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The Confederate Statue Controversy Isn't About Slavery, It's About Ending America
[The Federalist] Attacks on Confederate heritage have quickly evolved into attacks on American heritage, which was always the ultimate goal.Whether the rest of the country likes it or not, what happens in Texas matters a lot, not just because it’s the second most populous state but also because it serves as a kind of bellwether for what’s going on in those parts of America that coastal elites would prefer to ignore. That’s especially true of the controversy over Confederate statues and symbols and names, of which there are many in Texas, along with people in power who feel obliged to get rid of them. But if you think the iconoclastic impulse to purge public memory of the Confederacy has anything to do with the Civil War or a deeper understanding of American history, you haven’t been paying attention. The campaign against Confederate heritage is really a campaign against American heritage. The goal is to divide the country into irreconcilable camps for the purpose of waging political warfare. In the end, it’s really about giving up on the idea of America as a place where, despite our many differences, we can be a united and prosperous people. Here again Texas is a bellwether. This week, Texas House Speaker Joe Straus requested that an old plaque about the Confederacy be removed from the Capitol in Austin. The plaque itself is a piece of mid-twentieth-century Confederate Lost Cause paraphernalia that was erected in 1959, likely in protest of the Civil Rights movement. It claims the Civil War wasn’t really about slavery and the Confederacy wasn’t really a rebellion. Straus, a Republican, wants the thing to come down because it isn’t accurate. And he’s right: the Confederacy was indeed a rebellion, specifically over the issue of slavery. It should probably come down, in part because it probably shouldn’t have been put up in the first place. But in issuing his request, Straus has become the latest well-meaning public figure to blunder into the Confederate monument mêlée under the misperception that it’s all about accurately portraying history. If it were, those calling for the removal of statues and the renaming of schools would have articulated some limiting principle to prevent the defunding of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC, or the removal of a Christopher Columbus statue in New York City, or the dynamiting of Mount Rushmore. Posted by: Besoeker 2017-09-22 |
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