In all the Old South, there is not one statue of James Longstreet, Robert E. Lee's "old warhorse" and right-hand man after the death of Stonewall Jackson, and also one of Ulysses Grant's West Point classmates and best friends, whom he and Lee surrendered to at Appomattox.
After the war, Longstreet was a fervent supporter of Grant, Reconstruction, and rights for freed slaves. He led mixed race militias against the Ku Klux Klan and other recalcitrant Southern whites in pitched battles.
This explains why no statues of Longstreet were erected with all of the other Confederates during Jim Crow, but begs the question of why no one else ever bothered to do so, except for the one on the Gettysburg battlefield.
Longstreet proves people really can change, and that makes many people, including those who see white supremacy behind every bush, uneasy. We should remember Longstreet at least as much as we remember Grant and Lee.
Longstreet’s uncle, Augustus Longstreet who raised him, has the Longstreet Theater on the University of South Carolina’s campus named for him. He was a past president of the university aaaaaand a noted secessionist. So, another data point to add to your argument.
Sam Houston wasn't this admirable, but he is another alternate hero for Texans in particular. He was pro Union and warned everybody that all that would happen is a massive loss of life for no purpose because the South would lose anyway, and he was run out of town on a pole for it.
Or the Grimke sisters, who were born to wealthy planters in South Carolina (which was like the slavest of slave states - decadent wealth extracted out of slavery, majority slave population, one of the most militantly pro slavery and secession) and were so disgusted by slavery that they left their inheritance behind and went north and became abolitionists.
There's also any number of Southerners who fought for the Union.
If US Grant or Sherman is too raw a deal for some people to put statues up in the South, these people are *truly* heroic Southerners as alternatives.
*Edit*
As another somewhat trollish addition, people forget that MLK was a Southerner. There were notable differences in the Southern versus Northern black modes of resistance to Jim Crowe, and the mode people tend to admire a lot today were mostly in the Southern mode of the black preacher. (Well spoken, well dressed, non-violent resistance).
MLK was not some product of the post Great Migration inner city. He was a product of the suburban Deep South. See Fannie Lou Hamer as an example of the rural Deep South.
Edward Coles, private secretary to President James Madison, upon inheriting his family slaves worked out a plan--took them to Illinois, freed them, and gave each household 160 acres of land. Plenty of Southern heroes in the antebellum south.
Another thing that happened in the 1870s, after Longstreet’s embrace of Grant and Reconstruction, was that his fellow generals began a revisionist historical campaign as to Longstreet’s conduct at Gettysburg, blaming his performance on the second day for the defeat. (I find the consensus among most civil war historians is that, if anybody is to be blamed, it’s Ewell for his failure to interpret Lee’s order to take Cemetery Hill “if practicable” while avoiding a general engagement until Longstreet’s divisions could arrive as a more direct order than it seems to be (assuming it’s being reported correctly by Ewell and has staff).
It is sad to see the right’s conflation of a focus on the evil of slavery with hate for America. When I read about these great figures like Douglass and Lincoln I feel more patriotic, not less.
One can be opposed to glorification of the Confederacy while still having grave concerns about the way "doing History" these days means emphasizing the worst aspects of American history. Think of the American Revolution Ken Burns doc, with its bending over backwards to work the experience of slaves into the narrative. Slavery should be discussed to the extent it is relevant to the events and times being described, but the self-flagellation can be a bit much.
The fact that more highschoolers associate Jefferson with owning slaves than can identify that he served as President suggests we maybe crossed a line somewhere.
I agree with you both, I suppose there’s a wide range of what “focusing on slavery” could mean. Emphasizing the ideals and efforts of abolitionists is more productive than ignoring slavery or pretending it invalidates everything good about America and its founding
Based on reading about the Civil War, it seems that, at the time, the United States and the US flag were strongly associated with the cause of freedom and anti-slavery. So many people died fighting under the US flag in order to end slavery, and somehow activists have made that flag associated with... slavery.
If I was one of the right-wing Republicans, I would be emphasizing the fact that e.g. twice as many white people fought for the Union as for the Confederacy, and loads of them died. Kind of disrespectful to forget their sacrifice.
That and if you are Southerner - nobody ever got more Southerners killed than people like Jefferson Davis. The kill rate in this war of Southern military age men is more like that of France in WWI than anything otherwise ever seen in the USA.
There were *literally* piles of unburied bones laying around in parts of the South for years after the war.
This is completely backwards from what happened. You had people opposed to the 1619 Project and Howard Zinn being put into school curricula and that became framed as right-wingers defending slavery.
Except that the banishment of monuments as well as symbols from the Confederacy is performative. The enforcement of absolute purity, a power play.
I grew up in GA. The Confederate battle flag was for many people a symbol of regional pride, and even a sort of “fuck you” to non-southerners who looked down their noses at the south. If you didn’t grow up in the south, you have no idea about the pervasiveness of snotty attitudes and rank ignorance on the part of non-southerners.
I suppose many cultures feature this sort of regional bigotry, like the way Londoners think of Yorkshire people, or how people in Milan think of people from southern Italy.
An ignorant bigot from outside the south—a very intelligent one, perhaps a writer for The New Yorker. e.g.—sees a Confederate battle flag on display in a southerner’s yard, and assumes its meaning is white supremacy or even pro-slavery, when it’s nothing of the sort.
You can also choose to not perform. There is no reason to assume that the preservation of a Confederate monument is supporting slavery, but I can see why you'd frame it that way if you wanted to perform.
Statues of men who went to war against their own country to defend slavery are not supporting slavery?
Okay, whatever. But at the very least they were traitors to the United States of America, which is sufficient reason to take down the statues. Or do you think we should have statues of Benedict Arnold, John Walker Jr., the Rosenbergs, etc.? They're all part of American history, too.
It's very simple; it goes to motive and the values of others who are not you and may not share your sensibilities, and who have an entirely different relationship to the places where these monuments stand (or stood). The preservation of such statues is not necessarily an endorsement of slavery. It's like Columbus. Italian-Americans in particular are very proud of him because of his bold exploring feats and discoveries. I doubt many Italian-Americans endorse his treatment of the indigenous people he encountered.
I think one would have to go down south and talk to someone who wants to preserve such monuments, to find out what they think and why they value keeping these things within their town square. It's a high-and-mighty feat of arrogance to declare "what those statues mean", especially when one's declaration of what they mean serves one's moral-posturing performance needs.
I note that these old monuments were not controversial through the civil rights era, the liberating 70s, the greatly-improving race relations 80s and 90s, even into the 00s. And then social media created a soapbox for posturing accusers.
All right, how far does this go? Near Stone Mountain, GA, not too far from where I live, there is a Confederate cemetery. The men in it died defending the South, which you equate with defending slavery, though most of them probably didn't own slaves. Should the cannon in the cemetery be melted down for scrap and the headstones smashed up for aggregate -- and if not, why not?
Why would one have to be an "ignorant bigot" to draw a line from Confederate battle flag to white nationalism and all its appendages. The flag literally represented sedition - the worst crime one can commit against its own government. As the author points out, the one true reason for secession by southern states was slavery, full stop. Any other inferred reason is simply spraying perfume on a rotting corpse.
Regional pride? Fly the state flag of Georgia or any other flag from a Confederate state. But trying to act as if the Confederate battle flag is some innocent cloth of regional pride is laughable, at best.
It absolutely is "some innocent cloth of regional pride". What is laughable is you asserting this, when you have no idea what you are talking about. In the 1860s the battle flag did represent secession, and the reason for secession was absolutely to do with the issue of slavery. And then the flag was used by segregationists, even incorporated into some state flags.
But by the time I was growing up in Atlanta 50+ years ago, it no longer meant anything like that to many people I knew personally. I guess this is a difficult concept for concrete thinkers, or for people whose moral identity is wrapped up in a prejudicial sense of regional superiority.
