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Another casualty in the great Confederate statues war: the grave of General Lee's horse. Good riddance to this rebellious and traitorous ungulate.
What is more significant than the event is reaction on twitter - reaction consisting, as usual, of empty talk of revenge and even more empty threats, with no hint that posters intend to take part in their fight themselves.
"Someone shall do something!"
Narrator voice: "No one did anything at all."
I personally never understood the reverence for the Southern Cause/Dixie Pride among the right. It was largely thanks to the slave states that the US got such a big black population, which in turn is responsible for turning formerly great cities like Detroit into basket cases and making downtowns of cities like Baltimore, St Louis, Memphis and many others very dangerous. Don't forget that some of these Southern plantation oligarchs even talked about incorporating parts of the Carribean directly to aid the plantation economy.
The argument that "what ruined Detroit was letting black settle there" is unconvincing because once you have such a large population, they will have to go somewhere. And Jim Crow could never have been kept forever. Really, the plantation owners were just greedy capitalists putting profits over their own people, not unlike their contemporary equivalents. Why glorify the generals who fought for such a system?
From what I understand, most of these statues were put up after the civil war as a way to placate Southerners at a time when Southern identity was still a live issue. So basically a form of pragmatism. As the years have gone by, and as whites in the US have become more monolithic, the need that necessitated these statues has faded. I suspect that's why you see these muted reactions. It may have been a big issue 100 years ago or perhaps even 50 years ago. But not now.
Hopefully the US right can come to understand two things. First, the south in the civil war deserved to lose. Second, they should have been stopped way earlier.
A people who for a time, formed a country and resisted the government’s desire to impose its will on an unwilling population? It’s not really that surprising to me. Confederate flags represent resistance to tyranny much like Gadsden flags do.
I can't tell if you are being facetious. Either against the cause of the Confederacy or the cause of the American Revolution. Or, if somehow you don't notice the contradiction.
Both flags are literally flags used in America by those rebelling against the government that they saw at the time as tyrannical. As such they became cultural symbols of resistance to tyranny especially on the right. I don’t see why the fact that they came from two different wars has much to do with why they might be popular among people who see the government overreaching into their affairs.
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«Loyalty» is the pillar of right-wing sentimentalism, same as «justice» is the pillar of the left. (Strawmanned versions: «bootlicking» and «envy», respectively). The Left can't not pander to the wretched and the weak, even if their weakness is purely a matter of theatrical convention. The Right cannot not elevate and justify champions, even if those are small-minded, pointless scum or, at times, straight-up enemies. Something something The Lion, Our Hero, The Manly Leader, The Great General and His Loyal Horse, the true Man of the Right feels part of his soul would die if those were trampled upon.
And so The Left feels compelled to trample.
Seriously though, defending a horse's grave from «desecration» makes no less sense than defending a street-painted pride flag from skidmarks, so this is a fine test of mobilization potential.
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I am in partial agreement with you, and have advanced similar arguments in the past; I had an extended back-and-forth with one user on /r/CultureWarRoundup a while back about this exact topic. In addition to your very trenchant points, I would add that not only is plantation-style slavery terrible for the slave, it’s also terrible for the master! It inculcates sloth and unbearable haughtiness, as the slaveowner lords lazily over a totally dependent class of workers who free him from the need to engage in even the most trivial personal labor. As a right-winger I’m positively-inclined toward some form of aristocracy and hierarchy, but I was also raised with enough Protestant Work Ethic such that I’m constitutionally unable not to feel some level of contempt for the slave-owning lifestyle, to say nothing of the morality of the practice.
That being said, I think it’s important to remember that a great number of slave-owners in the early 19th century were already beginning to feel trapped by, and ashamed of, the institution, and were desperate to find a way to end it. Some of the most important organizers and funders of the American Colonization Society - including several Founding Fathers and eminent statesmen - were slaveowners who were looking for a way out. Remember that many states had laws dictating that any slave-owner who manumitted a slave was then responsible for essentially providing a life-long pension for that slave - something which would have been utterly financially impossible and ruinous for owners of large plantations that employed dozens or even hundreds of slaves.
Thomas Jefferson repeatedly predicted that slavery would need to end, and quickly, and that subsequently it would be necessary to deport the entire black population of the country; he had no idea how to financially sustain himself and his own lifestyle in any other way, though. The same is true of many other slave-owning Founding Fathers. The ultimate failure of the American Colonization Society is probably the single greatest what-if in American history, and I want to at least give some credit to the slave-owners who realized, after it was too late, what they had wrought on the country and on their own descendants.
As for why so many modern white identitarians are pro-Confederacy, I think a large part of that is simply a founder effect: major figures in the racial right in the 90’s and 00’s such as Jared Taylor, Sam Dickson, and Sam Francis, were all Southerners with ancestors who fought for the Confederacy, and for them the issue was acutely personal. Given that some of the important intellectual voices on the white nationalist right, such as Gregory Hood (AKA James Kirkpatrick AKA Kevin DeAnna), were directly employed and mentored by those figures, they’ve sort of picked up the Confederate sympathies by osmosis. There is also certainly an element of Owning The Libs, associating the Yankee occupying government, which brought (partial) racial integration to the South with the barrel of a gun during Reconstruction, with the later forcible imposition of the Civil Rights Regime a century later, a process which is frankly still ongoing and has expanded to the entire country and even arguably the entire American Empire.
This is a great point which I haven't thought about.
This is actually an area where I feel some sympathy towards Dixie, but they never understand that they created the problem in the first place. So it is hard to sustain it. Besides, they often make the North more liberal than it really was. Lincoln himself wanted to deport all the blacks for much of his life. The hardest fight against desegregation of public schools didn't happen in the South: it was in Boston.
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