Robert E. Lee, Retire Bitch
There are several criticisms levied at people of my generation: that we expect the world to be handed to us on a silver platter because we were coddled while young by the awarding of participation trophies. I think it’s fair to point out that it was those who raised us who opted to confer those dust-collecting totems of mediocrity and meaninglessness on us.
Then there is the hue and cry over safe spaces. The purpose of them being to offer folks from marginalized groups an opportunity to speak to that experience The argument is that they stifle freedom of speech. They also provide fodder for lazy, milquetoast bile spewers like Bret Stephens who rarely if ever have their stable lives of comfort and turning in stultifying copy interrupted or inconvenienced. Some of them even rake in six figures for breaking a sweat on their literary brow.
So knowing all this it’s interesting to see the fretting over the removal of Confederate Monuments. I mean, the South did lose the war after all, what merits a statue for people who lost and were fighting to prop up an institution that held human beings in chattel slavery?
As far as I’m concerned, the argument of “states’ rights” as cause of the war belongs on the dungheap of history along with the “law and order” dog whistle issued from the quivering jowls of one R. Milhouse Nixon.
My feeling on the matter is that the monuments should be removed from public life. The folks who live there should be the ones to make that decision.
One argument floated is that it’s an erasure of history. I don’t know about you, but most of my history education came from books. Monuments were superfluous and potentially added to prior knowledge. History is written by the victors, or the survivors. What we choose to honor reflects what we value as a people.
It’s not as though the monuments have stood for a long time and are great works of art.
The statues were mass-produced cheaply. An Associated Press story from 2015 dug into one company that made monuments. Statues made of marble or granite would have cost a significant amount of money: in the five-figure range.
The ones made of zinc by Monumental Bronze, a company based in Bridgeport, CT. The cost for a life-sized one was $450 and $750 for a statue that was eight-and-a-half feet tall. The same molds were used repeatedly so the same, anonymous Confederate soldierwas perched at many towns around the country.
They were also poorly anchored, which is why the statue in Durham came down so easily.
A graph put together by the Southern Poverty Law Center that was part of a comprehensive study of Confederate statues and monuments.depicts the placement of Confederate monuments since the end of the Civil War. Most were placed in the early 20th century when Jim Crow laws were implemented. Using the carefully curated myth of a genteel and noble south as justification for the oppression. More statues were put up during the Civil Rights Movements. Those statues served as reminder of who was really in charge.

Films like “The Birth of a Nation” and “Gone With The Wind” helped perpetuate the idea of the Confederacy as a noble, lost cause, that it was about states’ rights.
But that glosses over brutalities like the Fort Pillow Massacre in which troops under the command of Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest — who would be an early member of the Ku Klux Klan — slaughtered black Union troops attempting to surrender.
Or there’s Andersonville Prison, a POW camp operated by the Confederacy and the source of much misery for Union troops due to the brutal conditions. Water and food were scarce. It was unsanitary and overcrowded. Nearly 13,000 Union soldiers died during the time there.
The Confederacy was defeated, let it stay buried and those who fought to preserve it not be honored. Let the Civil War instead be a reminder of the brutalities humans are capable of inflicting on one and other for money and for hate. Let every symbol depicting the Confederacy in a positive light be left on the scrapheap of history along with the swastika and fasces.
