So as I read the OP, he seems to be saying he has no objection to removing statues which in full Confederate regalia, honor those whose fought against the United States and in support of a regime that in its Constitution and the statements of its leaders was formed to protect slavery.
If I were a grandchild of a person who fought for Germany in the 1930's I could well be proud of the courage with which my grandfather fought. If I were the son of a suicide bomber who came out of the Palestinian camps in Gaza I could well be proud of his courage in support of my people against what I honestly believed was intolerable oppression.
But I would not expect the people of France to erect a statue in Paris honoring the Nazi cause or to name a street or a military base in honor of Goering.
Somehow the Israelis have resisted the temptation to put up a nice statue of Arafat in Jerusalem. No one questions the courage or the sincerity of conviction of those who fought for the enemy.
You won't see any General Custer statues on Native lands. You don't see any monuments to General Sherman anywhere in the South. No statues, no street names, no college buildings with his name.
So don't tell me that statues and namings are simply a reflection of history. They are a reflection of support for the ideals fought for by those honored. The Confederacy was built on the promise of the continuation of Slavery. Period. Its constitution which so many think promoted "States Rights" in fact did not. It said that no state in the Confederacy could abolish slavery. It was the unassailable requirement for participation in the CSA.
Remember the words of George Wallace 100 years after the Civil War. Words which reflected his view of how the nation needed to be, how he saw the mixing of black and white people, how the South and much of the North still felt in the 1960's not the 1860's.
In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.
That is a concise summary of Wallace's platform. Just substitute the world slavery for segregation and you have the summary of the bedrock of the Confederacy. Is that a political system which we should be honoring in the USA? Is that something that just maybe a black person might find offensive? Those are not beautiful statues honoring our history. They are statues honoring those who fought to defend to the death the horrible horrible enslavement of humans.
Please read the "cornerstone" speech given by the VP of the CSA. He explains that the founders of the USA, and refers to Jefferson, all believed that slavery was wrong but were unable to find a way to eliminate it.
Quote:
It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time.
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He admits that slavery was viewed as evil by the USA but, as he goes on to explain, they were wrong.
Quote:
Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error...our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.
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This is a concise and very clear statement that the CSA was formed to continue slavery. That the view of those who flew the stars and bars was that it was a moral truth that the negro was an inferior whose natural place was to be subordinate to the white race.
To say that a moral person, black, brown, or white should not find that "truth" extremely offensive astounds me. And to believe that anywhere there should be a statue celebrating people for whom that "truth" was a foundational piece of their belief is no different from honoring those who believed Jews were less than human. Maybe even worse because the Nazis didn't fight for the right to kill Jews. They fought for German economic superiority and the sincerely held belief in Aryan superiority. We don't lionize the German soldier nor the German generals with statues.
Be proud of your southern heritage. But if you are proud of the Confederacy and the deplorable bedrock upon which it was built ...
