Regarding The Flap Over Confederate Statues

[TheBeardedDude]

At what point did anyone suggest that Lee and the other members of the Confederacy be forgotten? Not memorializing them =/= trying to make society forget them

Really, my big problem with the gung-ho anti-statue movement is its encouragement of a Manichean view of history that simply doesn't do anyone any favours. I don't see it as much different from the old Lost Cause of the South mentality, except, of course, that the sides being demonized are swapped. It's like in A People's History of the United States; a good enough place to search for the skeletons in the closet of American History, but as a proper, complete take on the history of America, it's really poor. 

Case in point, he writes about Andrew Jackson: "If you look through high school textbooks and elementary school textbooks in American history, you will find Andrew Jackson the frontiersman, soldier, democrat, man of the people — not Jackson the slaveholder, land speculator, executioner of dissident soldiers, exterminator of Indians." He then proceeds to talk about the latter category, and uses it as an excuse to dismiss the former category out of hand, insisting it's merely a con job masking a more sinister agenda. And, because people want to split the world into heroes and villains, history is done a disservice.

It's really telling that Bloody, Bloody, Andrew Jackson, an off-Broadway musical that's short enough it can't be bothered to split into acts, and casts him as an Emo, still remains a more honest and nuanced view of history than even most history books.

I personally think that, if kept up, they should go beyond mere commemoration of generals fighting valiantly for a vile cause, and confront the unsavory reality as much as the myth.

This: "...gung-ho anti-statue movement..." is a straw man. We aren't "anti-statue," we are against statues of traitors being erected and we are especially against the reasons why they were erected in the 50's and 60's in the Southern US. It isn't the person per se, but the persons who erected them, when they erected, and why they chose to memorialize the people they did when they did. Robert E. Lee statues (and engravings like that of Stone Mountain Georgia) weren't erected to teach people about Lee and the Civil War, they were erected to remind the "uppity blacks" that they lived in a world of racism and bigotry where they still didn't have the power or influence that they should have in an equal society