Huntsville, Ala.: “Heroes fell … in defence of the principles which gave birth to the Confederate cause.” Which principles? Image via Twitter.
Flags of the defeated
by Tom Sullivan
Huntsville, Ala.: “Heroes fell … in defence of the principles which gave birth to the Confederate cause.” Which principles? Image via Twitter.
One has to wonder why the flags and icons of defeated, racist regimes are cherished among the alt-right's self-described patriots. The answer is simple. Because the alt-right represents the former, not the latter. So does the sitting president.
Answering press questions in New York yesterday, the president of the United States gave aid and comfort to racists, white nationalists, and bigots worldwide. The families of the innocent dead and injured in Charlottesville will wait. What mattered more to the president was a woman on social media saying something flattering about his Saturday statement. He spent the press conference trying to deflect blame for the violence from the neo-nazis, klansmen, white nationalists, and armed miitia that attended the Friday tiki torch parade and the rally Saturday. They came to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. After yesterday's presidential encouragement, they will be back, and more of them.
"Tuesday was a great day for David Duke and racists everywhere," the Washington Post's lead editorial begins:
When a white supremacist stands accused of running his car into a crowd of protesters, killing one and injuring 19, Americans of goodwill mourn and demand justice. When this is done in the context of a rally where swastikas are borne and racist and anti-Semitic epithets hurled, the only morally justifiable reaction is disgust. When the nation’s leader does not understand this, the nation can only weep."Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists in BLM/Antifa," David Duke, former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, tweeted in confirmation.
In Charlotte: “They struggled nobly for the cause of independence and constitutional self-government.”
— Greg Greene (@ggreeneva) August 15, 2017
A whitewash. Sanitizing. pic.twitter.com/A99dA4OZaQ
The controlling cause of the unsettled condition of affairs in the Department is that the greatest efforts made by the defeated insurgents since the close of the war have been to promulgate the idea that the cause of liberty, justice, humanity, equality, and all the calendar of virtues of freedmen, suffered violence and wrong when the effort for Southern independence failed. This is of course intended as a species of political cant, whereby the crime of treason might be covered with a counterfeit varnish of patriotism, so that the precipitators of rebellion might go down in history hand in hand with the defenders of the Government, thus wiping out with their own hands their own stains.With dawn of the Jim Crow era, the insurgents' relations (many, white women) took to erecting cheaply made "racist kitch," essentially mail-order monuments to the "the boys in gray," thereby to whitewash the history of the Civil War and reassert white dominance. (You wondered why that statue in Durham crumpled so easily?)
These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.A new generation of counterfeit patriots wants to preserve that fake history and their own sense that men who share their complexion are still in charge. They are taking up arms again and, as an ally, have an anti-Lincoln with a taste for eugenics in the White House shouting "fake news."
After the Civil War, these statues were a part of that terrorism as much as a burning cross on someone’s lawn; they were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city.