago with a prison study which was broadcast on the ….

They found that volunteers given the role of 'guards' only acted brutally when they identified with their role and believed their actions were necessary to maintain control. 

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I think this article could have appeared multiple times during the last thousand years of human evolution. There may have been pride in fighting for a flag. There usually is. If there is no pride in the symbol of the flag, you don’t have a committed populace.

Battles are lost, battles are won, time marches forward.

There is a saying made popular a few years ago although with the exception of few events, can be truly determine if the actions or an individual or a group are "Being on the wrong side of history"

 

"Being on the wrong side of history" means that history will judge him (or group) as the person who was "in the wrong." For instance Ghaddafi will be judged by history as "in the wrong" for bombing his own people.

 

I truly don't believe that when young Nazi's joined their armies that they concluded that they were inherently wrong. They thought they were right and signed up to fight. Villagers in black pajamas defending their jungles from Imperialists, farmers that dropped their plows and picked up rifles, Romans that threw Christians to the lions and Christians that tortured infidels to a painful death never considered that the phase of life they were about to enter was anything but right!

 

It is never easy to be right all the time. It is never easy to be right some of the time. But History tells us through contemporary spectacles who we suspect in the past were right and who was wrong.

Today, sadly, painfully, many in the country are singing down to the South and cursing the soldiers of the South and their confederacy and maybe forgetting of the children and grandparents and the Mothers who died in the crossfire of battles, blaming them all for being wrong and on the wrong side of history.

How a child can be on the wrong side of anything, I will never understand.

 

Like the drug addled child, obviously raised in a world of hate and disrespect and pain who killed 9 innocents in Charleston, could be on the wrong side. 

He is responsible...but in a way he is not responsible.

 

Maybe in another universe, everyone who was responsible for creating the Monster would be held accountable as well. He was not raised in a vacuum.

 

Well we could not go an punish everyone that filled his heart with hate and blood and racist fears and so the Society did what it felt was the next best thing.

 

They removed his flag and they removed the only symbol they could punish. Will it stop the hate, the racist, the blood-letting? Will they stand circled and sing kumbaya and hold community meetings and embrace love in every spirit?

 

Probably not.

 

I am not sure why the South entered the war of separation. Or why it needed to maintain it's tenet that human's could own humans.

 

I suspect it was the same reason we enter all wars.

 

We have fear, we crave power.

 

We want to insure that we have a future as bountiful as our past. I think power is the keep word here.There is a reason that 100's of thousands of non-slave owners went to the battlefields of Tennessee and Virginia and Georgia and filled rivers with their blood.

Maybe education, maybe a cruel review of the past actions of human beings, maybe teaching more of what the Nation was created by would have stopped the plagues of slavery before it began and today people would not be singing about the removal of a symbol.

I am not cursing the past, but I am committed to not repeating its sins. (Except maybe when driving my car, eating their poisoned foods and damaging the planet around me...For those and other sins, I am sure I will wake up on the wrong side of history!)