Leftists Purging History or Al Queda in America

[SteelCurtain]

To many southerners, the civil war wasn't about slavery.

But we don't get to make up history. It was very clearly about slavery. The independence from the north was about an overwhelming portion of the southern economy relying on slavery, and if slavery were outlawed, a lot of rich people would lose quite a bit of their fortunes. It was about whether the Federal Government could overrule a state law that it deemed to be incorrect. Anyone who says that the Civil War was about states rights has to then come up with how states rights were being infringed. And then they have to look me in the eye and say that the Federal Government was wrong to create a Federal Law abolishing slavery. (And if these people truly felt it were about the abstract form of states rights, then they'd have to tell me how the Trump administration is not now infringing on the right of states to allow sanctuary cities across the nation.)

Just because people have fabricated an alternative form of history where people weren't fighting to preserve the institution of slavery from the reach of the federal government, doesn't mean everyone else needs to honor that. These monuments were put up after the War was over to remind black people why they fought. This argument about "some of the soldiers were not even fighting for slavery" is a red herring. There are no monuments to these soldiers, the ground troops. It's the generals, the politicians, the 'thinkers' of the confederacy that are being deified in the south. They knew exactly what they were fighting for.

It is appropriate to learn this history. It is appropriate to memorialize these men by learning about them, learning who they were and what they stood for within the context of the bigger picture. It is not appropriate to venerate them as American heroes. They were definitionally not American heroes. They fought against America. They were American traitors. As a person who went to school in the south, slavery was whitewashed as a contextual footnote in my history classes. It is often not until you get to college that you learn about the horrors that people like Andrew Jackson inflicted upon the Original American tribes and the stances that these men had towards black people. Most of our founding fathers were racists. The fact that they owned slaves is not the reason to take down any monument. This is the red herring that the president is pushing. No one but the most fringe lunatics are arguing for taking down the monuments of anyone but Confederate Rebels, men who decided that defending the institution of slavery was worth turning their back on their country and seceding from the union. Men who decided that the future of their money making abilities was more important than whether it was moral to own humans.

Whether people want to acknowledge it or not, that is the reminder that these monuments bring to those of us who know the history.

“I think it wiser, moreover, not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.”