"When History’s Losers Write the Story" [Confederate Statues]

From the article:

"I visited a summer camp in western Russia in July 2015. Its theme was “military patriotism,” and it involved dozens of teenagers lounging around in tents, wrestling, carving wood and making garlands. They were also taking history classes. Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader who killed millions of Soviet citizens, was remembered fondly.

“Whatever your view of Stalin, you can’t deny that he was a strong leader,” a counselor told me later over steaming bowls of cabbage soup. “Stalin won the war. He made it possible for us to go to space. You can’t just throw out a person like that from history.”

Russia has not faced the darker parts of its past, something I spent a lot of time thinking about as a correspondent there. But my own country has memory problems, too. Take the Civil War. Historians tell us it was fought over slavery. But an entirely different version unspooled last month at an Applebee’s in Delaware.

“It’s too simplified to say the war was over slavery,” said Jeffrey Plummer, head of a local chapter of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans. “That’s what’s been taught in the schools, but there’s more to it.”

Selective memory, it seems, is a global phenomenon. Think of Turkey and its blank spot where the Armenian genocide should be. Or Japan with its squeamishness about its aggression and mass murder in China. It starts as a basic human impulse to take the sting out of defeat or to avoid admitting some atrocity. But it’s also a way to help cope with a difficult present. And like a growth on a tree ring, it can keep the past off-kilter until some future generation is brave enough to right it."



My response:
When talking about Confederate history (and tacitly memorials/statues), this article makes comparisons to Nazi, Imperial Japanese, and Soviet history (and tacitly memorials/statues). But we're not comparing like and like. We're talking about statues of Stalin being compared to statues of Confederate soldiers. Germany doesn't tolerate any statues or memorials dedicated to Hitler, but it has plenty to honor its fallen, both in WW1 and WW2. If you want to compare like and like, then compare Confederate statues of Jefferson Davis to statues of Stalin. But that's not *really* what's going on, is it? Statues of Confederate soldiers, statues in many cases dedicated to the fallen, are being torn down. Do you think for one second that anyone would even consider tearing down Soviet statues in Russia dedicated to not Stalin or Lenin, but to fallen soldiers?

When you make this kind of association, condemning statues of Confederate soldiers and fallen because of their association with an ill war, you're judging soldiers by who they fought for. Now I'll go ahead and say that I'd be happy to see statues honoring Stalin and Hitler torn down (don't know of any honoring Hitler), but would object to any statues or memorials honoring fallen Wehrmacht or Soviet soldiers being torn down. Because those soldiers and what they did are divorced from the public policy. Being unable to divorce soldiers from the policies of political leaders has a very real meaning today.

Many people today think that the Iraq War was about oil. If people believe that and are unable to divorce soldiers from the policies of their political leaders, what does that say about those who fought in the Iraq War, and memorials honoring the fallen soldiers? If you can't divorce soldiers from the public policies of their national leaders, then you would have to condemn Iraq veterans for "Bush's War for Oil" in the same way that you condemn Confederate soldiers for the public policies of their national leaders. If you're going to condemn soldiers who served their country honorably because their political leaders had foreign policies that you find abhorrent, then I guess I'll just come out and say it - you can stick it where the sun don't shine.

 

You simply can't have this mentality that Confederate soldiers are undivorced from the policies of their national leaders and say, "support the troops, not the war." Because you're literally condemning the troops for the war.

 

We do not live in the CSA. Why are there so few (if any) statues of Sherman or Grant in the South? The SOUTH is no longer part of the CSA.
In fact most of the statues of the soldiers who fought for the CSA were erected at the height of the Jim Crow era...they were celebrating THAT era...not the CIvil War...but rather what the Civil War stood for to the South....slavery

 

You mean why have Southerners not erected statues of men who burned "From Atlanta to the Sea"? You're right, it is odd that people wouldn't erect statues to honor pillaging.

And?

Peddling partisan propaganda I see. Even left-leaning fact checking sites call that a lie.
http://www.politifact.com/punditfac...nfederate-symbols-gain-prominence-civil-righ/

So what? No rebuttal to anything the OP said? I mean, if you can't argue the point of the OP, I guess it makes to try to shift the conversation and avoid it's cogent points. I mean, if you're not interested in having an actual discussion. This is what politics seems to have become these days - "team play" partisan politics of people just ignoring what they hear and regurgitating debunked partisan talking points.

 

You simply can't judge soldiers by the policies of their political leaders and say, "support the troops, not the war."

