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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.
I don't think the statues should be destroyed if someone wants to take them, but I also do not think that it is reasonable to expect black Americans to be ok with there being official statues of people who enslaved their ancestors just 150 years ago.
The history is too recent. It is like expecting Latvians or Poles to not want to destroy statues of Lenin.
You would probably feel the same way, I think, if you were part of a racial minority living in a country where the racial majority had enslaved your ancestors 150 years ago.
Of course, if you want you are free to take a position of political selfishness and just say "screw them, I only care about white people" or "I only care about descendants of the English" or "I only care about my own friends and family", or whatever level you want to take it to.
Political selfishness is of course immoral by any standard definition of morality but it at least has the benefit that unlike every single political ideology, it is internally consistent.
Of course, don't expect people who are not part of your in-group as you define it to back you up if you are honest to them about your political selfishness.
I don't buy this. I'm not going to go to Italy and demand that the Arch of Titus be destroyed as an affront to the Jews. Past a certain amount of time, these monuments are historical and should stay. It's been over fifty years since the civil rights era when black people had enough political power that they could reasonably make a move to destroy monuments to their oppressors. At this point any monuments that are left should be off limits.
This can read as "when you have power, immediately destroy everything your opponents value or they'll start arguing for some arbitrary statute of limitations".
That would be a foolish way to read it.
You should value statues of Lee because you should value peace. You should value the idea that there is a limit to warfare and strife, that the sword can be sheathed, that people who have fought to the death can reconcile, that bloody civil war can in fact end. It can do this because the people fighting it did not perceive the conflict to be existential, and so at some point they were willing to stop. That is a rare and profoundly valuable virtue, and one that people should not treat with disdain.
You should value the idea of leaders who conduct themselves honorably, even for an evil cause. You should value this because no cause, no nation, no people, not even individuals are ever truly virtuous, as the line of good and evil runs through every human heart. You should value this because people following orders, even bad ones, and obeying what they see as honor and duty, even if woefully misguided, is what makes conflict survivable for a civilization. Fools mock the idea of "just following orders" because they've forgotten what it looks like when generals or the armies they lead don't. Fools mock the the idea of "honor" and "duty" as applied to those they see as villains, because they are stupid enough to believe that morality is a solved problem and that one can simply "do the right thing". Having a historical understanding that amounts to a Saturday morning cartoon, they presume that the moral equilibrium they have received from their present environment via an entirely passive osmosis is obviously and eternally correct.
If you believe in prioritizing the destruction of everything your opponents value, it's because you don't want to coexist with your opponents in any way. If you are unwilling to coexist with your opponents in any way, there is no way to make peace, as conflict becomes by necessity existential. It seems to me that most people advocating this sort of conflict have no conception of the horror they are asking for.
So I think this is true. But some elements of what your opponents value have to be up as fair game. If we invade Germany and then as soon as we leave they go right back to building their military and killing Jews and invading Poland, then we haven't really won anything.
If you want your opponent to respect your loss but not wipe you out, you have to respect their victory and give up whatever the inciting issue was. Otherwise they haven't really won and you haven't really lost and you'll go round in circles again soon enough. So it isn't a victory merely a pause in the fighting.
KMC says the South lost the war but won the culture war, they got to venerate their heroes and push Jim Crow and other issues into the rebuilt Union. He doesn't accept the loss of the value that black people are not equal Americans. He wants to keep it. Given that, the culture war at least is not over. Essentially his claim is that re-absorbing the South was a poison pill. That slipped the values they were fighting for back into America at large even though they lost the war.
Given that why shouldn't his symbols be valid targets in the culture war? He hasn't surrendered. He still wants his values to triumph. But that means his values, his symbols, his beliefs have to be valid targets for his opponents still. So they aren't shooting him, they are tearing down his symbols. The war rages on in a new sphere. But it still does rage.
Your points are valid once the war is over and one side actually capitulates.
Then why didn't they tear down the statues 50 years ago?
Tearing down the statues is not being done to hurt actual racists and white supremacists, or they would have been torn down 50 years ago. The fact that they are tearing them down now is evidence that they're not fighting back against the side that lost, but rather against their outgroup, who they can associate with the side that lost even when that's not actually true.
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