"The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down".

@thecarpathian 

+1

There are no winners in Wars, only Losers.  The American Civil War was a war where the Civilian Population was targeted to suffer, because doing so hastened the end of the war.  The North still had the moral high ground, as Slavery needed to be ended, but once the likes of Sherman and Sheridan figured out that making War on Civilians would cause desertions from the Southern Armies, and therefore felt that inflicting this pain could be justified as legitimate, a lot of bad things happened.    Most Southerners who fought were to poor to own slaves.  They were persuaded by their leaders and their  society they lived in that it was noble for them to give up their lives so that Southern Aristocrats could enjoy the fruits of their sacrifices.  I always viewed the narrator of this song as one of those duped white teenagers who  gets to live the horrors of war and is witnessing of the demise of his world, and is caught in forces not of his own making

@roxy54 the old cliche is that people that don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

@onhwy61 As a general history buff, and having had many holocaust survivors and victims in my family, I am pretty “read up” on the subject.  I understand that sometimes pain has to be inflicted upon civilians and soldiers in order to shorten conflicts and minimize further suffering down the road.  That doesn’t mean that we can’t have sensitivity to the suffering of all involved