 

when the south erects monuments to William Faulkner or Rosa Parks they will be taken seriously, until then they are just laughingstocks

 

The Civil War is over. Back in the 1970s when I joined the military, our basic training barracks was divided by northerners and southerners. I found it unbelievable as a northerner whose great, great grand father fought in the civil war in the Illinois Militia, in other words on the northern side.

But when you take the period of time into context, there are good reasons why there was a civil war. It certainly isn't cut and dried like everyone today sees or believes it to be. I firmly believe the major issues were economic. In the south, huge farms (or the dark word for it, plantations) couldn't be managed by a single farmer for production and sales to the northern industries that created the products from the commodities produced. At the time, as wrong as we now know, slavery was not uncommon around the world. Southern farmers simply "bought" slaves to do the tasks BEFORE machinery was invented to do the job. After machinery was invented then it would become an exercise in ROI, or return on investment for the cost of machinery.

There also wasn't the supply of workers to employ farm people, certainly not from Mexico as we see it happen today. Ask yourselves, are illegal immigrants slaves? there's certainly more on that to consider. So at the time it was required to buy slaves to do the job or watch your land investment go to waste. The Civil War pretty much destroyed the economy of the South. Therefore, the Civil War was primarily on economic issues followed by states' rights to choose their economic destiny.

These statues being torn down are only attempting to erase history to avoid any deeper discussion of the war. And those who ignore history end up repeating it. If we don't know the cause then we will repeat our mistakes.

But like I said, my great, great grand father fought on the northern side and I admire him for that.

Steve

 

I lived my first 24 years up north (NY, CT, IL) and my last 31 years in the South (TX). Outsiders don't understand the South is a distinct culture and these statues represent their region, their culture, their friends, and their families. They do not represent slavery or the Confederate government.

 

You're being disingenuous. Why should the rest of Americans, and all the blacks who live in the South, want to erect statues that glorify people who went to war to destroy the Union, preserve slavery and keep other human beings in chains?
And it's a fact that many of those confederate statues were erected long after the Civil War, not to remember fallen soldiers but as a symbol for keeping the ******s down, as Randy Newman said so clearly.
It's also a fact that some places in the South refused to celebrate the 4th of July for over 70 years following the war, once again demonstrating their hatred of our country and their inbred intransigent bigotry and immaturity.
If you want to compare statues, don't compare apples and oranges.

 

what they do represent is a bunch of rude uncivilized white people.

 

But I thought these statues were about history. I guess not. I guess it's about honoring a group of states that fought a war for slavery that killed 600,000

And by the way...your own link showed that most of these statues WERE constructed during the height if the Jim Crow era (note I didn't say civil rights era), Bad form for a moderator to be calling posters "liars" when THEY are wrong...or lying

 

Statues offend and must be removed but hanging a white child for a prop in a music video is form of artistic expression.

What will tomorrow bring us.

 

It's interesting that you'd choose to respond to what I didn't say rather than what I did.

 

1. I hardly think it a complicated thing, and anyone who read the op would have read it - the statues are mostly about honoring the men who fought. What kind of silly nonsense are you trying to peddle, that it's about "honoring stayes"? No one erects statues of the fallen to honor states, no one erects statues of soldiers to honor states - that's just crazy talk.

2. Did I saw they were not constructed during the period between reconstruction snd the civil rights era? You said, "they were celebrating THAT era", as if people erected statues of their fathers and grandathers who fought, we're wounded, and even died in combat just as some silly excuse to say, "hur de dur, we're going to celebrate TODAY - but going to almost exclusively honor soldiers from the Civil War to do so, becauze we're so tricksy." No. The reason why is plain, clear, and obvious, and even a left wing fact checking site says that you're full of crap on that.

 

Good luck getting the revisionists to depart from the utterly discredited "CW was all about slavery" lie narrative (or any of their other lie narrative advertisements for that matter). They have cherry-picked quotes from this or that document, SEE! SEE! (while ignoring 10,000 other pieces of necessary context). It's how they operate, how they lie to and fool the ignorant. They won't change their stripes.

Removing or protesting CW statues in a country where slavery was abolished, while the institution is still alive in many lesser parts of the world, is the height of hypocrisy. Removing or protesting ANY historical statue about ANYTHING is the height of hypocrisy without removing or protesting ALL of them.

The LW thinks its hypocritical zeal will end up having a unifying Lutheran Reformation effect similar to how removing iconography from the Catholic Church did. It won't, is counterproductive and is doing truly IMMENSE damage to Democrats and the gov-edu-union-contractor-grantee-trial lawyer-MSM Complex. GOOD!

