There can no longer be any doubt that the modern use of
Confederate symbols has nothing to do with Southern heritage. Dylan Roof used the Confederate flag freely
in his racist postings on the Internet, before he walked into a black church,
talked briefly with worshipers there, and killed nine of them in cold
blood. The alt-right marchers in
Charleston mixed the Confederate flag freely with Nazi swastika flags and other
symbols of the violent and racist right.
Confederate monuments have been used as gathering points for the
alt-right, and protecting those monuments has become a mission and a rallying
cry for these white-supremacist, extreme-nationalistic and racist groups.
In truth, Confederate monuments have always been about
racial injustice. The timeline recording
the erection of these monuments shows a clear peak in the early twentieth
century. That peak corresponds with
other peaks in the nation’s history: the peak of membership in the Klu Klux
Klan, and the peak in lynchings of blacks in the United States. These monuments, placed in prominent places
in southern cities, parks and universities, were intended to be a reminder of
racial separation and white supremacy, visible to both whites and blacks.
Image credit: Southern Poverty Law Center
Now, over 150 years since the end of the Civil War, it is
time for the monuments to come down. The
men honored in bronze and stone committed treason against the United States to
protect the practice of slavery, one of the most heinous organized crimes against
humanity, behind only human sacrifice and genocide. Those who erected these statues belonged to
organizations that promoted racial injustice, segregation, and lynching.
Many southerners and conservatives who don’t want to “erase
history” by removing the statues. I
believe that Confederate memorials should remain, wherever there is an
appropriate historical context.
Confederate statues should remain on battlefields and in museums. Confederate flags should fly freely during
historical re-enactments, where history buffs have gone to great effort to
re-create the uniforms, the camps, the cooking, and the life of soldiers in the
Civil War.
But the men who
directed war against the United States, who defended slavery and who caused the
bloodiest battles in our history should not be given places of honor in our
country! These statues should not remain in our cities,
parks and universities as a tacit validation of racial injustice for Americans
of today.
I had a Facebook conversation with a relative who compared the removal of Confederate monuments to the removal of other monuments, such as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. This is a false comparison, and totally inappropriate. Confederate monuments commemorate evil; they represent the atrocity of slavery which we fought the war to defeat. Our own honored dead, who gave their lives to vanquish slavery and fascism, should rise from their graves to protest the symbols of those evils put in places of honor, and openly paraded in our streets.
Russians had to deal with a similar problem after the fall
of the Soviet Union. At the time, much
Soviet history came to light. The worst of it, hidden for two generations,
revealed the savagery of Josef Stalin’s purges, forced imprisonment of
innocents, and the use of slave labor in labor camps, as documented in
Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago”, long banned in Soviet times. In addition to the purges, there was the
forced redistribution of food and the curtailment of migration during the great
famine, the “Golodmor” of Ukraine.
Together these atrocities cost the lives of ten to twenty-five million
Soviet citizens. In the 1990s and early
2000s, many statues of Lenin and Stalin were taken down. A number were gathered together in a park
beside the Moscow River, called “The Garden of Fallen Statues”. Statues of Stalin, some of them truly
imposing in size, were gathered together, and surrounded by two large works of
art. One display surrounding the statues
on two sides, represented Stalin’s victims in the gulags as thousands of faces,
trapped behind barbed wire. The other
display featured statues of starving children, and surrounded Stalin on the
other two sides. It is one of the most
moving pieces of art I have ever seen.*
Perhaps something like that would be appropriate for
Confederate monuments, statues, and memorials.
These things could be gathered up in a single place, and surrounded by
artwork representing the cruelty of slavery, the separation of families and the
sale of human beings like cattle, the hardship of work in the fields and the
brutality or the overseers. The tragedy
of the Civil War should be represented, too, by statues of thousands of dying
and shattered young men. And the later
tragedy of racial injustice, segregation, denial of civil and political rights,
and lynching should be present, too, as a reminder of why the statues were
erected, and why they must come down.
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* Unfortunately, in the current political environment in
Russia, there is an effort to rehabilitate Josef Stalin and his
reputation. According to a recent article, the Garden of Fallen Statues has been redesigned, and there is no mention of the art works which formerly surrounded statues of Josef Stalin.
