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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.
Destroying the statue was teabagging the outgroup plain and simple. The moderate voice in every statue controversy has consistently said something to the effect of "move them to a museum" which is what happened here. What this event (moving to a museum and then destroying it) shows is that there is no quarter to moderates in the culture war. It's very much in line with the friend-enemy distinction principle.
As a southerner who was on team "move them to a museum", I'm genuinely disgusted.
You’re forgetting the other moderate position, “smelt him into cannons.” I guess the idea was something museum/battle memorial worthy, but not honoring the guy in particular? It strikes me as a bit odd, so I’m not surprised it didn’t satisfy either side.
These "moderate" positions are all an illusion based on continual resetting of the Overton Window. That the utterly ludicrous "melt him down out of sheer spite" position became one legitimate wing while "do nothing and don't celebrate him too much" was the other creates the false impression that melt him down and turn him into cannons is a conciliatory gesture. That conciliatory position is still a triumphalist celebration of destroying Confederate heritage, just without quite as much overt ugliness.
In the spirit of framing our own positions as moderate, my position is the true moderate position, which was the "do nothing and don't celebrate him too much", not like the extremist position that the statues should be gilded and used as the centerpiece for a new Confederacy Day on December 20, where all Southerners gather around and chant, "Glory to our martyrs". That would be extreme, as where I am a moderate.
The problem is that the implicit point of public monuments is to celebrate historic figures. The fact that Lee is well-known is purely due to his decision to take up arms against the United States; the same can be said of almost every other Confederate. And it's not appropriate to celebrate those who opposed us in war. In other words, Lee's stature as a war hero is comparable to that of someone like General Howe or Santa Ana or Erwin Rommel. There may be statues of the former two in the United States, but if there are I guarantee they're somewhere like a battlefield where the context is clear and they generally build statues of every prominent person who fought there. But I doubt anyone would advocate for putting them in a position of honor such as a town square, and if you built one on your own property people would be right to suspect your motives.
Add to that the fact that they weren't seceding because of tax policy or some other anodyne complaint but to preserve an institution that's now globally recognized as a reprehensible denial of the most basic human freedoms, in a country whose founding principles were explicitly meant to advance those freedoms, however imperfect the execution was in its infancy. I don't see any situation where you can have a statue of a person whose entire professional career was at least implicitly dedicated to such an institution on the courthouse lawn or the park in the center of town and excuse it by saying that you don't celebrate it too much.
There are many examples in the world of veneration of an "honored enemy". Turkey hosts thousands of descendants of failed invaders every year at Gallipoli. 'Celebration' isn't the correct term to be used. Respect for a worthy adversary who believed in their cause is more appropriate.
I have no problem with respect. But I don't think anyone would argue that the South's erection of statues in prominent places was merely out of sober respect for an enemy. Are there any other of America's war foes who you feel we should be "respecting" at that kind of clip?
None of our other war foes were also Americans. None of our other war foes went on to be Americans, and to serve America to the best of their ability by accepting and trying to live by an honorable peace.
The white South didn't accept their defeat and try to live an honourable peace. They launched an insurgency (the 1st Klan), and when that failed they waited out the presence of federal troops in the South and then staged a series of coups against the Reconstruction-era State governments (elected by multi-racial electorates) in order to introduce Jim Crow. The North, to their shame, tolerated this due to exhaustion during the Gilded Age, and enthusiastically embraced it due to political corruption in the New Deal era.
Jim Crow was a dishonourable peace, and the Civil Rights movement was right to seek to overturn it.
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