Week of 08/21/2017

It Is Time To Truly End The Civil War
– by David Matthews 2

Leave it to the late and great comedian George Carlin to put things in perspective.

In his great recital of American history, he talks about how this country was founded with double-standards.  He basically described America’s founding fathers as “slave owners who wanted to be free”.  Insert uneasy laughter here.

Well, yeah, he has a point on that.  Most newly-made Americans were not allowed to take part in the actual voting process at the time.  Only white, Christian, land-owning males were allowed to vote for that new government at the time.

Eighty-or-so years later, we supposedly fixed that with the abolition of slavery.  But, as Carlin said, “Not so you’d really notice it of course; just kinda on paper.”  And that, of course, led to the Civil War.  Or, as my Southern neighbors cultishly chant, the “War of Northern Aggression”.  You know, where southerners threw screaming temper tantrums with rifles over the Emancipation Proclamation and wanted to form their own country and then lost.  Yeah, my collective neighbors are really nasty-sore losers over that, and they weren’t even alive when it happened.

Now the Civil War has been over with for over 150 years now... but, as George pointed out perfectly, “not so you’d really notice it.”  And while George was talking about the Civil War buffs who reenact the battles and joking suggest using live ammunition, it’s not the only part of that bloody conflict that is still around.

Yes, my friends, the South never really got over the fact that they lost the Civil War.  There are still plenty of good ol’ boys that fly the Confederate flag on their pickup trucks, they still try to subvert voting for certain people... or, as they call it, “goin’ after voter fraud”... and they still have their monuments.  And we’re not talking placards saying “So-and-so slept here” or “This general took a dump in this hotel”.  No, we’re talking statues.

Yes, the good ol’ boys in the South love their Civil War “heroes”.  The men who so hated being told what to do that they led armed insurrections against the United States of America.  Southerners really love that.  These are the same “patriots” who chant “our country, right or wrong” and “if you don’t like it, leave.”  Believe me when I say that the blatant hypocrisy does not go unnoticed.  It’s a double-standard worthy of those uneasy jokes of George Carlin.

But the truth of the matter is that these monuments of the Civil War were put up during times when the South refused to behave like they’re part of the United States.  First, they put up the Civil War monuments during the “Jim Crow” era, a few decades after the last battle was fought, when dominant white Christian males wanted the rest of the nation to know that they were still the ones in charge down there.  And the second time these things started showing up in large numbers was during the Civil Rights struggle of the 1950’s, when “separate but equal” was challenged and overthrown like a third-world tyrant.  They were put up to remind the “little people” that they were still in charge, not those “Northern aggressors” or “Yankees” or them “damn lib-ur-uls”.

I want you to think about this for a moment... imagine Bostonians waking up one morning and seeing a statue of British Private Hugh Montgomery standing atop the site of the Boston Massacre, pointing his musket at the masses to reenact when he first opened fire on innocent civilians in 1770.  Imagine seeing a statue of King George III in Virginia instead of President George Washington.  Imagine a statue as large as the one for World War II memorial right next to the White House of the British soldiers that ransacked and burned that building in the War of 1812.  How about a statue of Japan’s Emperor Hirohito in Pearl Harbor?  How many of you would want to see that?

Oh, but we can’t tear those down, can we?  “Heritage!”  “History!”  “These are symbols of our past!  We can’t just throw them away!  We can’t throw away our history!”

Sounds silly, doesn’t it?

And yet, just a couple of weeks ago (as of this column’s posting), that’s exactly what people were throwing temper tantrums over.  Statues and symbols that were designed to reinforce the idea of social dominance of one group over all others.

Now remember those hypothetical instances I brought up?  If, one day, we saw statues of King George III and Emperor Hirohito and the British soldiers behind the Boston Massacre and the burning of Washington DC?  Do you know what else they have in common with the Confederate leaders?  They are all losers!  They are all on the losing side of history!

This is one of the reasons why we had a hard time putting up a memorial for the Vietnam War.  We lost that conflict.  We invested a lot into it, it divided America across political and generational lines, and we lost.  But at least with that, we were still able to say that it was over.

Not so with the Civil War, which is why Southerner still refuse to acknowledge it, why they still fly those flags, and why they still support the underlying supremacy ideas, even if they cannot bring themselves to admit it.  They still refuse to accept that they lost the Civil War.  They didn’t put those statues up to “honor” those men in their place in history.  They were put up in defiance of it.  They were put up to say “we refuse to accept that we lost!”

Let’s get brutally honest here… it is high time that we truly end the Civil War.  The South lost.  Period.  Accept it.  Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson and the others who took part in the Confederate States of America were on the losing side of history, just like King George III and Emperor Hirohito were on the losing side of history.  That fact doesn’t subtract their respective places in history.  Rather, it puts them in the proper perspective.

How many of you supporters of Southern “heritage” were upset when we helped tear down the giant statues of Saddam Hussein in Iraq after we liberated Baghdad?  How many of you were upset when you see newsreel footage of us blowing up the old symbols of the Nazi regime that littered Europe after World War II?  How many of you were upset when the people of the old Soviet Union started tearing down images of Lenin and Stalin?  How many of you were screaming “heritage” and “history” at these instances?  I’m guessing the total number of you who were upset at these things was pretty close to - if not at - zero.  Funny how your appreciation of “heritage” and “history” is limited only to the things that you support.

Statues and monuments are powerful symbols of dominance, which is why insecure tyrants are fixated on putting statues up and why other people are hell-bent on tearing them down.  But, in and of themselves, they are neither historical nor accurate representations of heritage.

People in the South have waged a war of denial with the rest of the United States for a century-and-a-half, and it has done nothing but bring shame to themselves and the nation they claim to love “right or wrong”.  If you truly claim to love America, then you can’t keep holding on to the reasons that divided it, or to the symbols of that denial.  Let the statues and the other symbols of division go.  You won’t be forgetting history when you do; you’ll be putting it in its proper place... in the past.