Sherman's Modern-day March to the Sea
The Mayor of New Orleans, along with the entire City Council, has demanded a “conversation” about removing Civil War statues from public view and placing them in “museums.” For real.
I frankly think that the frantic entire rush to re-write history is yet another example of Rahm Emmanuel’s “never let a crisis go to waste” theory. When it became apparent that the President’s immediate demand for more gun control wouldn’t fly after the slaughter in a South Carolina church by a madman (or a demon), the Left turned to another target it’s been after for years, with the smallest scintilla of a connection to it: a Confederate battle flag appeared in a photo with the demon. The Confederate battle flag, representative of the offensive Civil War and its fuel, the institution of slavery.
The following is a thread on my Facebook page from Thursday. There is no easy solution to the “re-writing history” frenzy that is currently raging in this country, but I think the thread contains some thoughtful arguments, pro and con. My good friend of long standing is a brilliant lawyer in DC (not a government lawyer) who is also a screaming, pure Libertarian who listens to any and every genre of music, is a gourmet cook (of some really good and some really odd things), travels the world, reads more news sources daily than I knew existed, and teaches ESL to adults in his spare time. The first two paragraphs are my original post:
It appears that New Orleans’s knee-jerking, politically correctified elected officials have taken leave of their questionable senses. If they agree to remove statues of Confederate luminaries because they are painful reminders of slave days, they should remove Joan of Arc, too. The French were among the worst slave traders. Hell, they should probably rename the city and Parish, too.
So what argument am I missing here? It can’t be that they’re trying to whitewash history (no pun intended) because no one’s talking about destroying the statues or making them inaccessible to the public. I haven’t heard one call for closing the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond.
It can’t be that you should never take down a statue that is a part of a country’s past, else you’d be arguing that statues of Lenin should still fill the plazas of eastern Europe and statues of Hitler should grace the entrance to the Reichstag.
It can’t be that the statues honor “Southern heritage,” if you include in that heritage black southerners.
I see that some people are really outraged about this trend, but I honestly don’t see why.
Enlighten me. What is the argument against moving the statues to a museum (and saying this is “PC” is a conclusion, not an argument)? I just don’t get it.
Without using analogies, how would you finish this proposition?
Resolved: That the people of New Orleans should continue to leave statues of Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and P.G.T Beauregard and the statue honoring the victory of the White League over the Reconstruction government in the 1874 Battle of Liberty Place in places of honor on government property in New Orleans because …..
(These are the four statues whose relocation is being proposed. To me the most interesting question is what to do with the one for the Battle of Liberty Place — I’d let that one stay.)
[My analogies come from my analysis of what the real issue is behind this sudden history revision. The analogies relate to slavery. I think this modern Sherman's March to the Sea is not about the Civil War itself, it's about the institution of slavery itself. Slavery can't simply be condemned, there must be some current, physical manifestation of the condemnation. Since the actual historic figures who participated in the Confederacy's effort to maintain the institution of slavery can't be drawn and quartered themselves, in person, then their likenesses must be banished. (Except for Nathan Bedford Forrest, and his WIFE, whose bodies the Memphis city council has voted to EXHUME and relocate!)]
Where will it end.
Those are both valid points and ones that I don’t really disagree with at all. However, I don’t think those are sufficient to carry the day for keeping all Confederate monuments, many of which are clearly intended to honor the person. If I were a Memphian, I’d be adamant about demanding that the statue honoring the vile Nathan Bedford Forrest be taken down — and that if his body isn’t dug up and moved, then the tombstone should be accompanied by a placard explaining both his evil deeds and his undeniable military talents.
On the other hand, if I were a resident of Richmond I’d be adamantly opposed to removing any of the statues on Monument Row. They are particularly beautiful and particularly historic in the setting of the capital of the Confederacy.
So I’m open, for the reasons you suggest, to making a case-by-case assessment of whether particular monuments should be removed to a more “historical/educational” setting that can’t be misinterpreted as honoring an aspect of our past that was mistaken (at best). In the mix of factors, the fact that the statues are deeply offensive to many citizens would carry great weight with me, however. The government should not be engaging in speech that is intended to offend a substantial segment of the citizenry.
I disagree, however, with the notion that the speech is “intended to offend a substantial segment of the citizenry.” Intent is a highly fluid concept, subject to manipulation. In the vernacular of our generation, simply, it is what it is.
Also, many Confederate luminaries are worthy of recognition, if for no reasons other than their actions following the war; Robert E. Lee, being a subject in chief.
I’m not as sold as you are on Robert E. Lee’s post-war conduct, though I give him great credit for surrendering rather than obeying Jefferson Davis’s directive that he disband his army and engage in guerrilla war. Lee was adamantly opposing to allowing blacks to vote until his dying day.
Lee did promise that if the North would just let Southern whites take control again, they would treat the unintelligent (his view, not mine) Negroes with “kindness and compassion.” I guess you can’t blame him for that not really working out, since he died before Southern whites managed to violently expel blacks from the political system.
And Beauregard was a native son of New Orleans, a hub of the world at the time.
Sherman and his men are marching through the countryside again.
Source: http://moogiep.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-modern-day-shermans-march-to-sea.html
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