Tom Petty was a deep-south guy who made an album in the 80s with the title track Southern Accents. The lyrics of that song speak to his culture, and to the perceptions of it by people outside of it. Tom Petty was not the least bit racist. But the band used a gigantic Confederate Battle flag as the backdrop for the stage when they toured the album all over the US. This was the natural thing to do, because it was the commonplace symbol of his young-people rural-southern culture. People went to his shows without imagining that the flag had anything to do with race, because it didn't, and because it was the 1980s, long before a large segment of American culture became hyper-focused on differences, and social media provided a means for bigots to strike virtuous poses and make ignorant sweeping accusations about the motives of people they did not know. Race relations were vastly better 40 years ago.
Later in life Petty expressed regret that they'd used the flag as an innocent cloth of regional pride, because he understood that it all looked very different by the 2010s. But it had indeed been innocent.
Maybe one reason Yankees looked down on the South is that White Southerners were most proud of formerly owning, and, later, merely oppressing “Negroes”.
Doesn’t it tell you something that non-White Southerners are not enthusiastic about the CSA flag or the monuments to slave owners?
I'm considering 2026, not the era of slavery or of Jim Crow. Your framing is seriously out of date. Perhaps you suffer from SPLCitis. Morris Dees greatly enriched himself and his organization by appealing to the fears and prejudices of "Yankees". He encouraged people to imagine that the south was a terrible place for blacks, when in fact the south was a place where blacks and whites had been living and working together for decades.
If you want to gauge regional difference in race relations, you could for example look at how forced bussing in the 60s and 70s worked out in various parts of the country. This was happening while I was growing up in Atlanta; there was way more conflict in Boston than in Atlanta. This was because there were so many more blacks as a share of the population in Atlanta.
"Yankees" and other non-southerners look down their noses at southerners irrespective of Confederate symbols. A true phobia, as in an irrational fear or disdainfulness. I witness this every year when I take 3 dozen 19-year-olds from the upper midwest on a driving trip that follows the Mississippi River. We stay in Memphis, Natchez, New Orleans, and interact with a lot of local people. My students always express surprise at how different the south (and its inhabitants) is from their preconceptions. Blacks and whites everywhere, working together, respectful of each other, getting along. People of either race with strong southern accents who are intelligent, knowledgable, funny, and kind.
As for black people's attitudes about Confederate memorials, some are bothered, many are not. Kind of like white people.
Yeah, blacks and whites worked together in the South. Except only one group was enslaved. And Blacks voted with their feet, millions leaving for the North.
What part of Southern history pre-1965 are you so proud of?
I'm beginning to understand that people like you are committed to only ever imagining the south as it was pre-1965, and also ignoring everything I am saying about how your interpretation of a symbol is not universal, because it allows you to be a self-righteous, vituperative blowhard.
Morris Dees of the SPLC had the same idea: pretend it's still 1920 in 2020. Frighten the nice, wealthy old white people who lived in Connecticut and knew nothing of the south (and who never interacted with black people) into sending him money to save southern blacks from the rampaging KKK.
Modern-day "anti-racists" also share your framing. Pretend racism is everywhere and that it constrains the freedom of blacks, so that we must remedy it with policy and law.
What all of you have in common is that you need to keep pre-1965 America alive, in order to gain something. Money, political favors, or in your case, a sense of superiority.
Tom Petty's 1986 stage flag, Borglum's carving of Confederate leaders on Stone Mountain (GA), any southern small town's Civil War memorial—all these things had ceased to have anything to do with slavery in the minds and hearts of the people who saw them. Until people like you saw the opportunity to make a fuss and feel like a keyboard hero.
Apologies for being a little rude, but there is absolutely nothing I have written in this thread that suggests that I am "proud" of anything. Your dishonesty has now verged into silliness.
Oh please spare us from this old routine. Yes, we’re all just a bunch of insensitive yanks for thinking that it’s trashy to run around waving the flag of a short lived rebellion that fought for slavery. You’re a genius.
I understand what the memorials mean to you. That’s fine, but not particularly interesting, coming as it is from someone with apparently zero connection to the American South who appears to be white-knighting over this issue.
You cannot know what the memorials mean to anyone else, unless you ask them.
It’s not “amnesia”, as in forgetting. It’s that the memorials don’t mean to most southerners what you think they mean, because their perspective is different from yours.
Apparently this is something you cannot understand from where you are. My suggestion is to go south and talk to people you disagree with.
Tell me: How many Black people have you talked to about the CSA flag and monuments of CSA leaders, some of which overtly referenced slavery and segregation positively on their plinths?
These memorials mean exactly what I say they mean. The flag stands for a nation whose only significant differentiation from the Union it tried to leave was slavery. (You think people put the flag on their trucks out of excitement over a single, non-renewable six-year presidential term?) If not for their service for the Confederacy—what Lincoln called the Slaveocracy—almost none of these men would have had statues made of them. Southerners would like to remember their personal courage and military prowess minus the cause they fought for. Erwin Rommel had personal courage and military prowess and there aren't statues of him in Germany; I doubt they would even be legal.
I agree. The memorials mean exactly what you say they mean—to you. You have no way of knowing what they mean to someone else, unless you ask them to tell you.
You seem very invested in this issue, but your guesswork about the motives and thoughts of others is irrelevant. You seem to be a white knight yelling at the sky; unless you are actually not interested in becoming better-informed, you should go down south and have some conversations with the people who live there.
Not a statue, but a monument in Hildesheim, his hometown. Get your tickets, it's time to travel to Germany and tell them to destroy his stone.
Incidentally, Winston Churchill said of Rommel in January 1942, "We have a very daring and skillful opponent against us. And may I say across the havoc of war, a great general.” So I guess Churchill was a traitor too.
Was just there, and at least in Berlin, the regret for the NS period is palpable. Incidentally, Google tells me that Hildesheim wants to modify the monument to reflect more recent knowledge about Rommel, not to his credit.
"The right has come to the conclusion that any public recognition that slavery is wrong, that slaveholders were bad, and that emancipation was good is a victory for Marxists."
Yet another case of MAGA ironically driving the latinification of US politics: This has long been the default frame for the midwit Latin American right. Part of why the region is so dysfunctional is that extractive oligarchs spent a century successfully casting basically-liberal calls for defeudalizing land reform, property tax reform, and/or ending force labor as cryptomarxism, such that now the default position for any given moderate, literate Catholic in the region is, huh, there must be something to Marxism.
I mean my counter argument to that is that as a thing slavery should be condemned, but also that the South itself should be allowed to keep its heroes and iconography instead of binding it to slavery. I think the civil war was TO preserve slavery, but my answer to that is also “so what?” Slavery was thought to be the entire thing that the South’s economy hanged on, its reliance on it fueled by hundreds of years of propaganda partially started BY the Founding Fathers. It leads to a bizarre moral relativism where there is no sympathy to the fact that perhaps the South isn’t Literally The Third Reich for perpetuating a terrible thing and instead that it should be treated as a dark time in the history of America, but one that is no more or less detestable as every other part of a country’s history. Many people celebrate Guy Fawkes and the IRA and Churchill and Castro and Zulu and Caesar despite them all being terrible people, I think the fact that slavery is looked down on as such a terrible thing to have done hundreds of years ago is exclusively a white, liberal, western thing. Slavery is still bad, but it’s been treated on the level of the Holocaust I feel is always been weird to me because as opposed to the fact the Holocaust was an outlier of its time culturally the idea of ending slavery is still a radical position and only the modern first world really balks at slavery as it does today. One testimony of a guy who kept slaves and didnt particularly care when they got fried I’d say is actually proof of my point rather than a refutation, because pretty much everywhere else in the world slavery still happens and slaves are treated worse in places like Asia and Africa than western slavers could ever have dreamed of. Our disgust with slavery is due to us evolving to have values of decency, democracy and fairness, but we still dont go around fighting wars to end slavery in the congo. It seems like a unique pretension that we westerners cant be caught doing something that makes us seem like the guys we bought our slaves off of, unless it’s kids in china in which case we sweep that under the rug
Who cares what people in shithole countries think? The English knew slavery was wrong centuries ago. Our Founding Fathers knew it was wrong as well.
