Matthew Kuhl
Aug 24, 2017 · 3 min read
loss.csa

As someone who grew up less than 10 miles away from Stone Mountain, and also knows a thing or two about history (in that I have a degree in it), let me just say that this is an incredibly absurd comparison.

The artifacts and archaeological sites that ISIS has destroyed are valuable because they come from cultures that ended centuries ago. We have so little data on these cultures, relatively speaking, that every little bit is important. For instance, the oldest existing reference to the Hebrews of the Old Testament is likely found on the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, an artifact that was found at Nimrud. And for every one of those artifacts that was preserved, many more were likely destroyed or never found in the centuries since.

But the same can not be said of the Civil War, which ended 152 years ago. I have aunts who were born before the death of the last Civil War veteran. The last widows of Civil War veterans died in the early 2000s. There are at least two men alive today whose grandfather (President John Tyler) experienced the beginning of the Civil War. The Civil War is not precisely in living memory, but it is much closer to living memory than Sennacherib descending upon Judah “like the wolf on the fold”.

What’s more, Civil War historians have records of a caliber that ancient historians could only dream of possessing. Many of the people who experienced the Civil War, whether as soldiers or civilians, were literate enough to leave behind letters, diaries, and other records. The United States Army, Navy, and Marine Corps, which fought against treason in defense of slavery, have their own records of that time.

But sources and records for events that took place hundreds, much less thousands of years ago, are frequently sketchy and unreliable. In fact, my senior thesis for my bachelor’s degree concerned the fact that our knowledge of Byzantine Emperor Basil II’s war against the First Bulgar Empire is so sketchy that we can’t vouch for the veracity of one of the great legends of his rule (specifically, that after the Battle of Kleidion, he divided his Bulgar prisoners into groups of 100 and had 99 blinded in each group, with the 100th man left with a single eye, so that he could lead them home).

Those statues and monuments that people want taken down are not about history. They were never about history. They were about placing visible symbols of white supremacy in American communities. And many of them (including the statue in Durham), as it turns out, were not works of art designed to stir the mind to heroic heights, but mass-produced hack jobs that, in some cases, were identical to statues produced to commemorate Union soldiers. The vast majority of them, in fact, were erected long after the end of the war.

And it’s worth asking, why does one put up a statue to anyone or anything? In almost every case, a statue is meant to honor its subject. It’s meant to make them an object of public adoration, to (often literally) set them up on a pedestal, to make it clear that someone with power thought that this person or thing was worth honoring. Why should we honor men who fought to establish a government with a cornerstone of white supremacy and slavery? Why should the United States of America honor traitors like Lee and Davis, who swore solemn oaths to the Constitution, only to set them aside for the sake of perpetuating slavery? Wouldn’t it be better to honor the people who fought to preserve the United States, like Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, or George Thomas? What about those who fought to free the slaves, like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, or William Lloyd Garrison?

The idea that taking down these participation trophies for a pack of traitors is an assault on history or “PC paternalism” is utterly stupid. It is a long-delayed and completely deserved removal of the idols of white supremacy from the sanctuaries of our civil religion.

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Matthew Kuhl

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Grad student. Liberal. UU. Reader of books. Türkçe. .فارسی “If you can’t be seven feet tall, be seven feet smart.”

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