It appears that President Donald Trump and Commentary Page columnist Pat Buchanan (“Who Are We Without Our History,” PDN, Aug. 15) both have the same distorted knowledge of our country’s history.
Both seem to believe that the secessionist founders of the Confederacy are the equals of the Founding Fathers of our nation.
They base this on the fact that some of our founders owned slaves.
However, that is the only similarity.
Our Founding Fathers were attempting to build a new social and governing system based on the freedom of the individual.
They recognized that the prevailing forms of European governance, which included indentured servitude (a form of slavery), were wrong.
That is why our Declaration of Independence is so important.
The leaders of the Confederacy chose to ignore that declaration in order to maintain a socio-economic system based on slavery.
They seceded from the Union and fired the first shots of the Civil War at Fort Sumter.
These “heroes” of the Confederacy are in actuality traitors to the United States of America.
What Trump and Buchanan fail to realize is that we, as a nation, do not honor those who attempt to destroy us.
Let history simply acknowledge those traitors for the harm they did.
Mel and Vicci Rudin,
Port Angeles