Many societies had forms of slavery. Racialized slavery that maintained a class of slaves through generations was comparatively rare, though.
"It wasn't as bad as the Holocaust." Okay, that's fine. I agree. What does that tell us about the actual topic at issue? This is like a point a 5th grader would make. I was going to say middle schooler but that felt generous.
If the same record-keeping, video, audio and first-hand accounts of slavery were as prevalent as those from the Holocaust perhaps you would have a different point of view. There's no Schindler's List, The Pianist or Come and See equivalent to slavery which painstakingly shows the depths of human depravity. I've seen 12 Years A Slave, Amistad, etc. and they are very interesting historical accounts, but don't get to the barbarism that existed.
You're applying the purity test to evil which is the easy way out. "Pretty much everywhere in the world slavery happens" is an absolute load of shit.
Our slavery was a detestable, disgusting, abhorrent time in history. Up to four million Africans are estimated to have been kidnapped, tortured and transported to the Americas with as many as 15% dying on the journey alone - not to mention those who died before boarding ships or after arrival and before auction.
If you think the only people who despise American slavery are white Western Liberals then I truly feel for your worldview.
Slavery is bad either way, but I think this question is a good test for whether you're treating historical behavior in an evenhanded way, vs trying to tell a morality tale about how bad white people were.
It does not! But Africans get off the hook for their role in the slave trade. Europeans provided the demand for slaves but they did not (99% of the time) go into Africa raiding and seizing people for slavery. They went to the port and other Africans handed over the slaves for guns and gold and other goods. Many people have a mental model of slavery that involves wrongdoing only by whites. I think that's wrong.
"because pretty much everywhere else in the world slavery still happens" - Slavery is illegal everywhere in the world. If it still happens, that is a problem arising out of poverty, illegal activities/groups and weak law enforcement, things you don't abolish with a simple legislation change. Slavery already wasn't the norm when the Civil War happened. - "slaves are treated worse in places like Asia and Africa than western slavers could ever have dreamed of" Where is your evidence of that? While it's hard to quantify brutality, the Atlantic slave trade had an exceptionally high death rate (during the transport and on the field), and was the biggest forced mass migration movement. What makes you think they were treated better than in other places? Of course treatment differed from household to household, but that would be true anywhere.
I never said it was an excuse. I said it was a problem with you can’t change with a simple legislation change, as slavery is already illegal everywhere. The commenter said “we still don’t go fighting wars to end slavery in Congo”, which presupposes that fighting a war would abolish these practices.
The working conditions in Kongo are indeed close to slavery, although not exactly chattel slavery, they are defined by debt bondage, which includes forced labour, extreme exploitation and child labor. People enter debt bondage or extreme exploitation (or send their children to work) due to extreme poverty. This is not a moral statement, saying that these practices are to be tolerated because of it, but means that changing that would need more than just changing laws.
The Douglass quotes are interesting. If he could forgive his former owners, despite personal experience of slavery, why do so many leftists, especially black ones, bang on about reparations owed by the West to people several generations away from any direct experience of slavery? I assume they do realise that this attitude makes race relations worse, not better, but they're not really trying to achieve good race relations.
For some reason, the French can maintain the statues of their kings despite being ardent support of the Republic. That goes for many other nations as well.
Americans don’t have to treat all of our history as a morality play. We should remember our past as it really happened.
No, my statement is neither supporting nor defending putting up new statues based on current events. That is obviously not the same as preserving cultural history via statues that are already in place. I think statues that have been in place for very significant time periods have an inherent cultural value that modern statues do not.
I don't favor French or any other kings, but I do like having statues of them. Nor do I support President Jackson, but I am not opposed to statues of him either. And I certainly do not advocate for tearing them down.
And as for new statues, I am more in favor of murals, bro.
Fredrick Douglass actually wrote 3 autobiographies—4 counting Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892 Revision): A deeply expanded final version published three years before his death.
My favorite is his first—Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845): His first and most famous book. Written shortly after his escape from slavery, this short but powerful narrative was published to prove his literacy and establish his authentic identity to the public.
I would highly recommend reading some of Douglass’s speeches. A great collection may be found in Great Speeches by Frederick Douglass edited by James Daley. My favorite speech is Self-Made Men (1884).
“I have been asked “How will this theory affect the negro?” and “What shall be done in his case?” My general answer is “Give the negro fair play and let him alone. If he lives, well. If he dies, equally well. If he cannot stand up, let him fall down.”
The apple must have strength and vitality enough in itself to hold on, or it will fall to the ground where it belongs. The strongest influence prevails and should prevail. If the vital relation of the fruit is severed, it is folly to tie the stem to the branch or the branch to the tree or to shelter the fruit from the wind. So, too, there is no wisdom in lifting from the earth a head which must only fall the more heavily when the help is withdrawn. Do right, though the heavens fall; but they will not fall.”—Fredrick Douglass
I”m starting to worry that I might be beyond tedious at this point, but note that I am matching your anti-racist zeal tit for tat. So forgive me, as I forgive you… (My comments are for others primarily anyway.)
As a hardcore libertarian, like you, I hate chud socialism, populism, etc. But your transformation from Hoste to Hanania has resulted in an overcorrection to the point that you are just a dogmatic anti-racist bigot. It may startle you to be called a bigot but it’s probably because bigotry is now associated exclusively with racism. But I literally mean you are intolerant of racialists. In a sense, you are like some of those ex-communists from the 50s whose anti-communist zeal got the better of them (the difference being that anti-communism was/is correct).
Your transformation seems to have a personal component, i.e., the idea of being stuck in Jordan/Palestine as a 130+ with all those horrible genotypes horrifies you (as it should), so it results in a great deal of empathy for non-white high-IQ people stuck in sh*tholes around the world. This makes sense and is applaudable, but it overlooks that preferring your own kind is not immoral and your anti-racist zeal prevents you from even mustering an argument against it (other than “skin color is superficial..”) In other words, racism is not the gotcha you think it is; it’s just a stick to beat people with like a Protestant preacher railing against imaginary sins. (On a daily basis, it seems!)
Your pro-immigrant arguments are rock solid as far as they go except for the glaring fact that you ignore that alien phenotypes are externalities for many people. But your anti-racism forces you to ignore these costs. That’s PC anti-economics. You would never let a leftist get away with this!
So, how do we internalize these externalities? Property rights. But that’s exactly when you become a socialist—you won’t acknowledge that the natives own the streets/roads. If you have to embrace socialism to defeat anti-racism, you might not be the defender of property rights you think you are. Instead, you are, apparently, a “liberal” who thinks that property rights are defeasible for the purpose of “higher ends”. That’s how we got DEI, etc.
I say ditch the unfalsifiable anti-racist moralizing and go full bore for freedom of association and property rights. You will still get plenty of immigration (in some areas) and hopefully deflate the chud socialists.
All you have to do is imagine a Muslim nation in 1860 where half of it fights a bloody civil war to maintain their right to keep Christian slaves. And make everything else about that nation and its antecedent region the same as the CSA. Would Matt Walsh celebrate the Muslim Robert E Lee? These people are as dim as college leftists that wear Che T-Shirts or idiots who deny the brutal nature of Communism. Dare not admit slavery was awful and that the CSA was an ISIS-like state keeping 30% of its inhabitants in chains. That is but an asterisk on an otherwise noble enterprise, apparently. This is like people who excuse Stalin because maybe they had a nice subway.
