ABOUT THOSE STATUES...

ABOUT THOSE STATUES…

I have been reading and thinking quite a bit about the “Confederate Statues” controversy, and offer the following thoughts:

(Be advised, I am a “northerner,” so my views may reflect some geocentric bias.)

1. The conversation is helpful to me personally. For as long as I can remember I have felt ambivalent about these memorials; now I recognize why.

2. One possible solution: contextualize the statues historically by placing a similar-sized statue of a slave in chains next to each one of them. Doing this will preserve the history that many today claim they do not want to lose. Slavery is, after all, what they were fighting to preserve. An explanatory plaque would be a cheaper, but less effective, alternative.

(I know that some argue that the Civil War was not about slavery, but slavery was the intractable problem that led to everything else associated with the war.)

3. Another solution: move all the statues to museums that teach the history not only of the war itself, but of the century that followed it. Or maybe move them to battlefields or Civil War cemeteries, such as Gettysburg and Johnson’s Island, where they really can serve a historic purpose. My understanding is that many of them were put up decades after the war, as much to bolster the legalized racism practiced in most of the south in the early 20th century as to honor particular soldiers. These statues do not need to be displayed in places of honor in order to be useful, though I am not sure how much instructional value most of them actually have.

(I am wary of destroying history’s artifacts when they make us uncomfortable. Second only to the crimes against people perpetrated by Isis has been its destruction of historically significant works of art in the ancient world. Isis’s fundamental contempt for human culture and history is a crime against us all.)

(I am also wary of angry crowds taking it upon themselves to pull down and destroy statues. Mob action is a highly risky last resort, maybe.)

4. The Governor of Maine compared the destruction of Confederate statues to the possible destruction of 9/11 memorials? Really? That’s bizarre.

5. Speaking of history: weren’t these Confederate Generals traitors? Didn’t they participate in an armed rebellion against the country of their birth and to which many of them must have sworn allegiance when they signed on as soldiers and officers in the US Army? (Robert E. Lee, chief among them.) To have allowed them to go back home to take up their lives again after the war was one thing. To honor and celebrate them is quite another. What Americans would want to do that 150+ years after the last shots were fired?

6, in which I answer the question I posed in the final sentence of #5: Americans who long for another rebellion against the United States of America, that’s who would want to honor and celebrate those rebels; Americans armed to the teeth because they think the only way to save their country and their way of life is by violence; Americans who wear Nazi symbols and who wave Confederate flags because they want their convictions to become our fears.

7. Where else on earth would any government tolerate for a moment, much less for a century and a half, the near veneration of those who had taken up arms against it, leading to uncountable loss of lives and properties, for a cause–chattel slavery–that history has judged to be absolutely evil? We are such a complex amalgam of competing passions!