How Trump Rid the Nation of All Those Goddamned Confederate Statues
Most of the statues were of Confederate War heroes, most were erected in the 1920s. All were meant to commemorate one of the biggest of the Big Lies; the one about a noble Lost Cause. The one invented after the fact, the one that begat ‘The Birth of a Nation’. The one meant to deny the fact. To deny, first you must lie. Denial is but a lie to oneself. One lie necessitates another. First thing you know, you have a narrative.
And it must follow, as the night the day,
William Shakespeare, circa 1603
As sure as the night follows the day, one lie leads to another, ‘The Birth of a Nation’ was then used to perpetuate the very Big Lie that begat it; the one about the nobility of the cause.
Oh what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive
Sir Walter Scott, circa 1808
Maintaining a web requires almost constant attention; especially over generations. For generations, first novelists, then Hollywood writers, and historians, expanded and maintained this web/(false narrative) while southern politicians in Washington diverted the Nation’s attention away from the ugly truth.
Out damned spot
William Shakespeare, circa 1606
Hers but was a wee task compared to outing the spot left by nearly one-hundred years of the lynchings, indentured servitude, peonage, and suppression committed in the name of this Big Lie.
—
Ronnie stood before the Berlin Wall and demanded, “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Mikhail did it, but Ronnie got all the credit.
Donnie doesn’t want the credit, but it is his to have and to hold. His little Storm Trooper exercise in Charlottesville lit the petard.
For ’tis the sport to have the enginer
Hoist with his own petard; and ’t shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines
And blow them at the moon. O, ’tis most sweet
When in one line two crafts directly meet.
William Shakespeare, circa 1603
Only to be replaced by the bogus attacks on critical race theory.
Just goes to show you, there’s always something.
White people do not have a monopoly on narcissism, but they have done a much better job of monetizing it.
Ron
accident of history. which is to say things happen, and then they cause other things to happen. first thing you know power switches from slave trading empires in africa (of which some folk are inordinately proud without knowing much about it) to (skipping over a lot) spice trading europeans some of whom expanded the slave trade of africans to america, and now get the blame for having invented greed and cruelty.
which wouldn’t be worth talking about, except that greed and cruelty are bad for us. And while holier than thou is bad for us too, my biggest objection to it today is that it plays into the hands of the masters of greed and cruelty to keep us at each other’s throats and so defeats itself.
i never thought of “the lost cause” as much of a big lie, much less “one of the biggest Big Lies,” but I never particularly associated it with racism much less lynching, but just the ordinary lies people tell themselves to try to save some self esteem out of losing a fight they were stupid to get into in the first place.
i had a gentleman the other night want to beat me up because my dogs were not on leash…they hadn’t done anything harmful to him except cause his dog..tied to a fence with about an eighteen inch leash..to bark hysterically. But he was ready to fight and die for the cause of law and order. Simple human nature.
Good to see that taxpayer money will no longer be used to honor traitors.
Joel
actually, treason is aiding the enemies of one’s own country. since the South had seceded, it was no longer part of the “united states.” So fighting for the Confederacy against the United States was not treason by definition. I don’t think any member of the Confederate Army was ever charged with treason. Jefferson Davis was charged, but not tried.
But perhaps you are one of those who take the view that George Washington and friends were traitors to their king and country?
Next question is whether any Federal money was used to honor the people who fought for the Confederacy.
Lincoln fought to “preserve the Union” for very practical reasons, and used the war as the best chance to free the slaves and give them the right to vote, but he seems to have been reluctant to charge confederates with treason.
Which is why we honor Lincoln and not Joel. [hint: not only did he save the Union and free the slaves, but he sought to “bind up this country’s wounds.”]
So, how far has the GOP gone down the rabbit hole? Consider the movie “1776” when it came out during the Nixon Administration. When Nixon was given a preview:
“A commentary from writer Peter Stone and director Peter H. Hunt reveals that of the half hour that was axed from the film (it’s now restored and mightily improved from the scruffy laserdisc), the cruelest cut was the conservative-tweaking song ”Cool, Considerate Men” — which then President Richard Nixon asked producer Jack Warner to remove.”
https://ew.com/article/2002/08/02/1776/
Meanwhile, Nixon had no problem with another song, “Molasses to Rum”, which correctly identifies that the guilt from the slave trade was earned by both Northern and Southern colonies.
They’ve gone from don’t make fun of conservatives to ignore the inconvenient truth.
@EMichael,
They both ignore and misdirect to deny the inconvenient truth that the Confederacy was an act of treason against the United States. Having grown up in the South, I’ve heard all the threadbare misdirection.
Yes, Confederate treason was motivated by the defense of slavery. The Cornerstone Speech fully embraces that. But the founding fathers also owned slaves. Yet we still have statues to them, as well as place names and portraits on our currency.