There isn't even really a "nice" thing to prop up. The South was extremely economically backward and undeveloped compared to the North. It was poor, illiterate, with terrible infrastructure, and endemic mosquito born tropical disease like malaria and yellow fever. Its culture was more violent and uncouth. Southern elites were not a particularly sympathetic class of elites when you peel back the curtains. They were rapey, they didn't push innovation and investment like Northern capital did, and they were extremely jealous of unearned, unmerited social prominence.
Even the things most people like about the South - the music, the accent, the food, etc. is a *fusion* of European and African folkways.
This argument seems to me to miss the value of retaining Confederate monuments - which is their link to the past, to history.
If you go around Europe, you'll see lots and lots of monuments. Lots of them are to people who did things which would not stand up to modern scrutiny, and which no one would approve of nowadays. In Britain, there is a statue to Oliver Cromwell outside the Houses of Parliament - Cromwell's activities in Ireland were at least as bad as anything most of the slaveholders did in the American South. Statues to various imperialist figures like Clive of India dot the landscape. And there are many more - kings who oppressed the people, generals who committed what would nowadays be considered atrocities. But they are part of the landscape, part of the history of the country, and their presence is part of what enables British people to link to their history - not least the history of how attitudes in the past were different, such that the people who erected the statues might celebrate military success while passing over the darker aspects of that success. Simply walking around among these connects people to that past, both the good and the bad of it.
In America we have a much shorter history, but the same thing applies - and in the South, for obvious reasons, a lot of that history prior to 1865 involves supporters and defenders of slavery. Removing those monuments breaks the connection between the present and the past - not only the past of the Civil War itself, but also the past of post-Civil War generations, especially in the time of Jim Crow, which is when most of these monuments were erected: it is an important lesson to know that these racist figures WERE celebrated, and that - like it or not - we live as the heirs to that celebration.
The mistake is not to keep the statues: the mistake is the stupidity of those like Matt Walsh, who defend their retention by pretending that people like Lee were paragons of virtue, overlooking the terrible thing that they were fighting for. We should keep the statues - but with a realistic understanding of why they are there in the first place. And we should add to them. Put up statues of heroic anti-slavery campaigners next to those of Lee or Jackson, as our own contribution to the layering of history in our country.
And the same thing that should prompt us to keep the statues should indeed make us keep Juneteenth, which only recently became a federal holiday, but which was celebrated by Black people long before that, going right back to the Civil War period. That is another part of the layering of history, and I strongly support that as well.
Are there statues of Cromwell in the Republic of Ireland though? We don't celebrate people that literally terrorized a huge segment of our country. 2 CSA states were majority black.
There are to my knowledge no statues of Cromwell in the Republic of Ireland. There are, however, statues to Julius Caesar in France (most famously in the Tuileries), despite his having massacred more people there than Cromwell did in Ireland. And of course there are statues to kings who oppressed the entire country, such as Henry VIII.
I spent 20 years of my secondary teaching career correcting the hatred of America taught in social studies class. While I taught Spanish, invariably a student would make a comment along the lines of, "We really are a bad country." I had a short reply, which basically stated we should not shut the door on the past, nor relive it every day." I saw the attitude rising at the university in the 90's, which is why I did not seek a place in academia.
I'm all for getting rid of the 1890's Lost Cause statues which sought to perpetuate an ideological interpretation of the past. But fought against the removal of a monument to the Confederate dead in Indianapolis. I also translated documents in seeking the truth about two British citizens who were disappeared in Argentina in the 70's. Never have gotten the true story about them.
I immediately saw that adding Juneteenth completed a Trinity. July 4th: the start of freedom; Juneteenth: the elimination of an antithetical institution and MLK Day: where half citizens became full citizens.
> I immediately saw that adding Juneteenth completed a Trinity. July 4th: the start of freedom; Juneteenth: the elimination of an antithetical institution and MLK Day: where half citizens became full citizens.
> the South retconned the entire Civil War to make the conflict about states’ rights, thus creating the “Lost Cause” narrative. In a sense it was, but that narrative begs the question of “the right of states to do what?” It was to own black people...
This is not quite right. South Carolina did secede because they thought a Republican president would threaten slavery; however, most of the other Southern states, while agreeing that the Republicans would harm the cause of slavery in the long run, thought that in the short run Lincoln would be too constrained by the Constitution & Congress to do much in that direction; they only joined South Carolina in seceding once Lincoln reinforced Fort Sumter, showing he meant to keep SC in the Union by force & thus, in much of the South's opinion, violating the right of the states to secede. For a detailed discussion of this see William Freehling's book on the pre-Civil-War South, which also notes that the antebellum South wasn't much concerned with states' rights other than secession except as they supported the maintenance of slavery--it was the South, through the Fugitive Slave Act, that mounted the greatest attack on states' internal autonomy in the years before the Civil War.
I highly recommend reading this beautiful speech from Douglass from 1867 in defense of Chinese immigration. This was a stance which was unpopular even at the time, a time of much more open immigration. Douglass was one of history's great champions of liberty.
I grew up in the rural South with the Lost Cause in a way most people, including people in Southern cities and suburbs, probably don't understand. Actually thinking about what it really meant in general and for me and who I was in particular was one of the first moral, philosophical, and ideological things I thought about in a serious way as a teenager and young adult.
My opinions are basically that anybody who doesn't have a background pretty close to mine and is going around wearing the Lost Cause is playing dress up in stuff they don't understand. Call it cultural appropriation if you like and of the absolute stupidest thing you could have possibly copied from the South. Seriously, go listen to bluegrass and eat some fried catfish and okre and leave this mess alone.
If you *did* inhabit this stuff the way a fish inhabited water, and you haven't thought about it, you need to go read your Faulkner (especially A Rose for Emily) and your C Van Woodard. Once you can stomach that, graduate to Ty Seidule and finally James Baldwin writing on Faulkner. These first 3 are Southerners who understand loving both the South and the truth. The last finally calls out how loving the South can blind you to the truth.
*Edit*
If you need more after this, you can go read about postwar era Texas from 1865-1875 and the general caliber of murdering thug involved in "resistance" to the Union. A good example is Benjamin Bickerstaff. This guy's murdering rampage against Unionists and free blacks was so bad that it was finally some disgruntled townspeople who ambushed him and shot him and not the US military who had been chasing him all over NE Texas for weeks. The South and Texas in particular was literally beset by bands of highwaymen and brigands, Confederate deserters turned "resistance" postwar, who hid in camps in canebrakes and woods and came out mostly to steal from and murder civilians.
One thing that should be marked up to the Confederate generals' credit is that almost to a man they said, "Well, we lost. Go home, pick up the plow or the pen or whatever you did before this war started and try to make the best of it." As far as I am aware, none of them advocated starting a "resistance" to the victorious North. Those Confederate deserters were thugs, plain and simple, and were probably pretty poor soldiers to boot.
In all the Old South, there is not one statue of James Longstreet, Robert E. Lee's "old warhorse" and right-hand man after the death of Stonewall Jackson, and also one of Ulysses Grant's West Point classmates and best friends, whom he and Lee surrendered to at Appomattox.
After the war, Longstreet was a fervent supporter of Grant, Reconstruction, and rights for freed slaves. He led mixed race militias against the Ku Klux Klan and other recalcitrant Southern whites in pitched battles.
This explains why no statues of Longstreet were erected with all of the other Confederates during Jim Crow, but begs the question of why no one else ever bothered to do so, except for the one on the Gettysburg battlefield.
Longstreet proves people really can change, and that makes many people, including those who see white supremacy behind every bush, uneasy. We should remember Longstreet at least as much as we remember Grant and Lee.
Looks like they put up a statue to Longstreet in Georgia in 2001. But it took a really long time, so the point stands.
Really? Thanks. I either didn’t know or had forgotten.
Longstreet’s uncle, Augustus Longstreet who raised him, has the Longstreet Theater on the University of South Carolina’s campus named for him. He was a past president of the university aaaaaand a noted secessionist. So, another data point to add to your argument.
