Why SHOULD Confederate Statues be removed?

Greetings and Salutations;

This week has seen madness in this Great Land that has not happened in decades.   The Events in Charlottesville, VA, are easily found on the Net, in all their disgusting detail.   I may touch on them in another entry, though.   Here,  I want to talk about the excuse used by the Neo Nazis for their attack upon the city.   This was the removal of the statue honoring Confederate General  Robert E. Lee from the public square.

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I have no doubt that General Lee was a brave man and a courageous warrior.  I believe he might well have been an ethical person too.  However,   he was fighting to destroy this great nation, in support of a culture that felt it right and proper to own another human being,  looking up them as sub-human, and nothing more than a tool to be used and abused until they were useless,  then to be discarded and replaced.   He and the entire Confederacy,  were  wrong.  They fought for their cause and lost…perhaps because their cause was Evil, and God was on the the side of the Union,  perhaps because their economy  did not support a war machine as well as the North did…It does not matter.  The bottom line is that they lost, and their attempts to destroy America failed.

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There are many that, today,  still are fighting that war.  They grumble under their breath about the “War of Northern Aggression”  and “The South Shall Rise Again”.  They often display the stars and bars – the pseudo-Confederate flag that has come to represent that time.   Many of them are simply young, and ignorant.  They have no idea of the reality of what they are praising meant.  Some are still stained with the Evil of racism, White Supremacy, and White Nationalism  that drove much of the conflict in those bloody years of 1861-1865.   These latter folks are the real danger to America.   The ignorant idealists can be educated, and when presented with the reality of that time,  no longer support it or idealize it.   However, the distressing number of Racists and Neo Nazis that this administration has enticed out from under the rocks is a sign that America has a LONG way to go yet.   It was this latter group that marched through Charlottesville,  chanting Nazi Slogans,  carrying torches,  and, clashing with the counter protesters.

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So..Why are we removing the Statues of Confederate Generals from the Public Square?   Many of these were put up well after the end of the War,  beginning in 1917 , through  the 1950s and 1960s,  as a reaction by “The Cult of the Lost Cause”  to the Civil Rights marches and attempts on the part of citizens of color to gain the equal recognition and protections they were due under the Constitution.  This was the beginning of the enactment of “Jim Crow” laws around the country.   The purpose of these memorials was not to remember  the Civil War,  but to bring fear to the hearts of people of color.  They were there to remind all those people that the people that fought to keep them in the dehumanization and bondage of Slavery were not only still around,  but were, in many cases, still in power.   Also,  they are glorification of a failed society.  They are honoring the Generals who were Traitors to the United States.  To leave them up in a position of honor in the Public Square, is not only to continue that oppression of people of color,  but, could be  acknowledging that perhaps these people were right…and had a point worth supporting.   They did not.  They were on the wrong side of Society, and because of that were  defeated.  While the statues should be preserved,  they should be tucked away in museums along with the other historical debris of time,   surrounded with evidence of what actually caused the Civil War,  and why it failed.

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 The Mayor of New Orleans addressed this recently,  in talking about why that city was removing  its statues of Confederate Generals.  I think he put it very eloquently, and it is worth reading his full presentation.  However,  here is a video of an excerpt of it that really strikes home.