A Message to Conservatives and Liberals About Statues

Span the Spectrum
Aug 23, 2017 · 4 min read

There has a been a lot of hubbub over the last few months regarding statues, plaques, and names of buildings (“memorializations”). Culminating in the travesty we witnessed in Charlottesville.

So I figured now was as good a time as any to lay out my views on when memorializations should be torn down or changed and when they should be left alone. Hopefully Conservatives and Liberals will follow suit.

For this debate, it’s important to understand that there are two distinct types of memorializations:

  1. Those that commemorate historical events; and
  2. Those that honor men.

COMMEMORATING HISTORY

This message is for the Liberals.

Those memorializations that commemorate historical events should be left alone. Period.

Memorializations of historical events like 9/11 or the statues at Gettysburg, don’t seek to honor men. The 9/11 memorial isn’t about honoring the terrorists and Gettysburg isn’t about appreciating the Confederates. It’s about marking historically important events so that we neither forget them nor the valuable lessons they have to teach.

And thus, memorializations that commemorate historical events should be left standing.

HONORING MEN

Beyond memorializations that mark historically important events, we have those that honor men. These statues, plaques, and namings are meant to draw our attention to the greatness of the men being depicted.

So it is here that we must distinguish between two types of men being honored:

  1. Traitors; and
  2. Flawed men.

This message is for the Conservatives.

Any and all memorializations honoring Confederates should be torn to the ground, erased, or renamed. These men were traitors.

“These men weren’t traitors,” you say. “These were men with deeply held convictions about states’ rights, and were simply fighting to preserve those rights.” First, these men were fighting about and in order to preserve slavery, not states’ rights. Second, it doesn’t actually matter what they were fighting for or how sincere their beliefs were. They could have been fighting for the right to put more sugar on their corn flakes. It’s irrelevant. These citizens of the United States of America went to war against the United States of America.

Let me repeat that one more time in case you missed the subtle message. These men. Went to war. AGAINST. The United States of America. There is no purer definition of a traitor than that. And traitors do not get statues within the country they betrayed.

Putting up a statue of Robert E. Lee is akin to putting up a statue of one of the 9/11 terrorists. Both of these men hated the United States, and wanted to destroy it. These men don’t get statues.

One More Message for the Liberals.

Memorializations exist to honor men for their great accomplishments in building this country. The operative word in that sentence is “men.” You’ll note I didn’t say “saints.” I said “men.”

There are far too many Liberal movements on college campuses and elsewhere to whitewash or “contextualize” our history by changing the names of buildings named after historical figures who had significant flaws in their character (Woodrow Wilson at Princeton; John C. Calhoun at Yale). So despite all of the other significant and/or beneficial things they did, their names are to be erased from history because they were men of their time.

I, on the other hand, do not require my historical figures to be perfect. I understand these were men, and thus they had flaws. If you require that those being honored with memorializations be saints, then there will literally be zero memorializations with people’s names on them. And that is just stupid.

Just for fun, let’s take a look at this not-even-close-to-complete list of memorializations that will need to be whitewashed because the men being honored were imperfect.

  1. Washington state (George Washington was racist, a slave owner, sexist, and an adulterer)
  2. Washington DC (see #1)
  3. The Washington Monument (see #1)
  4. Every single Street, Avenue, Boulevard, and Terrace named after Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK was sexist and an adulterer)
  5. MLK Day (see #4)
  6. Jefferson City, Missouri (Thomas Jefferson was racist, a slave owner, sexist, and an adulterer)
  7. The Jefferson Memorial (see #6)
  8. Malcom X College in Chicago (Malcom X was an adulterer and an anti-Semite)
  9. The Walt Disney Company, Disney World, Disney Land, and all other Disney-named places and products (Walt Disney was racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic)
  10. All buildings named after any of your local politicians, businessmen, or community leaders (each one of them was at least racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, homophobic, or an adulterer)

In short, be careful in your search for ideological purity for I suspect you will find no man left unimpeached (and thus no memorialization left standing).

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Span the Spectrum

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If your thinking doesn’t span the entire political spectrum, you’re not thinking.

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