Sam Houston wasn't this admirable, but he is another alternate hero for Texans in particular. He was pro Union and warned everybody that all that would happen is a massive loss of life for no purpose because the South would lose anyway, and he was run out of town on a pole for it.
Or the Grimke sisters, who were born to wealthy planters in South Carolina (which was like the slavest of slave states - decadent wealth extracted out of slavery, majority slave population, one of the most militantly pro slavery and secession) and were so disgusted by slavery that they left their inheritance behind and went north and became abolitionists.
There's also any number of Southerners who fought for the Union.
If US Grant or Sherman is too raw a deal for some people to put statues up in the South, these people are *truly* heroic Southerners as alternatives.
*Edit*
As another somewhat trollish addition, people forget that MLK was a Southerner. There were notable differences in the Southern versus Northern black modes of resistance to Jim Crowe, and the mode people tend to admire a lot today were mostly in the Southern mode of the black preacher. (Well spoken, well dressed, non-violent resistance).
MLK was not some product of the post Great Migration inner city. He was a product of the suburban Deep South. See Fannie Lou Hamer as an example of the rural Deep South.
Edward Coles, private secretary to President James Madison, upon inheriting his family slaves worked out a plan--took them to Illinois, freed them, and gave each household 160 acres of land. Plenty of Southern heroes in the antebellum south.
Yeah there's precious little Longstreet nostalgia here in the deep south.
Another thing that happened in the 1870s, after Longstreet’s embrace of Grant and Reconstruction, was that his fellow generals began a revisionist historical campaign as to Longstreet’s conduct at Gettysburg, blaming his performance on the second day for the defeat. (I find the consensus among most civil war historians is that, if anybody is to be blamed, it’s Ewell for his failure to interpret Lee’s order to take Cemetery Hill “if practicable” while avoiding a general engagement until Longstreet’s divisions could arrive as a more direct order than it seems to be (assuming it’s being reported correctly by Ewell and has staff).
It is sad to see the right’s conflation of a focus on the evil of slavery with hate for America. When I read about these great figures like Douglass and Lincoln I feel more patriotic, not less.
One can be opposed to glorification of the Confederacy while still having grave concerns about the way "doing History" these days means emphasizing the worst aspects of American history. Think of the American Revolution Ken Burns doc, with its bending over backwards to work the experience of slaves into the narrative. Slavery should be discussed to the extent it is relevant to the events and times being described, but the self-flagellation can be a bit much.
The fact that more highschoolers associate Jefferson with owning slaves than can identify that he served as President suggests we maybe crossed a line somewhere.
I agree with you both, I suppose there’s a wide range of what “focusing on slavery” could mean. Emphasizing the ideals and efforts of abolitionists is more productive than ignoring slavery or pretending it invalidates everything good about America and its founding
Based on reading about the Civil War, it seems that, at the time, the United States and the US flag were strongly associated with the cause of freedom and anti-slavery. So many people died fighting under the US flag in order to end slavery, and somehow activists have made that flag associated with... slavery.
If I was one of the right-wing Republicans, I would be emphasizing the fact that e.g. twice as many white people fought for the Union as for the Confederacy, and loads of them died. Kind of disrespectful to forget their sacrifice.
That and if you are Southerner - nobody ever got more Southerners killed than people like Jefferson Davis. The kill rate in this war of Southern military age men is more like that of France in WWI than anything otherwise ever seen in the USA.
There were *literally* piles of unburied bones laying around in parts of the South for years after the war.
This is completely backwards from what happened. You had people opposed to the 1619 Project and Howard Zinn being put into school curricula and that became framed as right-wingers defending slavery.
Except that the banishment of monuments as well as symbols from the Confederacy is performative. The enforcement of absolute purity, a power play.
I grew up in GA. The Confederate battle flag was for many people a symbol of regional pride, and even a sort of “fuck you” to non-southerners who looked down their noses at the south. If you didn’t grow up in the south, you have no idea about the pervasiveness of snotty attitudes and rank ignorance on the part of non-southerners.
I suppose many cultures feature this sort of regional bigotry, like the way Londoners think of Yorkshire people, or how people in Milan think of people from southern Italy.
An ignorant bigot from outside the south—a very intelligent one, perhaps a writer for The New Yorker. e.g.—sees a Confederate battle flag on display in a southerner’s yard, and assumes its meaning is white supremacy or even pro-slavery, when it’s nothing of the sort.
"Except that the banishment of monuments as well as symbols from the Confederacy is performative."
Of course, monuments and symbols are inherently 'performative.' We can choose whether to performatively support slavery or condemn it.
And it seems to me the best way to fight regional bigotry would be to not make people whose most important belief was slavery is good your heroes.
You can also choose to not perform. There is no reason to assume that the preservation of a Confederate monument is supporting slavery, but I can see why you'd frame it that way if you wanted to perform.
Statues of men who went to war against their own country to defend slavery are not supporting slavery?
Okay, whatever. But at the very least they were traitors to the United States of America, which is sufficient reason to take down the statues. Or do you think we should have statues of Benedict Arnold, John Walker Jr., the Rosenbergs, etc.? They're all part of American history, too.
It's very simple; it goes to motive and the values of others who are not you and may not share your sensibilities, and who have an entirely different relationship to the places where these monuments stand (or stood). The preservation of such statues is not necessarily an endorsement of slavery. It's like Columbus. Italian-Americans in particular are very proud of him because of his bold exploring feats and discoveries. I doubt many Italian-Americans endorse his treatment of the indigenous people he encountered.
I think one would have to go down south and talk to someone who wants to preserve such monuments, to find out what they think and why they value keeping these things within their town square. It's a high-and-mighty feat of arrogance to declare "what those statues mean", especially when one's declaration of what they mean serves one's moral-posturing performance needs.
I note that these old monuments were not controversial through the civil rights era, the liberating 70s, the greatly-improving race relations 80s and 90s, even into the 00s. And then social media created a soapbox for posturing accusers.
All right, how far does this go? Near Stone Mountain, GA, not too far from where I live, there is a Confederate cemetery. The men in it died defending the South, which you equate with defending slavery, though most of them probably didn't own slaves. Should the cannon in the cemetery be melted down for scrap and the headstones smashed up for aggregate -- and if not, why not?
Why would one have to be an "ignorant bigot" to draw a line from Confederate battle flag to white nationalism and all its appendages. The flag literally represented sedition - the worst crime one can commit against its own government. As the author points out, the one true reason for secession by southern states was slavery, full stop. Any other inferred reason is simply spraying perfume on a rotting corpse.
Regional pride? Fly the state flag of Georgia or any other flag from a Confederate state. But trying to act as if the Confederate battle flag is some innocent cloth of regional pride is laughable, at best.
It absolutely is "some innocent cloth of regional pride". What is laughable is you asserting this, when you have no idea what you are talking about. In the 1860s the battle flag did represent secession, and the reason for secession was absolutely to do with the issue of slavery. And then the flag was used by segregationists, even incorporated into some state flags.
But by the time I was growing up in Atlanta 50+ years ago, it no longer meant anything like that to many people I knew personally. I guess this is a difficult concept for concrete thinkers, or for people whose moral identity is wrapped up in a prejudicial sense of regional superiority.
Tom Petty was a deep-south guy who made an album in the 80s with the title track Southern Accents. The lyrics of that song speak to his culture, and to the perceptions of it by people outside of it. Tom Petty was not the least bit racist. But the band used a gigantic Confederate Battle flag as the backdrop for the stage when they toured the album all over the US. This was the natural thing to do, because it was the commonplace symbol of his young-people rural-southern culture. People went to his shows without imagining that the flag had anything to do with race, because it didn't, and because it was the 1980s, long before a large segment of American culture became hyper-focused on differences, and social media provided a means for bigots to strike virtuous poses and make ignorant sweeping accusations about the motives of people they did not know. Race relations were vastly better 40 years ago.
