One could say there are two “schools of thought” regarding monuments. Their subject matter could mark them as vessels of collective memory. Alternatively, there is a competing, present-minded view. Because monuments are placed by democratic governments in public space, they define a community’s values.
The “collective memory” school is superficial. Just because an object is rooted in facts does not make it an instrument of pedagogy. Monuments stylize history, shaving away unattractive qualities and glorifying what’s left. They evoke emotion and send a message. This can be done for good or for ill, but it is clearly normative.
By endorsing a monument, a community reveals what it is willing to sanction. Thus, posterity is entitled to remove structures that were erected by earlier generations. Norms and values change. Our public landscape can and should change with them.
All memorials to the Confederacy must go. If one consensus has congealed over the last half-century, it is that racism is wrong. The Confederacy was a slaveholders’ revolt, inseparable from the view of black people as chattel. Moreover, Confederate imagery has been and remains to this day a touchstone for white supremacists. To repudiate those values demands that we remove all symbols of racial repression.
In any democracy, government serves as a forum for shared norms. The symbols put on display by our government should not include those that honor past racial violence. It legitimates ongoing racism in the present.
Alexander Jones is an original contributor to PoliticsNC.
Just as CIS members should have never taken down their Soviet monuments, NC should not take down theirs. “Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it…”
No there are not two “schools” of thought, for alas one of those thoughts has obviously not had enough “schooling.”
Lets examine the reality of some other famous NON-Confederate Americans, most of whom have several monuments in their “honor.”
How about that Central Park monument to General Sherman? A quote from him, “The more Indians we can kill this year the fewer we will need to kill the next, because the more I see of the Indians the more convinced I become that they must either all be killed or be maintained as a species of pauper. Their attempts at civilization is ridiculous.”
Or US Grant, the Union victor and soon-to-be president whose infamous “jewish” orders issued in 1862 included his “General Order # 11,” expelling all Jews “as a class” from his conquered territories within 24 hours. He also issued orders banning southward travel in general, stating that “the Israelites especially should be kept out… no Jews are to be permitted to travel on the railroad southward from any point. They may go north and be encouraged in it; but they are such an intolerable nuisance, that the department must be purged of them”.
How about former Union general Custer who has a couple monuments including one at West Point? On November 27, 1868, without bothering to identify the village or do any reconnaissance, now Lieutenant Colonel Custer leads an early morning attack on a band of peaceful Cheyenne living on RESERVATION LAND where we put them. Over 100 were killed including scores of women and children.
Good old Ben Franklin? At the age of 81 he was named president of the country’s first abolitionist group, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society – good for him, yet he himself OWNED SLAVES for over 40 years.
George Washington owned over 300 slaves when he died as well. There’s a big pointy memorial to him near the White House. Fell it?
Should FDR’s memorial in DC come down? In 1941 Roosevelt signed the War Department’s blanket Executive Order 9066, which authorized the physical removal of all Japanese Americans into internment camps even though his own federal report said that nearly all Japanese-Americans were loyal US citizens. So he had US CITIZENS rounded up and basically put in prison because of their ancestry.
Learn some history people, before you start destroying it!
Great rundown. I’m gonna copy and paste this for the next time someone wastes breath on this. Especially love the part about liberal icon FDR.
So, should we remove the Martin Luther King street sign because he was a womanizer.
No he did a lot of good thinks. Because what you want removed.
Troy said it best. His last two paragraphs sum up my feelings exactly. Thanks, Troy.
I differ here on this matter. Those memorials should stay. But not for the reasons cited quantifying their removal; since there is validity in those reasons.
In context, they serve as reminders. Reminders that good men of ordinary firmness can be hoodwinked into defending a cause that was indefensible. A stone cold reminder (forgive the pun) that we all have choices to make in our lives and those who defended the South and it’s morose decisions chose poorly; many paying for that decision with their lives.
The majority of southerners didn’t own slaves. I pause here to wonder if they truly understood what was at stake and the ‘true’ reasons behind secession and the subsequent war by rationally deciding to champion those reasons or if they were but pawns in a game being played by the landed gentry as an offshoot of the feudalistic system from which many claimed heritage, believing steadfastly that their way of life was in jeopardy by those who failed or refused to understand them and the South.
No one can dispute the bravery of those that fought; we can despise the reasons and causality of it. For that reason, those statues should stay. They were erected, for the most part, as the remaining veterans of the war began passing away due to old age; it was their legacy to those that never came back. They are not obelisks to an ideal but to people. All dead now, but remembered.
Remember them for their sacrifice, their bravery, and the blunder of their decisions. We should not allow them to be viewed in any other context.