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Take 2.
I posted and deleted this because I don't want to get banned, but if I can't talk about the things I want to talk about then I don't see much point in caring about the account, anyway. Still, I'll try to be subdued.
The Robert E Lee statue from Charlottesville has been destroyed. Liquidated, actually, and slated to be replaced with some statue for black people, which is striking symbolism of how Americans are being liquidated to be replaced by foreigners.
I'm posting the reactions on twitter, because there are dozens of two-sentence sentiments that I share. I'll quote a couple, for posterity, and you can get the gist of the other side from the WP article.
Columbia Bugle
Jack Posobiec
Jack again
Maarblek
BlueandGray1864
Spencer Klavan
That last one is really quite striking, given this line from the WP article:
Really, you should read the article, too. In it, I saw the genocide of my race, and it scares the hell out of me. I suppose this must be how the Jews feel.
So, is it justice? Is it vengeance? Should it be celebrated? Should it be destroyed?
And does the symbolism of liquidating the statue of a white man apply to the declining white population in America? Is the deliberate melting down of this statue a parallel to the deliberate replacement of the American race?
ETA: One more tweet from this morning, just a few hours ago:
GigaThaad
Elon Musk
Musk, as a white man born in South Africa, should know what it looks like when your native country changes and now wants you and yours dead and gone.
Culture war stories involving the legacy of the Confederacy--and Confederate heroes like Lee in particular--are always troubling to me, in part perhaps because, as a Southerner, I don't know myself what to make of that legacy. The existence of the whole Confederate movement is so inextricably bound up with the crime of slavery that celebrating the heroes of the movement seems, on its face, indefensible. I am probably more "woke" than the average Mottizen when it comes to American race issues; I believe HBD is a worse explanation for persistent black underachievement than the lingering effect of centuries of cultural disruption under slavery combined with decades of further disruption under racist post-Civil-War legislation (although neither explanation is fully satisfactory). I would find it shocking if the current problems with American black culture weren't primarily due to the uniquely extreme oppression blacks faced for so many generations. We can debate whether or not the South would have abandoned slavery on its own initiative without it being forced to do so by the Union's victory in the Civil War, but I don't see how one could deny that the intent of the founders of the Confederacy was to preserve slavery in perpetuity (mostly for the benefit of wealthy plantation owners, rather than working white Southerners). When people, on the Motte or elsewhere, castigate the Confederates as racist losers who picked a stupid fight in furtherance of an execrable cause, I can't find a good reason for disagreeing with them.
And yet I do disagree with them--I do admire Lee, and for some reason I'm proud of the South and of the Confederacy. I can't explain it rationally. I like that, despite being ill-equipped and outnumbered 2-1, the South held out for over four years in a hot war with a technologically superior foe. I'm glad we didn't just roll over to the North's demands, but made the Yankees fight for it. I even take a perverse and morbid pride in the fact we killed more of them than they killed of us.
What's even more confusing is that, for most of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, it seemed like it was fine to like the Confederacy. Pop-culture protagonists in books, movies, TV shows, comic strips, etc., could be Confederate soldiers or open Confederate sympathizers and still be beloved by post-war Americans, North and South. American society didn't seem interested in condemning pro-Confederate Southerners as "traitors" or excoriating them as "racists"--even though the charges were as just then as they are now. I feel like the attitude of Americans, a few decades after the Civil War, might be summed up in this picture. At best, people on both sides seemed willing to put the dark past behind them and settle into a mutual civility. At worst, it seemed like non-Southerners viewed Southern pride and loyalty to the rebel cause as a sort of quaint, harmless expression of regional patriotism.
The vitriol towards Confederates I see in stories like this and in some of the comments here seems new. I can't say that those commenters are wrong--I share their reasons for disliking the Confederacy, although something (maybe just the loyalty of my Southern blood) prevents me from reacting with the same level of antipathy. I just wonder what happened to the truce that seemed to have once reigned in this particular culture war.
I think it's pretty clear they would have, and that the Civil War was more about Federal control over the states than it was about slavery. I judge this based on how other countries prohibited slavery, specifically England. I don't think they would have continued slavery indefinitely any more than Brazil did.
Their intent was to withdraw from an agreement that they felt their supposed countrymen were not following. The basis of this refusal was of course slavery, but it could have been something else. I think you should read the declarations of secession. I did, and while slavery is right up and down all of the documents, it's revealing how many different complaints they had, and how reasonable those complaints are. These independents states agreed to combine to form a union for mutual prosperity, and the conditions of that union had been trampled for decades because one side was unwilling to abide by the agreement they had made.
What happened was Obama, and then Trump. And it's not about the Confederacy, it never really was and never really will be. It's about me, and white people like me, here and today. The one single person whose actions were most responsible for this statue being melted down is Donald Trump. When he won in 2016, half the country declared war on the basket of deplorables, and sought to tear down their statues and destroy their culture. Literal culture war. The statue was melted this week because Trump won in 2016. It was melted to show whites that this country doesn't want them, it doesn't want their history, it wants to rewrite the history of their nation to exclude them.
I didn't even vote for Trump in 2016 or 2020, but I can tell when people hate me and want me, my parents, my brothers, and my children dead and gone from this world. I can tell when they take symbolic actions, and I can interpret the symbolism. Now I wish I did.
I am curious and confused why you have lumped “white people” in with Confederate history. Surely most white people in America were not Southern rebels, and there’s more to that culture than Robert E Lee? I realize that as a Southerner yourself it feels a bit more personal but… again, I really feel the Confederate issue doesn’t generalize. And part of it is just that Southern primary education more or less lies to its own people about this part of history. Not only do many texts outright lie about the causes of the Civil War, the South may have claimed that slavery would die out, but their actual actions reveal an active attempt at spreading it. A lot of these “reasonable complaints” just boil down to economic issues, made worse because the South didn’t want to take steps to rebalance their economy away from slavery. And they certainly didn’t want to treat Black people like the humans they are. That’s not something you can just glaze over.
They don’t just attack confederate symbols. Last time I checked Christopher Columbus was cancelled too. They pull his statues down which do have significant to my people.
I think his post was a little hyperbolic but it’s also sort of true.
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Ah, yes. This old canard.
Sorry, but I had to take 400-level history courses on Southern history before the notion that 'Well, the Civil War may have had other factors beyond slavery that caused it' even got brought up.
I'll believe my own eyes and experience, thanks.
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