Later in life Petty expressed regret that they'd used the flag as an innocent cloth of regional pride, because he understood that it all looked very different by the 2010s. But it had indeed been innocent.
"The flag literally represented sedition - the worst crime one can commit against its own government."
sedition means criticizing government. we fought a war to legalize that don'tcha know.
Maybe one reason Yankees looked down on the South is that White Southerners were most proud of formerly owning, and, later, merely oppressing “Negroes”.
Doesn’t it tell you something that non-White Southerners are not enthusiastic about the CSA flag or the monuments to slave owners?
I'm considering 2026, not the era of slavery or of Jim Crow. Your framing is seriously out of date. Perhaps you suffer from SPLCitis. Morris Dees greatly enriched himself and his organization by appealing to the fears and prejudices of "Yankees". He encouraged people to imagine that the south was a terrible place for blacks, when in fact the south was a place where blacks and whites had been living and working together for decades.
If you want to gauge regional difference in race relations, you could for example look at how forced bussing in the 60s and 70s worked out in various parts of the country. This was happening while I was growing up in Atlanta; there was way more conflict in Boston than in Atlanta. This was because there were so many more blacks as a share of the population in Atlanta.
"Yankees" and other non-southerners look down their noses at southerners irrespective of Confederate symbols. A true phobia, as in an irrational fear or disdainfulness. I witness this every year when I take 3 dozen 19-year-olds from the upper midwest on a driving trip that follows the Mississippi River. We stay in Memphis, Natchez, New Orleans, and interact with a lot of local people. My students always express surprise at how different the south (and its inhabitants) is from their preconceptions. Blacks and whites everywhere, working together, respectful of each other, getting along. People of either race with strong southern accents who are intelligent, knowledgable, funny, and kind.
As for black people's attitudes about Confederate memorials, some are bothered, many are not. Kind of like white people.
Yeah, blacks and whites worked together in the South. Except only one group was enslaved. And Blacks voted with their feet, millions leaving for the North.
What part of Southern history pre-1965 are you so proud of?
I'm beginning to understand that people like you are committed to only ever imagining the south as it was pre-1965, and also ignoring everything I am saying about how your interpretation of a symbol is not universal, because it allows you to be a self-righteous, vituperative blowhard.
Morris Dees of the SPLC had the same idea: pretend it's still 1920 in 2020. Frighten the nice, wealthy old white people who lived in Connecticut and knew nothing of the south (and who never interacted with black people) into sending him money to save southern blacks from the rampaging KKK.
Modern-day "anti-racists" also share your framing. Pretend racism is everywhere and that it constrains the freedom of blacks, so that we must remedy it with policy and law.
What all of you have in common is that you need to keep pre-1965 America alive, in order to gain something. Money, political favors, or in your case, a sense of superiority.
Tom Petty's 1986 stage flag, Borglum's carving of Confederate leaders on Stone Mountain (GA), any southern small town's Civil War memorial—all these things had ceased to have anything to do with slavery in the minds and hearts of the people who saw them. Until people like you saw the opportunity to make a fuss and feel like a keyboard hero.
Apologies for being a little rude, but there is absolutely nothing I have written in this thread that suggests that I am "proud" of anything. Your dishonesty has now verged into silliness.
Oh please spare us from this old routine. Yes, we’re all just a bunch of insensitive yanks for thinking that it’s trashy to run around waving the flag of a short lived rebellion that fought for slavery. You’re a genius.
Thank you!
But I don't think you're necessarily "insensitive". You're simply an uninformed provincialist.
I understand what the memorials mean to you. That’s fine, but not particularly interesting, coming as it is from someone with apparently zero connection to the American South who appears to be white-knighting over this issue.
You cannot know what the memorials mean to anyone else, unless you ask them.
It’s not “amnesia”, as in forgetting. It’s that the memorials don’t mean to most southerners what you think they mean, because their perspective is different from yours.
Apparently this is something you cannot understand from where you are. My suggestion is to go south and talk to people you disagree with.
Tell me: How many Black people have you talked to about the CSA flag and monuments of CSA leaders, some of which overtly referenced slavery and segregation positively on their plinths?
These memorials mean exactly what I say they mean. The flag stands for a nation whose only significant differentiation from the Union it tried to leave was slavery. (You think people put the flag on their trucks out of excitement over a single, non-renewable six-year presidential term?) If not for their service for the Confederacy—what Lincoln called the Slaveocracy—almost none of these men would have had statues made of them. Southerners would like to remember their personal courage and military prowess minus the cause they fought for. Erwin Rommel had personal courage and military prowess and there aren't statues of him in Germany; I doubt they would even be legal.
I agree. The memorials mean exactly what you say they mean—to you. You have no way of knowing what they mean to someone else, unless you ask them to tell you.
You seem very invested in this issue, but your guesswork about the motives and thoughts of others is irrelevant. You seem to be a white knight yelling at the sky; unless you are actually not interested in becoming better-informed, you should go down south and have some conversations with the people who live there.
Not a statue, but a monument in Hildesheim, his hometown. Get your tickets, it's time to travel to Germany and tell them to destroy his stone.
Incidentally, Winston Churchill said of Rommel in January 1942, "We have a very daring and skillful opponent against us. And may I say across the havoc of war, a great general.” So I guess Churchill was a traitor too.
Was just there, and at least in Berlin, the regret for the NS period is palpable. Incidentally, Google tells me that Hildesheim wants to modify the monument to reflect more recent knowledge about Rommel, not to his credit.
"The right has come to the conclusion that any public recognition that slavery is wrong, that slaveholders were bad, and that emancipation was good is a victory for Marxists."
Yet another case of MAGA ironically driving the latinification of US politics: This has long been the default frame for the midwit Latin American right. Part of why the region is so dysfunctional is that extractive oligarchs spent a century successfully casting basically-liberal calls for defeudalizing land reform, property tax reform, and/or ending force labor as cryptomarxism, such that now the default position for any given moderate, literate Catholic in the region is, huh, there must be something to Marxism.
"basically-liberal calls for defeudalizing land reform, property tax reform"
you're misusing the word 'liberal'. progressivism is not liberal, and does indeed bear a strong genetic relationship to marx.
" and/or ending force labor"
you can't "end forced labor" by using taxes to forcibly extract labor products.
I mean my counter argument to that is that as a thing slavery should be condemned, but also that the South itself should be allowed to keep its heroes and iconography instead of binding it to slavery. I think the civil war was TO preserve slavery, but my answer to that is also “so what?” Slavery was thought to be the entire thing that the South’s economy hanged on, its reliance on it fueled by hundreds of years of propaganda partially started BY the Founding Fathers. It leads to a bizarre moral relativism where there is no sympathy to the fact that perhaps the South isn’t Literally The Third Reich for perpetuating a terrible thing and instead that it should be treated as a dark time in the history of America, but one that is no more or less detestable as every other part of a country’s history. Many people celebrate Guy Fawkes and the IRA and Churchill and Castro and Zulu and Caesar despite them all being terrible people, I think the fact that slavery is looked down on as such a terrible thing to have done hundreds of years ago is exclusively a white, liberal, western thing. Slavery is still bad, but it’s been treated on the level of the Holocaust I feel is always been weird to me because as opposed to the fact the Holocaust was an outlier of its time culturally the idea of ending slavery is still a radical position and only the modern first world really balks at slavery as it does today. One testimony of a guy who kept slaves and didnt particularly care when they got fried I’d say is actually proof of my point rather than a refutation, because pretty much everywhere else in the world slavery still happens and slaves are treated worse in places like Asia and Africa than western slavers could ever have dreamed of. Our disgust with slavery is due to us evolving to have values of decency, democracy and fairness, but we still dont go around fighting wars to end slavery in the congo. It seems like a unique pretension that we westerners cant be caught doing something that makes us seem like the guys we bought our slaves off of, unless it’s kids in china in which case we sweep that under the rug
Who cares what people in shithole countries think? The English knew slavery was wrong centuries ago. Our Founding Fathers knew it was wrong as well.
