Civil War Reconstruction continued

I have been a bit quiet for a while. I, like much of the country, have been appalled by the antics of President Trump for a number of typical and also contrary reasons. I do not disagree with everything that he is attempting to accomplish, just because embraces awful positions on other issues. In some sense, I am even more deeply resentful of his appalling white supremacist and neo-Nazi apologist statements. They are appalling in and of themselves, but also because these statements also can prejudice others against anything else Donald Trump may embrace. They poison his entire agenda, good and bad.

When one looks into the history of Confederate memorials, it presents a not so virtuous justification of erecting them in the first place. The great surge in erecting these monuments coincides with the promulgation of Jim Crow laws and of Lost Cause mythology. The Old South prior to the Civil War was built upon a foundation of racism at its worst. It was an economic system where people owned other people. The Lost Cause mythology attempted to soften that ugly fact and revise history to make the actions of those who led the rebellion,  to preserve the system which allowed certain people (whites) to own other people (blacks), to appear more virtuous than they really were. It also attempted to have the oppressors and former slave owners assume the roles of victims.

The monument building occurred at the same time that Washington DC was resegregated by Woodrow Wilson, the KKK membership spiked, and many gains African Americans garnered in the South after Reconstruction were rolled back through enforcement of Jim Crow laws. The nation put in place immigration laws at that time that were blatantly racially exclusive. The monuments to the Confederacy were erected for a purpose, and a not so benevolent one. We need to recognize that was part of the plan.

Do the statues need to come down? I like the idea that they need to come down only after a period of reflection and education. Here they are in plain sight, where some have been for more than 100 years. Many of us simply ignored them as empty and boring markers of distant history no longer relevant to our lives. However, the history involves events which happened not so long ago and we need to be more aware of what happened then because it is relevant to what is happening now. I believe they were erected with malice intent with an agenda focused on fear and intimidation. Some people in current times share this same agenda. There is nothing benign about this. I believe that once the truth about these statues becomes widely understood, they will come down because they will be a source of embarrassment.

In my opinion, it is not justified to honor people whose behavior and actions were neither heroic nor morally sound. They likely were people with many virtues (or at least some virtues) but their decisions to fight for a way of life predicated on human enslavement put them on the wrong side of the moral divide. It might be said that our founding fathers (Washington and Jefferson) should also be viewed in this light but I would like to make a basic distinction. Washington and Jefferson were hypocrites in that they were slave holders,  but they did not mount a rebellion based upon preservation of a morally unjustifiable tenant of slavery. Their monuments were erected to celebrate their accomplishments in creating a Republic which, although imperfect, has been a remarkable accomplishment.

Confederate leaders led a rebellion primarily motivated by the desire to preserve this abhorrent institution. We do need to recognize that their views were not unique for the times. Slavery was the norm for thousands of years and these men and women who embraced it in the early and middle part of the 19th century represented the tail end of slavery acceptability, at least in the developed world. Their lack of insight may be explainable given history, but it is not morally justifiable and clearly does not warrant any monuments celebrating their lives and actions. In the end, they accomplished essentially nothing. What is there to celebrate about their lives and accomplishments?

This series of events also highlights the perils of focusing on moral equivalencies. At the most basic level, everyone is flawed and everyone makes mistakes. This creates the opportunity to level all moral transgressions, elevating minor infractions to major status and lowering major one to minor status. We need to recognize that some transgressions are simply worse than others. Yes, I understand that this can lead one into another slippery set of slopes but we can for our work on the ends of the spectrum and not in the middle. Advocacy of Nazism and White supremacy has no middle way aspects. The philosophy is poison and has recent history marked by brutal violence and mass murder. We would be absolutely mortified if current day Germany started erecting statues honoring Adolf Hitler and Herman Goering.