Discussion for article #235433
We should never forget, or allow our friends in the South to forget, that every single one of the Confederate silent sentinel monuments, is a monument to amnesty, total, blanket amnesty, for treason.
Every single soldier who took up arms for the Confederacy was a traitor, and would have hung were it not for several successive blanket amnesties issued by executive action, or passed into law by Congress.
Next time one of the usual suspect blowhards stands on high principle to denounce the obvious and categorical evil of granting one bit of amnesty to people who have merely violated our immigration laws, ask him or her how they feel about blanket amnesty for treason, for taking up arms to kill their fellow countrymen. If they do claim to be agin’ the Demon Amnesty when this question is put to them, ask them to support efforts to have all these Confederate monuments taken down, and, more importantly, to have all those statues of traitors who served in the govt or armed forces of the Confederacy removed from the Capitol and dumped in the Anacostia.
8 Likes
Well of course, the Union won. So it is only fitting for the winner to expound on it’s win, and pay homage to the winning heroes.
However, you never see the loser in any war be able to erect statues to their loss. Ever see statues of hitler? Or king george? Or any other loser?
Only the south pays homage to their losing icons.
Meh…they still think the war is raging. Never admitting defeat. However, their’s was an unconditional surrender. Because they were traitors!!
2 Likes
Never been to Germany or Austria and seen all the memorials to the dead of World War I, have we? Or the Vietnam Memorial?
And there are plenty of statues of people who lost wars all across the world in nations fair and foul. Crazy Horse and George III, Napoleon I and Karl Mannerheim, Boudica and Vercingetorix, Kim Il Sung and Gamel Nassar.
You can’t hate a place or a people into thinking and acting the way you want them to. And with the possible exception of the Spartans, people who lost a family member in a war have never spit on the ground and said “good riddance” because they died on the losing side.
The need to believe that a loved one’s death in a war wasn’t in vain is powerful. Few can resist the compulsion. The consequences of the survivors’ compulsion to impose meaning on the deaths can range from the palliative to the poisonous, but which it is has little to do with whether the war was won or lost.
10 Likes
On a lecture tour of zinc statues, the lecturer explained that the zinc statues had sections that could be unscrewed and replaced with a different version. This was true of soldier statues and also of Native Americasn. You bought a generic zinc Indian and then added stuff to make them a particular tribe.
2 Likes
With malice toward none and charity toward all, eh?
Well, Occam, I actually think that amnesty was a good idea after the Civil War, certainly amnesty to common soldiers and low-level govt officials. Get low enough down the chain of command, and “I was only obeying orders.” actually is a reasonable defense. I think that even ordinary soldiers and low level officials should have lost the franchise permanently, but otherwise, sure, amnesty for the treason of taking up arms against their country.
That said, I also think that amnesty for people who violated our immigration laws is much, much more in order. Laws can be stupid, and our immigration laws are stupid. Even if you think these laws are just fine and dandy, are you going to argue that following each and every provision of them is so much more important than not talking up arms to kill fellow Americans en masse, that amnesty for the former is unthinkable, but amnesty for treason is necessary to prove one’s basic charity? Where do you stand on amnesty for the undocumented? Does that issue involve charity to law-breakers and their minor children? Does being against amnesty prove malice towards them?
I have absolutely no malice whatsoever towards RE Lee. He was one of the finest generals our country has ever produced. I just don’t think that someone who chose to use that great gift in pursuit of treason in defense of slavery should be granted a place among the statues in the Capitol. Amnesty, charity, the absence of malice – none of these require that one tell lies about a person and pretend their faults and errors, especially really grievous errors like treason, didn’t exist, that they deserve public honor for a public life that most notably included treason. By all accounts RE Lee was a very humble man, someone who had grave doubts about the morality of slavery, and was undecided about fighting for or against his home state, and it is not at all clear to me that he would not be upset with the motives that prompted the great state of VA to send his statue to the Capitol. The Commonwealth did this for one reason, and one reason only, to put a thumb in my eye and the eye of every American, to support the lie that the cause Lee fought for wasn’t treason, but was instead something noble and honorable. I have absolutely not one drop of charity for that lie, I have nothing but malice for it.
Actual charity towards one’s fellow man involves accepting them in full awareness of their faults, much as we hope that they will accept us. We had no choice at the end of the Civil War but to accept that millions of our countrymen had been involved in a treason that the full and merciless application of the law would have required that they answer for with their lives. This country, wisely and humanely, chose mercy, chose amnesty, chose to set by the application of the full force of the law against these grievous lawbreakers. Some of us also chose to forgot the crimes that needed to be forgiven, and perhaps it’s not a coincidence that it’s these very people who we see are the most zealous in persecuting people today whose crimes are almost a joke when set beside treason in defense of slavery.
1 Like
Monuments to slavery are a bad idea. They remind us of a time when slavery was the largest component of GDP. You could simply capture the economic value of another and keep it because some people were not seen as members of the same species.
In related news, there is the possibility such statues honoring White Supremacy become poop targets, and have to be removed.
1 Like
I wholeheartedly agree with you about amnesty for undocumented immigrants. In fact, I support dropping all quota restrictions which necessitates the unrealistic distinction between documented and undocumented immigrants (“legal” vs. “illegal” aliens to some people).
That said, I disagree that making any sort of fuss over Southern Civil War memorials is a good idea or a good point to challenge the perceived hypocrisy of others. Let dead veterans lie.
Southern Civil War Memorials have nothing whatsoever to do with honoring the dead, and everything to do with laundering history.
Benedict Arnold was arguably a greater general than Lee, and arguably did more to win us the war (by his actions at Saratoga alone) than even Washington, who never won a pitched battle. Yet I can predict with confidence that CT will never send a statue of Arnold to stand in the Capitol next to Lee’s. That’s true for one simple reason – CT, unlike VA, doesn’t have an axe to grind trying to justify treason in defense of slavery.
Arnold does have a statue in his memory, at Saratoga, and I have to say that it is clearly the most moving memorial to any individual soldier (the Vietnam Memorial on the Mall takes the overall honors) I have ever visited. It’s just the statue of a left boot, tucked away in a corner of the Saratoga Battlefield, with a short inscription that doesn’t even mention Arnold’s name, just alludes to his deeds. It honors his sacrifice, as he was wounded in the lower left leg and foot both at Saratoga and earlier in an assault on Quebec. It honors his memory because had he not been wounded, it is likely that he would have captured Quebec and annihilated a British army in a field battle, something that might have ended the war years earlier. And because of the horrific wound, and because he wasn’t a very congenial person, he lost out on getting the command of the southern Continental Army that instead went to his bitter rival and utter incompetent Gen Gates
If you can devise a similarly thoughtful and emotive memorial to Lee, or the Confederate dead in general, that manages to honor their personal sacrifice and military accomplishments in such a way that it doesn’t also lend legitimacy and honor to the cause they committed treason to fight for, great, I’ll be the first subscriber to help raise that monument, not the least because I count numerous ancestors among those Confederate dead. But I count slaveholders too among my ancestors, and the South I was born into is simply not capable of honoring their dead except as a means of lending legitimacy and honor to a cause that is utterly and completely disgraceful, and, here’s the important part, a cause that is not dead
Here’s how we’ll know that cause is dead, beyond rising from the grave. When both the Civil War and the War of the Revolution are so far back in memory that Arnold’s treason and Lee’s treason are no longer alive to us, when the idea of these two committing treason is as quaint and merely historical as which side The Earl of Warwick was on in the War of the Roses, then we can have statues to both put up in places of public honor.