Many societies had forms of slavery. Racialized slavery that maintained a class of slaves through generations was comparatively rare, though.
"It wasn't as bad as the Holocaust." Okay, that's fine. I agree. What does that tell us about the actual topic at issue? This is like a point a 5th grader would make. I was going to say middle schooler but that felt generous.
If the same record-keeping, video, audio and first-hand accounts of slavery were as prevalent as those from the Holocaust perhaps you would have a different point of view. There's no Schindler's List, The Pianist or Come and See equivalent to slavery which painstakingly shows the depths of human depravity. I've seen 12 Years A Slave, Amistad, etc. and they are very interesting historical accounts, but don't get to the barbarism that existed.
You're applying the purity test to evil which is the easy way out. "Pretty much everywhere in the world slavery happens" is an absolute load of shit.
Our slavery was a detestable, disgusting, abhorrent time in history. Up to four million Africans are estimated to have been kidnapped, tortured and transported to the Americas with as many as 15% dying on the journey alone - not to mention those who died before boarding ships or after arrival and before auction.
If you think the only people who despise American slavery are white Western Liberals then I truly feel for your worldview.
Who did the kidnapping?
does whether slavery was good or bad depend on the answer
Slavery is bad either way, but I think this question is a good test for whether you're treating historical behavior in an evenhanded way, vs trying to tell a morality tale about how bad white people were.
See also: https://unfashiontruthec.substack.com/p/the-forgotten-history-of-islamic
It does not! But Africans get off the hook for their role in the slave trade. Europeans provided the demand for slaves but they did not (99% of the time) go into Africa raiding and seizing people for slavery. They went to the port and other Africans handed over the slaves for guns and gold and other goods. Many people have a mental model of slavery that involves wrongdoing only by whites. I think that's wrong.
"because pretty much everywhere else in the world slavery still happens" - Slavery is illegal everywhere in the world. If it still happens, that is a problem arising out of poverty, illegal activities/groups and weak law enforcement, things you don't abolish with a simple legislation change. Slavery already wasn't the norm when the Civil War happened. - "slaves are treated worse in places like Asia and Africa than western slavers could ever have dreamed of" Where is your evidence of that? While it's hard to quantify brutality, the Atlantic slave trade had an exceptionally high death rate (during the transport and on the field), and was the biggest forced mass migration movement. What makes you think they were treated better than in other places? Of course treatment differed from household to household, but that would be true anywhere.
"If it still happens, that is a problem arising out of poverty"
In 1850, the US was quite poor by modern standards, with a per-capita GDP comparable to modern sub-saharan Africa:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-project-database?tab=line&country=~USA&mapSelect=~USA
Was the poverty of the US in 1850 a valid excuse for slavery?
I never said it was an excuse. I said it was a problem with you can’t change with a simple legislation change, as slavery is already illegal everywhere. The commenter said “we still don’t go fighting wars to end slavery in Congo”, which presupposes that fighting a war would abolish these practices.
The working conditions in Kongo are indeed close to slavery, although not exactly chattel slavery, they are defined by debt bondage, which includes forced labour, extreme exploitation and child labor. People enter debt bondage or extreme exploitation (or send their children to work) due to extreme poverty. This is not a moral statement, saying that these practices are to be tolerated because of it, but means that changing that would need more than just changing laws.
The Douglass quotes are interesting. If he could forgive his former owners, despite personal experience of slavery, why do so many leftists, especially black ones, bang on about reparations owed by the West to people several generations away from any direct experience of slavery? I assume they do realise that this attitude makes race relations worse, not better, but they're not really trying to achieve good race relations.
For some reason, the French can maintain the statues of their kings despite being ardent support of the Republic. That goes for many other nations as well.
Americans don’t have to treat all of our history as a morality play. We should remember our past as it really happened.
Yeah, I’m sure if leftists put up statues of BLM rioters, you would totally defend it, our history isn’t a morality play bro!
No, my statement is neither supporting nor defending putting up new statues based on current events. That is obviously not the same as preserving cultural history via statues that are already in place. I think statues that have been in place for very significant time periods have an inherent cultural value that modern statues do not.
I don't favor French or any other kings, but I do like having statues of them. Nor do I support President Jackson, but I am not opposed to statues of him either. And I certainly do not advocate for tearing them down.
And as for new statues, I am more in favor of murals, bro.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/america-needs-more-murals-not-more
Kings arent slavers and traitors. These are celebratory monuments, not a museum. Do we have statues to the Rosenbergs?
Then the solution is simple: change them to statues of Abraham Lincoln.
Fredrick Douglass actually wrote 3 autobiographies—4 counting Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892 Revision): A deeply expanded final version published three years before his death.
My favorite is his first—Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845): His first and most famous book. Written shortly after his escape from slavery, this short but powerful narrative was published to prove his literacy and establish his authentic identity to the public.
I would highly recommend reading some of Douglass’s speeches. A great collection may be found in Great Speeches by Frederick Douglass edited by James Daley. My favorite speech is Self-Made Men (1884).
“I have been asked “How will this theory affect the negro?” and “What shall be done in his case?” My general answer is “Give the negro fair play and let him alone. If he lives, well. If he dies, equally well. If he cannot stand up, let him fall down.”
The apple must have strength and vitality enough in itself to hold on, or it will fall to the ground where it belongs. The strongest influence prevails and should prevail. If the vital relation of the fruit is severed, it is folly to tie the stem to the branch or the branch to the tree or to shelter the fruit from the wind. So, too, there is no wisdom in lifting from the earth a head which must only fall the more heavily when the help is withdrawn. Do right, though the heavens fall; but they will not fall.”—Fredrick Douglass
I”m starting to worry that I might be beyond tedious at this point, but note that I am matching your anti-racist zeal tit for tat. So forgive me, as I forgive you… (My comments are for others primarily anyway.)
As a hardcore libertarian, like you, I hate chud socialism, populism, etc. But your transformation from Hoste to Hanania has resulted in an overcorrection to the point that you are just a dogmatic anti-racist bigot. It may startle you to be called a bigot but it’s probably because bigotry is now associated exclusively with racism. But I literally mean you are intolerant of racialists. In a sense, you are like some of those ex-communists from the 50s whose anti-communist zeal got the better of them (the difference being that anti-communism was/is correct).
Your transformation seems to have a personal component, i.e., the idea of being stuck in Jordan/Palestine as a 130+ with all those horrible genotypes horrifies you (as it should), so it results in a great deal of empathy for non-white high-IQ people stuck in sh*tholes around the world. This makes sense and is applaudable, but it overlooks that preferring your own kind is not immoral and your anti-racist zeal prevents you from even mustering an argument against it (other than “skin color is superficial..”) In other words, racism is not the gotcha you think it is; it’s just a stick to beat people with like a Protestant preacher railing against imaginary sins. (On a daily basis, it seems!)
Your pro-immigrant arguments are rock solid as far as they go except for the glaring fact that you ignore that alien phenotypes are externalities for many people. But your anti-racism forces you to ignore these costs. That’s PC anti-economics. You would never let a leftist get away with this!
So, how do we internalize these externalities? Property rights. But that’s exactly when you become a socialist—you won’t acknowledge that the natives own the streets/roads. If you have to embrace socialism to defeat anti-racism, you might not be the defender of property rights you think you are. Instead, you are, apparently, a “liberal” who thinks that property rights are defeasible for the purpose of “higher ends”. That’s how we got DEI, etc.
I say ditch the unfalsifiable anti-racist moralizing and go full bore for freedom of association and property rights. You will still get plenty of immigration (in some areas) and hopefully deflate the chud socialists.