 

That's your interpretation, your opinion. Not fact.

 

"Peddling partisan propaganda I see. Even left-leaning fact checking sites call that a lie.
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/aug/15/joy-reid/did-confederate-symbols-gain-prominence-civil-righ/"

That's not a lie.
Lesh said: ↑
"In fact most of the statues of the soldiers who fought for the CSA were erected at the height of the Jim Crow era...they were celebrating THAT era...not the CIvil War...but rather what the Civil War stood for to the South....slavery"

He/she was right.
Even your own link says that.

 

(I don't expect the confederate sympathizers to read maybe past the first line or two below...but I'll lay it out here for the random reader who may be interested...)

At the time - when those thousands of monuments were popping up all across Dixie, it was primarily for the cause of the white supremacist south.

The black population could go to hell. It was meant as a big **** you to them.

In the later 1800's early 1900's - in the south was a time they really flexed their White Supremacist muscle.

That's when the Jim Crow laws, literacy tests, state mandated segregation - and basically full stomping on the Civil Rights of blacks in the South came about with a brute force.

That short bit of time after the 15th Amendment when blacks were allowed to vote, and it was Federally enforced - was gone.

Some states that had the black population make up over 50% or registered voters in the years after the war, plummeted to literally a fraction of 1% by 1900.

At this same time, a resurfacing of Confederate "nobility" came about, and United Confederate Veterans, the United Daughters of the Confederacy set about to rewriting the history of the War.

They started portraying the CSA as being about things like the tariffs, and States' Rights, and tried to whitewash the slavery aspect out of it altogether - and to the extent slavery existed, it was a benevolent kind, with gentle Mammies, generous, loving slaveowners, and happy happy slaves.

They did this to justify Jim Crow and the White Supremacy that brought out KKK and other paramilitary organizations that were terrorizing and intimidating the hell out of the the blacks at that time.

It was those women's groups that set in motion, even a hundred years later, with their Lost Cause propaganda and erecting of these statues all over the South the whitewash myth that still lingers.

I don't feel strongly about moving these statues one way or another, but people need to remember why and under what circumstances they were put there.

The over arching message was: White Supremacy Reigns.

 

Ver

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Very well written. That could also be extrapolated into the political actions of Lyndon Baines Johnson who sent millions of Americans to fight in a war across the Pacific. Hmm.... I wonder how many statues of LBJ have been erected?

 

That's fine. I didn't expect many posters to actually read and respond to the the argument of the op. I mean, you didn't.

 

certainly its fact...obviously

 

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No doubt in your statement. Yet it was Democrats pushing the era of Jim Crow that were responsible for the erection of those statues, the march down Pennsylvania Ave by the KKK as Woodrow Wilson applauded, extolled the movie 'Birth of a Nation', segregated the military and federal government, including establishing the first internment camps based upon ethnicity. That also goes for FDR who continued the heinous actions of Wilson during the Second World War. Democrats all....

 

Already addressed this. As I said, the monuments to Confederate soldiers were not erected to honor Jim Crow laws (lmfao) or the states - you don't need to bend over backwards to figure out why monuments to soldiers were erected. They were to honor soldiers.

"This was an era of generational change during which Civil War veterans, dying of old age, were venerated by their children and grandchildren, experts told us.

"Organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans came into being," said Charles S. Bullock, III, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Georgia. "Civil War veterans were honored in parades. There is a Confederate Memorial Day which pre-dates the National Memorial Day.""

 

I responded to another post of yours where you called a poster a liar, and backed it up by providing a link that proved her right, and you wrong. Ha!

As far as the OP, it's buncha junk. The vast majority of the few statues that have been taken down are of the generals and the leaders of the slavocracy, not the fallen privates and soldiers.

I also did address the whole topic directly with that lengthier post on the United Daughters of the Confederacy post, and I note: YOU didn't read or respond to it, just flipped your hand.

 

It might seem like an opportune time to score partisan points by pointing out these were largely Democrats, but that is extraneous and misses the point. These statues were erected during the Jim Crow era, but they weren't erected to honor Jim Crow laws. We don't need to bend over backwards to figure out why statues of soldiers were erected - it was to honor soldiers.

And when people condemn the statues of soldiers of the Confederacy because of their association with the war, they are condemning men who fought honorably because of what their political leaders did. This is logically NO different than someone who believes the Iraq war was about oil associating American veterans with that "war for oil" and wanting to tear down statues of American soldiers fallen in the Iraq War because of their association with the war.