Requiem for a Culture, Part 6: The End of Reconciliation

Southern partisans, especially those who have ancestors who fought in the War for Southern Independence, are well aware of the depredations that have been visited upon Southern monuments in the last three or four years. The process culminated late last year with the desecration of two cherished monuments, the statue of General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. I’ll give a brief recapitulation of these events for readers who may not be familiar with what happened.

A bronze statue of General Lee, the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, had stood since the 1920s in a little park next to the library in downtown Charlottesville. The “Unite the Right” false-flag fiasco in 2017 started the ball rolling on the statue’s removal. Late that summer General Lee and his horse Traveller were covered with a burka to prevent passers-by from being triggered by the sight. Then in 2020 the fentanyl overdose of Saint George Floyd provided the coup de grâce: the following year the statue was finally removed from its plinth. To make sure that the South would never rise again, last October the revered general was cut into pieces and melted down.

The widely-published photo of General Lee’s molten bronze face was like a knife in the heart for Southern partisans (or at least for this one).

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