Dallas yesterday, Richmond tomorrow
A statue of Lee was removed from an eponymous park in Dallas yesterday, without incident.
The 14 foot- (4.3 meter) tall statue in Dallas of Lee on horseback riding with an unnamed soldier has been at a city park since 1936, with then President Franklin D. Roosevelt on hand for its dedication.
Workers in yellow vests took down the Lee statue and hauled it away on a trailer pulled by a pick-up truck, during an operation lasting about four hours, according to a Reuters Witness. Dozens of bystanders watched while police, including some officers armed with rifles, stood guard.
The park may be renamed.
Earlier this month, a U.S. judge dismissed a lawsuit from the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who were seeking court protection to keep the statue in place in the park.
Opponents of Confederate memorials view them as an affront to African-Americans and ideals of racial equality. But supporters of such symbols argue they represent an important part of history, honoring those who fought and died for the Southern states that sought to secede in the Civil War.
Yes, and that’s the problem – we shouldn’t honor people who fought and died to preserve slavery. That would be like honoring SS guards who worked at Auschwitz.
White supremacists are heading to Richmond, Virginia for a rally tomorrow to “defend” Confederate monuments.
CSAII: The New Confederate States of America is planning an unpermitted “Heritage not Hate” rally to defend Richmond’s Robert E. Lee Monument following the deadly “Unite the Right” rally to defend Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee statue.
“I hope nobody loses their lives tomorrow, on either side, I really do,” CSA II organizer and Three Percenter militia organizer Tara Brandau told WTVR. “That’s not why we are here.”
Friday morning, Brandau posted photos of her in a pickup truck, flashing a Three Percenter gang-sign while wearing a ‘POLICE’ hat and confederate fingerless gloves.
Two long rifles appear to be displayed in a rear window rack.
Just a good-will gesture.
Following the violence in Charlottesville, CSAII’s official statement said they would continue to defend “at all costs” confederate monuments, like the statues in Charlottesville and Richmond.
“We pride ourselves in honoring and protecting our Proud Confederate Heritage as well as our Confederate Monuments and Cemeteries to honor our past heros (sic) and not let their memory fade away as is being done by a lot of our government officials today,” the CSAII Commanding General wrote on Facebook. “CSA II® will continue to honor our heros (sic) memory by protecting our monuments to their memory at all cost and assisting our fellow members of the Heritage ~ Not Hate Movement to stop the oppressive tactics done by these above mentioned hate groups and government officials.”
The “heritage” is slavery and white supremacy, imposed and defended with force.
Indeed.
What am I not getting? The confederates not only tried to secede from the United States, they went to war against it. They were traitors and they were traitors in the name of wanting to enslave people. Having lost the war they and their descendants and sympathisers have run an intermittent terror campaign that has waxed and wained ever since. They have tried to subvert the rule of law by passing state and local laws that have been found lawful and unconstitutional time and again.
This isn’t about heritage, history or culture. Its not even just politics. It’s simply the continuation of the civil war and should frankly be viewed in that light. They’re just fucking racist traitors.
Ophelia, there is a post of mine in moderation, made from a new email address.
Funny you should mention that: An AfD candidate in Germany says Germany should be proud of its soldiers in both world wars. The AfD is the new right wing party. (read ‘anti-immigrant’; they want a minimum quota on deportations. That’s pretty much their entire platform.) They had to disappear one of their spokesmen in January for calling the Holocaust Memorial a ‘monument of shame’.
Some people just don’t want to admit that it really does matter which side you’re on.
‘Confederate fingerless gloves?’
Oh, hell, that’s actually a real thing out there. I could have gone all day without having to learn that.
Let’s see if we can think of other soldiers we should be proud of.
The ones who rounded up Japanese citizens for internment in 1942.
The ones who guarded prisoners of war who built the Burma Railway.
The ones in the Panzer division who killed everyone in Oradour-sur-Glane.
The troops of the British Indian Army under General Dyer who shot all those pesky protesters in Amritsar.
The soldiers in the Pakistan Army in Bangladesh (then called East Pakistan) in 1971.
To name a few.
Re Rob at #2:
I can’t disagree. But after any civil war, the participants have to come up with some way of living with one another again. In the U.S., that meant amnesty for all but the top echelon secessionists. Reconstruction should have dismantled racist institutions and the whole plantation culture, but that was a bigger commitment than the political consensus could bear, particularly with the same clever, single-minded, wealthy, and articulate planter class in the South undermining that consensus. So we ended it as part of a Presidential election compromise in 1876, and the white South was allowed to recreate slavery in all but name for another 80 odd years and to recast the affair as one they could be proud of.
We won the war and lost the peace, so we’re still fighting it.
“We pride ourselves in honoring and protecting our Proud Confederate Heritage…”
If heritage generally is so indispensable, surely they can conjure up some other southern figures from the worlds of music, literature or art to generate some feelings of pride? It’s not as though the only thing of note the south ever produced was the confederacy.
Re #8 – It depends on whether or not they really want to celebrate Southern heritage or white heritage. I get the feeling it’s the white heritage they want to celebrate, and for something distinctively southern and white, they’ve got the practice of slavery, the defense of slavery, a secession attempt to protect slavery, and apartheid.
If they wanted to celebrate Southern heritage more generally, of course they’ve got a lot to be proud of. There’s music and the civil rights movement, but those would be more specifically black accomplishments. (Well, not all the music – but then, the music that isn’t may be problematically white too often.) I would take it as a wonderful thing if people can reach a genuinely, thoughtfully post-racial sense of self in which white Southerners would be able to regard jazz and the civil rights movement as the accomplishments of “us”, but that’s waaaay in the future for anyone cheering about the Confederacy today.
Communities that work together a bit more closely and with a bit more of an easy-going tempo mark off the U.S. South from other parts of the country, at least as a wide generalization. Some of that probably goes back to the antebellum South and its institutions, but it at least, by now, is a common property across the color and class divides.
The less-developed stretches of the South can be gorgeous, but naturally beauty is more a source of satisfaction and happiness than pride as such. Being good custodians of it would be a source of pride, but it’s a hard sell to push that kind of hippie stuff in the current political culture down there.
Jeff @7, you’re quite right. Other nations that have avoided his sort of thing have generally taken one of two paths. They either essentially wiped out the opposition, or that engaged in a generation of active efforts to achieve peace and forgiveness. Sadly the US did neither and as a result the United part of the name has been sporadic at best, a sick joke at worst.
Yes, but if you look at that quote, it is the confederacy specifically that they want to honor and protect. And that is the problem. Because the confederacy is, as we have discussed and they choose to ignore (or pretend to ignore), about treason and slavery. The confederacy itself did not produce other things, because the CSA existed specifically to succeed from the union and protect slavery. And honoring and protecting their Confederate heritage is all about intimidating people of color. They no longer have the right to hold them as slaves. They were made to get rid of the “white’s only” and “colored’s only” separation of everything.
The statues are meant to take the place of statutes as a means of controlling and intimidating the non-white population.