I've recently read several conservative writers who used to oppose the wholesale removal of Confederate monuments now taking the tack that if neo-Nazis are going to make them the focus of their movement, they have to come down.
Rich Lowry:
The monuments should go. Some of them simply should be trashed; others transmitted to museums, battlefields, and cemeteries. The heroism and losses of Confederate soldiers should be commemorated, but not in everyday public spaces where the monuments are flashpoints in poisonous racial contention, with white nationalists often mustering in their defense.
Ryan Booth:
Those of you who want Lee's statues to remain don’t need to defend them from the Left — you need to defend them from the alt-Right! They are the ones who are ruining any chance you have for keeping them.
If there are so many of who are not racist who honestly honor Southern culture and heritage so much, why wasn’t there a giant protest group in Charlottesville, pushing away the Nazis while chanting “heritage, not hate”? Why did you leave the opposition to the Left?
. . . . The Confederate flag and Confederate monuments have become gods to a group of people bent on hate and violence. As such, we’re better off without them.
Indeed it seems that if the racists are determined to make the defense of Confederate monuments their rallying cry, those monuments are not long for this world. If city governments don't remove them, mobs will.
2 comments:
A mob did in Durham. It was a soldier statue, not a leader.
@Anon
It is vital to note that this was, of course, a mob action in response to other mob actions.
When the city government decided to remove the statue officially, a mob of white supremacists came out marching with fiery torches in a display of racial intimidation. When ordinary people stood up to protest against such intimidation, the mob of white supremacists turned to physical violence.
While one mob was busy beating living breathing people in the name of making plaing their abhorant racial hatreds, another was merely tearing down an unfeeling old hunk of metal dedicated to a soldier who is long dead.
A great lie keeps getting repeated by one side of this issue - that their position is about honoring the sacrifices of the common southerners of the war, and putting aside the politics of the conflict they took part in.
Funny - you don't see many Southerners erecting statues of figures like Newton Knight, who led Jones County in rebellion against the Confederacy over being forced into a conflict they did not support, being taxed unjustly, and being forcibly conscripted to serve an army and a government they viewed as illegitimate. In fact, Knight is flat out demonized by most southerners. What happened to honoring the sacrifices of the common Southerner, and putting aside the politics of the war?
Post a Comment