Anyone who knows me knows that for my entire life I have been a history buff. More than that I have read, rabidly, books about history, politics, biographies, and everything I can get my hands on. My favorite areas of study are the Civil War, Indian Wars, World War I, and World War II.
And anyone that knows me also knows that I fight like the dickens to ensure that history is always available and always there because when we dismiss, ignore, hide, or diminish history we end up repeating it (as we have now with Nazis in the nation, but that's in my prior blog posts).
So many people think "He'll defend keeping the Confederate statues, he'll say they are okay as they are part of history, and that removing them is wrong."
Nope. They definitely should be removed...but with a caveat.
You see as I grew older I wanted to know all sides of the story. As they say the truth is usually in the middle, but that is only true for some things at some moments in history. Consequently I have talked with many people including those who suffered and suffer. I've talked with and known Holocaust survivors, Blacks who were attacked, Hispanics here illegally, Muslims who were vilified, and many others. I heard their stories, I watched them cry, I was appalled by some of their tales. I also read...a lot. I read about the oppressed and the oppressors. I read how either side was righteous.
But what I found was one specific truth...the oppressors always, always, always sought to dehumanize those they disagreed with. They sought to destroy their lives and backgrounds. They wanted not to just make them an oppressed people, but to utterly crush them and then either eliminate them or use them. And those oppressors were never righteous in any form of societal, moral, or ethical thinking.
What I found when talking to Holocaust survivors is that the last thing they, or any of their family, would want to see are statues in the town squares of Germany of Hitler, Goebbels, Bormann, etc.
The last thing that Ukrainians want to see in the square of Kiev are statues of Lenin and Stalin.
The last thing that Iraqis want to see are statues of Saddam.
The last thing that Hispanics want to see are Noriega or many of their dictators.
And the last thing that Blacks want to see are statues of General Nathan Bedford Forrest who founded the KKK, or General Robert E. Lee who led the Army of Virginia in support of the rights of slave states, or Jefferson Davis who as President of the Confederate States of America was leader of the seditionist act to destroy the United States of America and wanted to allow for expansion of slavery.
So why then do we have those statues in our squares? Why do we allow them to be honored in our street and school names? Why, when we do not ourselves put up statues of those we fought and who wanted to destroy people and civility, are we putting up and allowing the statues of the leaders of the Confederacy?
And why in the world would any White American want to glorify people who wanted to destroy the entire nation all so that they could let some of the people own slaves under "states rights?"
Why?
Because for them it's not at all about the actual statues. It's not at all about "states rights." It's not at all about our history. It's about clinging onto the right to be a White supremacist. It's about wanting to hold onto their White privilege. It's about wanting to intimidate and invoke fear unto those who's skin or religion or lifestyle is not their White Christian one.
It's about everything that caused those statues to be up not after the Civil War, but during the battle for Civil Rights in the 1900s. If you check most of those statues were done as Blacks were fighting, struggling, and even dying to just be considered Americans like everyone else.
And they still are.
And every day that a Black person walks by such a statue, or attends Nathan Bedford Forrest School, or sees someone with a massive Confederate Flag in the back of their pickup truck it's a statement to that Black American..."fuck you."
It's the same, completely the same, as those members of the American Nazi Party, who in full Brown Shirted uniforms, marched through the Jewish majority village of Skokie, IL years ago. Imagine if American Nazis, which were in the hundreds of thousands before Pearl Harbor, had managed to get statues of Adolf Hitler erected throughout the nation. Would we have left them in place after Hitler lost? Would we have put up more later on? What about the Jewish Americans, how would they feel?
That's what's going on right now.
And with the ascension of a fascist, bigot, and liar to the White House in the form of Donald Trump, supported by the modern Nazis, the Republicans, and his elevation due to the machinations of Hillary Clinton, his friend, and the Democrats collaboration where are we?
We are into a situation where the people are taking things into their own hands. Where they will NOT allow Nazis to rule our nation, to scare us, to intimated us, to attack Blacks, Muslims, Hispanics, Jews, or anyone else. The people will not allow the USA to become the new Nazi Germany. And since they cannot turn to the Democrats (usually the supporters of the people) they are now doing it themselves. They have also seen that the police, who used mace, armor, and riot gear on Native Americans, Occupy protestors, BLM, and others but did nothing at all and didn't stand up to Nazis carrying rifles, holding torches, and chanting "blood and soil" (taken from the SS motto of "blood and honor") that they too are suspect.
So now the people are bringing down the symbols of a failed seditious action and racist slavery. They are tearing down the statues themselves or forcing their representatives to remove them "or else." And those are good things.
But now for the caveat I mentioned before, not all the statues should be brought down in a chainsaw manner and none of them should be destroyed.
Why you might ask incredulously after this long spiel?
Because they are part of our history. Those statures, like the ones of Nazi figures and paraphernalia in the Holocaust Museum, should all be in their own museums in all the states who seceded from the union and lost. They should be put in them with information as to who the person was, what they did during the Civil War, and how they ended up after. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest should be shown to have been such a rabid racist he lynched freed Blacks, he formed the KKK, and he was as vile a person as existed. Gen. Robert E. Lee should be shown as the commander of the armies and how he turned against his oath to the United States and became a traitor. All of them should be preserved and exposed.
And some statues should not be destroyed or removed but left in place because some of those in the South realized what they were doing was wrong, and became activists for Civil Rights, such as General PGT Beauregard who after the war fought for Black voting rights and the start of Civil Rights in Louisiana.
For the others, we do not want them destroyed lest we forget what they did and what happened. We do not want to bury their despicable actions. We sure as hell do not want to glorify them any longer.
So do not destroy them. Remove them. Preserve them for a museum to the horrors and actions of the states they were in. Make it clear their actions will not be tolerated ever again.
For you see we made this mistake once with the Nazis. We taught the American students and people about the horrors of the Holocaust, but we never taught them how the German people came to murder millions. How they elected, legally, Nazis to the Reichstag (Congress). How Adolf Hitler was legally made leader of their nation.
We never taught our children that. We never made it clear what fascism and Nazism were. We made a massive mistake, and now we have Nazis in our government, on our streets, and trying to make this another Nazi Christian White Supremacist state and using the statues and glorification of the Confederacy as their rallying cry.
Never again.
Never, ever, again.
And never, ever here.
