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Several items on this thread have struck me. First, although comparing honours of one nation with those of another is often misleading, I have long felt that, for much of their histories, the Victoria Cross and Medal of Honour have been as close as one can come to national equivalents. At various times both have been handed out by the bushel, because few other awards were available, and as new awards were created, the standards for each changed.
That said (and writing as a foreigner), I have been by turns amused and appalled at some Congressional Medals of Honour of late. My principal concern has been the sense that "History did not turn out the way we would now like it to appear, so let us change the history". Hence, well-meaning folk award Teddy Rosevelt the MoH (and when I check an old web site for a 1999 poll I find that American medal collectors and commentators went 50-50 on opposing and supporting this). Other well-meaning folk reach back to award Medals of Honour to blacks and other visible minorities decades after the events. Whether for Teddy or the others, I view such acts as utterly inappropriate, cheapening the honour, corrupting the process, and demeaning to the "recipients".
The sentiment "History be damned - let's change the facts" is not confined to the US, however. There was a report some two years ago that certain Australian politicians were proposing to award not one but THREE newly-minted Australian VCs to people that said politicians felt had been slighted by the British. There was a website devoted specifically to lobbying for a VC to John Simpson (I have not been able to find it for reference in this message, but when I read it the site was a mixture of Brit-bashing and misinformation).
Now if Australians wanted to bastadize the VC in general and their own version of it in particular, that would be their problem alone - but I fear that an Australian "history re-write" would set a precedent for Canadian equivalents. I had not heard the line of "Tommy Prince for VC" (though it would not surprise me), but various journalists have written that Buzz Beurling should have received one, and at least one writer has virtually declared that only his Canadian background seperated John Fauquier from a VC (utter rot !). Meanwhile, I occasionally handle letters in which various folk try to get DFCs for buddies of 55 years past. I have to write to say why these "oversights" happened and why it would be a bad thing to "correct" them.
It was with this in mind that I was horrified when earnest people succeeded two years ago in getting a Dicken Medal for a dog that had been killed at Hong Kong. Revisiting history in this way - even for a dog - makes it difficult to argue against similar "corrections" being attempted on behalf of humans.
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