What Do You Commemorate? | No One Said It'd Be Easy
The Daily Stoic
Daily Stoic | Backyard Ventures
4.5 • 5.3K Ratings
🗓️ 5 July 2024
⏱️ 9 minutes
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Summary
“As a historian, we have to look unflinchingly at the past, looking at the record of events as they happened. But commemoration—what we choose to celebrate and honor—is something different.” - General Ty Seidule
🎙️ General Ty Seidule On Our Responsibility To Study, Understand And Grapple With History
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Wundry Plus subscribers can listen to the Daily Stoic Early and Ad Free right now. |
| 0:04.8 | Just join Wundary Plus in the Wundry app or on Apple Podcast. |
| 0:12.4 | Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday we do double duty not just reading our daily |
| 0:17.8 | meditation but also reading a passage from The Daily Stoic, my book, 366 meditations on wisdom, perseverance in the art of living, |
| 0:26.6 | which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. |
| 0:33.0 | So today it will give you a quick meditation from the Stoics |
| 0:36.0 | with some analysis from me, |
| 0:38.0 | and then we'll send you out into the world |
| 0:40.0 | to turn these words in to works. What do you commemorate? The Romans did some terrible things. They conquered and they pillaged, they enslaved, they executed and persecuted. |
| 1:02.0 | And the Stoics were more than just implicated in this. |
| 1:04.1 | They were active participants. |
| 1:05.8 | Rusticus, the beloved teacher of Marcus Aurelius, |
| 1:08.2 | the one that introduced him personally |
| 1:10.2 | to the writings of Epictetus, |
| 1:11.4 | was the persecutor of Justin Martyr, sentencing him to a cruel and terrible death. |
| 1:16.0 | Seneca was an enabler of Nero. They all owned enormous estates, tended by slaves. |
| 1:21.6 | And these are unpleasant things to think about. These |
| 1:23.8 | injustices may have been commonplace then, but that doesn't excuse them. They |
| 1:27.5 | were still injustices, as the Stoics often acknowledged in their writings. |
| 1:31.2 | Yet these contradictions and cruelties are not what we talk about most of the time here at Daily Stoic. Is that a cop-out? In a recent and all-time best episode of the Daily Stoic podcast, we talked to General Tai Sedgili, former professor at West Point in a retired United States Army general. |
| 1:48.2 | In the episode, talking of his work to rename and in some cases remove honors that the Army has bestowed on various figures of the Confederacy. |
| 1:55.6 | General Sedgilly makes a distinction between history and commemoration. |
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