Slavery.... IS BAD!
Yes. The Arab world should get on with abolishing it forthwith, just as the Western Christian world did going on 200 years ago.
All you have to do is imagine a Muslim nation in 1860 where half of it fights a bloody civil war to maintain their right to keep Christian slaves. And make everything else about that nation and its antecedent region the same as the CSA. Would Matt Walsh celebrate the Muslim Robert E Lee? These people are as dim as college leftists that wear Che T-Shirts or idiots who deny the brutal nature of Communism. Dare not admit slavery was awful and that the CSA was an ISIS-like state keeping 30% of its inhabitants in chains. That is but an asterisk on an otherwise noble enterprise, apparently. This is like people who excuse Stalin because maybe they had a nice subway.
There isn't even really a "nice" thing to prop up. The South was extremely economically backward and undeveloped compared to the North. It was poor, illiterate, with terrible infrastructure, and endemic mosquito born tropical disease like malaria and yellow fever. Its culture was more violent and uncouth. Southern elites were not a particularly sympathetic class of elites when you peel back the curtains. They were rapey, they didn't push innovation and investment like Northern capital did, and they were extremely jealous of unearned, unmerited social prominence.
Even the things most people like about the South - the music, the accent, the food, etc. is a *fusion* of European and African folkways.
The antebellum South just mostly sucked.
(I am Southern for the record).
This argument seems to me to miss the value of retaining Confederate monuments - which is their link to the past, to history.
If you go around Europe, you'll see lots and lots of monuments. Lots of them are to people who did things which would not stand up to modern scrutiny, and which no one would approve of nowadays. In Britain, there is a statue to Oliver Cromwell outside the Houses of Parliament - Cromwell's activities in Ireland were at least as bad as anything most of the slaveholders did in the American South. Statues to various imperialist figures like Clive of India dot the landscape. And there are many more - kings who oppressed the people, generals who committed what would nowadays be considered atrocities. But they are part of the landscape, part of the history of the country, and their presence is part of what enables British people to link to their history - not least the history of how attitudes in the past were different, such that the people who erected the statues might celebrate military success while passing over the darker aspects of that success. Simply walking around among these connects people to that past, both the good and the bad of it.
In America we have a much shorter history, but the same thing applies - and in the South, for obvious reasons, a lot of that history prior to 1865 involves supporters and defenders of slavery. Removing those monuments breaks the connection between the present and the past - not only the past of the Civil War itself, but also the past of post-Civil War generations, especially in the time of Jim Crow, which is when most of these monuments were erected: it is an important lesson to know that these racist figures WERE celebrated, and that - like it or not - we live as the heirs to that celebration.
The mistake is not to keep the statues: the mistake is the stupidity of those like Matt Walsh, who defend their retention by pretending that people like Lee were paragons of virtue, overlooking the terrible thing that they were fighting for. We should keep the statues - but with a realistic understanding of why they are there in the first place. And we should add to them. Put up statues of heroic anti-slavery campaigners next to those of Lee or Jackson, as our own contribution to the layering of history in our country.
And the same thing that should prompt us to keep the statues should indeed make us keep Juneteenth, which only recently became a federal holiday, but which was celebrated by Black people long before that, going right back to the Civil War period. That is another part of the layering of history, and I strongly support that as well.
I just wish the emancipation holiday wasn't called something that seems to celebrate illiteracy.
Are there statues of Cromwell in the Republic of Ireland though? We don't celebrate people that literally terrorized a huge segment of our country. 2 CSA states were majority black.
There are to my knowledge no statues of Cromwell in the Republic of Ireland. There are, however, statues to Julius Caesar in France (most famously in the Tuileries), despite his having massacred more people there than Cromwell did in Ireland. And of course there are statues to kings who oppressed the entire country, such as Henry VIII.
While we're at it, there are several statues of Vlad the Impaler in Romainia.
I spent 20 years of my secondary teaching career correcting the hatred of America taught in social studies class. While I taught Spanish, invariably a student would make a comment along the lines of, "We really are a bad country." I had a short reply, which basically stated we should not shut the door on the past, nor relive it every day." I saw the attitude rising at the university in the 90's, which is why I did not seek a place in academia.
I'm all for getting rid of the 1890's Lost Cause statues which sought to perpetuate an ideological interpretation of the past. But fought against the removal of a monument to the Confederate dead in Indianapolis. I also translated documents in seeking the truth about two British citizens who were disappeared in Argentina in the 70's. Never have gotten the true story about them.
I immediately saw that adding Juneteenth completed a Trinity. July 4th: the start of freedom; Juneteenth: the elimination of an antithetical institution and MLK Day: where half citizens became full citizens.
> I immediately saw that adding Juneteenth completed a Trinity. July 4th: the start of freedom; Juneteenth: the elimination of an antithetical institution and MLK Day: where half citizens became full citizens.
I have to remember that!
> the South retconned the entire Civil War to make the conflict about states’ rights, thus creating the “Lost Cause” narrative. In a sense it was, but that narrative begs the question of “the right of states to do what?” It was to own black people...
This is not quite right. South Carolina did secede because they thought a Republican president would threaten slavery; however, most of the other Southern states, while agreeing that the Republicans would harm the cause of slavery in the long run, thought that in the short run Lincoln would be too constrained by the Constitution & Congress to do much in that direction; they only joined South Carolina in seceding once Lincoln reinforced Fort Sumter, showing he meant to keep SC in the Union by force & thus, in much of the South's opinion, violating the right of the states to secede. For a detailed discussion of this see William Freehling's book on the pre-Civil-War South, which also notes that the antebellum South wasn't much concerned with states' rights other than secession except as they supported the maintenance of slavery--it was the South, through the Fugitive Slave Act, that mounted the greatest attack on states' internal autonomy in the years before the Civil War.
I highly recommend reading this beautiful speech from Douglass from 1867 in defense of Chinese immigration. This was a stance which was unpopular even at the time, a time of much more open immigration. Douglass was one of history's great champions of liberty.
https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/our-composite-nationality/
I grew up in the rural South with the Lost Cause in a way most people, including people in Southern cities and suburbs, probably don't understand. Actually thinking about what it really meant in general and for me and who I was in particular was one of the first moral, philosophical, and ideological things I thought about in a serious way as a teenager and young adult.
My opinions are basically that anybody who doesn't have a background pretty close to mine and is going around wearing the Lost Cause is playing dress up in stuff they don't understand. Call it cultural appropriation if you like and of the absolute stupidest thing you could have possibly copied from the South. Seriously, go listen to bluegrass and eat some fried catfish and okre and leave this mess alone.
If you *did* inhabit this stuff the way a fish inhabited water, and you haven't thought about it, you need to go read your Faulkner (especially A Rose for Emily) and your C Van Woodard. Once you can stomach that, graduate to Ty Seidule and finally James Baldwin writing on Faulkner. These first 3 are Southerners who understand loving both the South and the truth. The last finally calls out how loving the South can blind you to the truth.
*Edit*
If you need more after this, you can go read about postwar era Texas from 1865-1875 and the general caliber of murdering thug involved in "resistance" to the Union. A good example is Benjamin Bickerstaff. This guy's murdering rampage against Unionists and free blacks was so bad that it was finally some disgruntled townspeople who ambushed him and shot him and not the US military who had been chasing him all over NE Texas for weeks. The South and Texas in particular was literally beset by bands of highwaymen and brigands, Confederate deserters turned "resistance" postwar, who hid in camps in canebrakes and woods and came out mostly to steal from and murder civilians.
One thing that should be marked up to the Confederate generals' credit is that almost to a man they said, "Well, we lost. Go home, pick up the plow or the pen or whatever you did before this war started and try to make the best of it." As far as I am aware, none of them advocated starting a "resistance" to the victorious North. Those Confederate deserters were thugs, plain and simple, and were probably pretty poor soldiers to boot.