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Notes -
I've read the discussion on the destruction of General Lee's statue in Charlottesville in last week's thread. I got the impression that many commenters here are prone to come up with explanations why the official removal of the statue was at least unsurprising or objectively justified from a culture war perspective, and I get that. But it seems they aren't focusing on the palpable difference between legally removing a statue and destroying it in a furnace. Because as far as I'm concerned, it's a big step from one to the other.
I'm reminded of the political transitions that happened in Central Europe in 1989-91, because many local monuments to either Soviet politicians/soldiers or local Communists or Marx/Engels were officially removed as a result. Anyone can correct me if they can, but I think all those new political systems were content with just removing the statues and putting them in "museums", which in most cases basically meant that these statues were put in open-air storage in remote and mostly abandoned memorial parks to just wither away, but not destroying them, cutting them up, melting them down etc. This hasn't even happened to Stalin statues in the Baltic states, for example, even though local anti-Soviet sentiment was definitely the strongest in the entire region, not something to understate. You can still find and visit those statues today.
And in this case, even this relatively close parallel doesn't really work, because it's not like there was a fundamental regime change in Virginia since the statue was erected.
And what happened to Lee's statue certainly cannot be explained by financial considerations either, as I'm sure that whatever arrangement that was on the table for putting it away as a museum piece was cheaper than melting it down in a furnace.
The only fitting parallel that comes to mind is Napoleon ordering captured cannons to be melted down to build a gigantic iron monument in Paris dedicated to the victory at Austerlitz. But again, I'm sure I won't have to explain in detail how that political context was completely different from this, even though I'm aware there are many hardline leftists today who would've preferred the evil Confederacy to be publicly humiliated in such ways back in 1865.
In the end, the only sufficient explanation I can come up with is that local authorities were afraid that Lee's statue, no matter where it were to be placed, was likely to become a site of pilgrimage for right-winger heretics opposed to the culture-warring leftist interpretation of race relations in the US, hence the statue's destruction.
Plus, and this is just pure speculation on my part, I think General Lee was such a perfect personification of the Southern patriarchal ideal of gentlemanliness that he invites leftist hostility like no other figure in US history. Plus, he had the cheek to candidly express views on slavery and the innate characteristics of Africans that are, from a leftist perspective, uniquely horrible, just too painful, and cutting too close to the bone, as they say.
I find it ironic that as recently as 2005, the most culturally-prominent example of the Confederate battle flag was widely recognized as a pure expression of regional pride, and not at all a racist symbol. As it happens, that example isn't as much of a tangent as you'd think.
It's important to realize just how $Current_Year this iconoclastic movement is.
Some time after 2008, there was a growing suspicion that southern pride had a lot of embedded racism.
Towards the end of the GWB presidency and especially after Obama's election the blue tribe decided they were done playing nice with the south.
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Do you think that the Dukes of Hazzard movie released in 2005--which unmistakably had a lot of Southern pride--was rife with embedded racism?
That movie even had the self-awareness to mine humor from the varying perceptions of the Confederate flag circa '05, with neither view being promoted. Just acknowledged.
It is practically dispassionate in comparison to where we are now. And that's where I thought we stood maturity-wise as a nation. Northerners rolled their eyes and tut-tutted and Southerners told them to shove it, but it didn't seem to amount to much beyond the mundane neighborly squabbling endemic to any nation, state, or city. The kind of shit talking little different than that between New Yorkers from different areas, Western European countries between each other, or the Eagleton vs Pawnee stereotype that comes up in any given state.
Now this is being recast as an existential and moral fight to the death. A reckoning long overdue since we averted our privileged eyes from obvious stains of evil. And while I've long heard talk about the Union 'not going far enough' in destroying the Antebellum South, I chalked so much of this up to tough online posturing uttered by cowards that couldn't shoot a dog, let alone raze a town. Shame on me for not treating this with the full contempt it warranted, since I never thought this view would rank up to the level of legitimacy it sees now.
I find it hard to trust people who don't acknowledge this switch. It wasn't motivated by recently unearthed knowledge or a radical reappraisal of our understanding of the conflict. It was pure present-day vibes, and those come from now, and are only very tenuously connected to a long-gone war a century and a half ago. And it's why I'm not moved by anybody linking to historical and/or academic documents debating full removal of Confederate symbols, because people talk all the fucking time.
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There's nothing ironic about it, it's enemy action.
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