Taboo Civil War topics

Some 150 years have passed since the trauma of our American Civil War. And still there are some subjects and topics that aren't discussed by silent mutual consent, even though the topics are well-known.

1) Southerners loyal to the Union and those Southerners who enlisted in the Union Army to fight fellow Southerners.

2) Northerners sympathetic to the Confederacy who openly supported it and those who even enlisted in the Confederate Army.

3) Black men, free or slave, who enlisted in the Confederate Army in the final months of the war when all was lost, making such enlistments meaningless. But this is a painful and taboo subject with Afro-Americans today.

4) Individual minorities who joined either the Union or the Confederacy. History records a Chinese young man in the Union Army as an infantryman and another Chinese man in the Confederacy as a corporal with the artillery.
The Native Indian Americans, namely of the Five Civilized Tribes (or Nations) sided with the Confederacy, hoping to secure their territorial homelands. Finding themselves on the losing side meant little mercy to the Indians after the Civil War.

5) This last one is what the movie, RIDE WITH THE DEVIL entailed, American neighbors who chose sides and ended up fighting each other as partisans, guerrillas, militia, even as bandits and murderers. Ask anybody who survived the pitiless, horrifying civil war in the former Yugoslavia, around 1992 to 1995 and you'll grasp what it must be like to aim a firearm at someone you attended grade school and high school with.

These are all painful memories for Americans to contemplate, even this far away from the war. Americans have forgotten what it was like to fight the British in 1812, the Mexicans in 1846, the Spanish in 1898, the North Koreans and Red Chinese in 1950, but we remember what it was like killing each other as clear as yesterday. If the English Civil War is any precedent, it will take 200 years for the nation to completely get over the trauma.