The difference is that our founding fathers founded the US. The Confederacy was founded to destroy it, which is the very definition of treason. Let’s be honest about slavery and about treason. If we remove taxpayer-supported statues because they honor slaveholders, taxpayer-supported statues of Jefferson, Washington and others should also go. But the difference is that taxpayer-supported statues honoring Confederates are also taxpayer-supported monuments to treason against the US. Let’s start by removing those.
Joel,
Of course you are right. Slavery was legal when those founders owned slaves. You can deplore them for that, but you cannot erase them from their total records. Those who committed treason deserve to have their monuments destroyed.
and the horses they rode in on, too.
how many black lives did you save today?
interesting article elsewhere on the blogs: man in texas faces twenty years in prison for voting while on parole.
oh, well, can’t do anything about that. but we can do something about those statues.
(the horses? well they were slaves too.)
Yeah, the world is always an “either/or” situation.
geez
Morning,
Off to Chicago on Wednesday, then Denver late August, and finally Phoenix mid-September. Yves and I had a dust-up on details. I would not let Lambert get away with generalities. She did not like it. c’est la vie . . . Germans have a better term for it which I can not recall just yet.
Run,
I take great pride of being banned from NC over a decade ago. And basically, it was because I caught Lambert in a stone cold lie and Yves did not like it and killed my access and the entire thread.
Coberly,
Keep up the good work. You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make them think or even make them like you or make them sing opera. A horse will drink when it gets thirsty.
@Ron,
The Confederacy saw no difference between human slaves and horses, other than that human slaves counted as 3/5 of a human for allocation of white men in Congress. I’m disappointed to see Dale endorsing the equivalency between horses and black humans. I’m sorry to see you encourage him.
Ron
I like horses, even though I have been thrown, and even knocked out once, by horses that did not approve of my riding skills (they were right about the skills). But I have also been saved from serious injury by horses who seemed to understand such things…and forgave me my trespasses.
If I was doing good work, it would be trying to write a book about Social Security that could get published, and read, and understood by a large enough number of people to make a difference. So far, my writing is no better than my riding.
As for teaching people the power of “love thy neighbor,” I might as well be Schindler trying to teach the captain (colonel?) the power of forgiveness.
Joel
i have been trying hard to leave you alone. because there is no hope of changing your mind.
but i did not endorse an “equivalency between horses and black humans.” I thought I was pointing at the propensity of all humans to be cruel to all living things. horses were treated as slaves, and slaves were treated like horses.
it seems to me you divide humans into us and them, and at least you think you treat “us” better than “them”. but sometimes in all the excitement you lose track of which is who.
Joel
think of this as a mathematical problem: if the Constitution had counted slaves as 5/5ths of a person, the South would have had MORE representation in Congress, not less. And if the Constitution had counted slaves as 0/5ths of a person, there would have been NO United States…the slave-holding states would not have joined. Leaving the United States with too little power to defend itself in a cruel world.
Meanwhile NOTE THAT the Constitution refers to “slaves” [it does not use that word] NOT to “black persons.”
Note also that slaves are NOT counted as “3/5 of a person” but that 3/5 of the NUMBER of such persons shall be counted for purposes of representation and direct taxes.
the difference matters.
Coberly,
Only in your mind does it matter. How he applied the 3/5ths is mostly correct.
Like Lincoln, I believe that if slavery is not evil then nothing is evil. He believed that the Founders set slavery on the path to extinction. The leaders of the Confederacy [as well as Justice Tawney and Senator Douglas] saw that path to extinction being realized and tried to change it..by extending slavery into the free states. When Lincoln won election on a platform of preventing the extension of slavery, the slave states saw the handwritng on the wall and chose to secede and create a slave empire [including the Carribean and points south] independent of the United States.
Lincoln knew he was on shaky ground Constitutionally, but he also knew the stakes and played his cards perfectly to prevent secession AND to free the slaves and give them the vote.
It is ignorant of you and others to ignore the whole history of anti-slavery in America. And stupid of you to pick unnecessary fights with people whose votes, if nothing else, we need to keep the Republicans from turning America into a tyranny, where the word slave is never mentioned: black people will not be the only ones reduced to effective slavery, but white people will be allowed to treat them worse to fool themselves into thinking they are “the master race” while being slaves not only to the rich, but to their own hate.
Coberly,
Fortunately for me this year is a lot drier than the last two here. So, you will only find me fighting the lost cause briefly each morning while I stoke up on coffee and try to take a dump. You are correct in your analysis, which in politics means absolutely nothing at all.
thanks Ron
it’s a lot drier here too, but that’s not a good thing.
as Al Gore once said, time for me to go.