Pierce: Removing Confederate Statues Isn't Sanitizing History--It's Fumigating History

Removing Confederate Statues Isn't Sanitizing History—It's Fumigating History

That difference is everything.
By Charles P. Pierce
Aug 17, 2017



OK, I can understand there being statues to the white-supremacist traitor army in places like Kentucky and Maryland, which were, after all, border states during the Civil War. (It was in Baltimore where, on Patriots Day in 1861, the 6th Massachusetts was assaulted by secessionist dickwads, the event immortalized, if such a word can be used, in a huge mural in the State House on Beacon Hill.) But, seriously, people, Montana? The Great Falls Tribune surprised the hell out of me with this one.

I think we can all agree that Montana is a northern state, right? I mean, it wasn't even a state during the Civil War, and this fountain wasn't erected until 1916. As best I can tell, the Daughters of the Confederacy, the Bless-Your-Heart wing of white-supremacist backlash, performed Johnny Appleseed duty with these monuments and statues any place to which Southern folks fled after they started a war they couldn't finish, a war that wrecked their parasitic local economies. Many of them went west, to work the mines, or work the railroads, and get rich, or, at least, less poor. This, apparently, is the reason the Daughters put up these abominations in places like Montana, so that the expatriate Confederates could take comfort in the fact that the cause of white supremacy was alive everywhere in the country.

Also, too, Arizona.

And Los Angeles.

Despite the fat-headed involvement of the president*, who went bananas on the subject over his electric Twitter machine again this morning, there is a germ of a very healthy historical moment in our current discussion of these statues. In case you were wondering, and why you would be at this point is a good question, the president* took one more opportunity to reassure his white-supremacist base that he's their boy.

snip//

Pro Tip: any time he makes a reference to "culture," that's not a dog-whistle, that's an air-raid siren.

Seriously, though, I think the fact that we're arguing over whether or not we should end the free ride through our history that treasonous racists have enjoyed for 150 years is a very salubrious moment. For example, it is now much more widely known that the great majority of these statues were erected long after the Civil War, and that most of them were erected either during the high-tide of lynching in the South during the beginning of the 20th Century, or during the 1950s, when mass-resistance to racial desegregation was gathering steam in the old Confederacy. (This latter phenomenon also accounts for the resurrection of the Confederate battle flag.) These were not put up as tribute to heritage or history. They were put up as reminders to African American citizens as to who really was in charge of their lives, 13th amendment or no. These were tributes to the "culture" of Jim Crow, of sharecropping, and of lynching. More people are aware of that now than were aware of it two weeks ago, and I think that's all to the good.

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http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a57073/removing-confederate-statues-reason/