They Need Gone.

Robert E. Lee, basically the South’s version of Jesus. Traitor to his country, and wasn’t even that good a general.

You know what?

Confederate monuments have got to go.

Yes, they need gone, they need to be trashed and consigned to the dustbin of history.

This should not be a controversial position, but the insistence and butthurt of the right makes it so.

I really have to question why the right is defending traitors, slaveholders, and racists, but that’s beside the point…. Or is it?

Seriously, people, the monuments and plaques to the Confederates serve only one purpose; to reinforce white supremacy. That’s it. The ‘Daughters of the Confederacy’ worked hard to promote the racist ‘Lost Cause’ myth (the poor, poor put-upon South!), to try and turn a righteous and deserved defeat into a phoenix victory. They worked hard to promote white grievance, supremacy and the view of the South that the Civil War was about more than slavery (it wasn’t). Don’t @ me with ‘states rights’ because those ‘rights’ were the ‘right’ of the one race to hold another in chains, steal their labor, their children, their lives. And the were perfectly fine about it, they used the Bible (of course they did) to excuse their behavior, bending Christianity until it broke into very tiny, fine pieces. Want to know why there were Northern Baptists and Southern Baptists for decades? Slavery. They broke apart because the North could not bend their Christianity to accept slavery (they were okay with white supremacy though, but that’s another post) and the South, all high, mighty, and pissed off, took their bat, ball, and slavery-infested religion, and stormed off home.

And started a war. Yep, they started it, all so they could keep people in slavery. That was the cause and the war ended it.

Well, in name. The South was able to end ‘Reconstruction’ (an era when Blacks had the vote, held elected offices and had power) and start the Era of Terror, where whites would violently take back power through intimidation, terror, and murder. And to mark their white ‘territory’? Statues of the great Confederate ‘heroes’. The DOC started founding chapters (you just needed seven women who had bothers or fathers who were Confederate soldiers, that was pretty much the entire South) and started collecting money for monuments. And of course, passing out their ‘Lost Cause’ propaganda. (They even had a Confederate Catechism. No, really!) They erected as many monuments as they possibly could; statues of generals, soldiers, plaques to dubious ‘achievements’ of the South (like the time a white mob, angry at the election of a Republican governor and his Black Lt. Governor, took over the statehouse for three days. Yes! There was a plaque up for decades calling these racist vigilantes ‘heroes’!). So, yeah.

The statues and monuments were part of a disinformation campaign for the white South, and a campaign of intimidation against Blacks and any notions of equality they might have. Flags, monuments everywhere, on public land, some paid for with public money. Imagine if you were Black, walking through your town, (the places you were allowed to walk), and seeing soaring tributes to your oppressors, the people who killed friends and loved ones, literally everywhere you looked.

Pretty fucking horrible.

Intimidation usually is.

And no, these didn’t go right up after the war, the majority went up at the end of the 19th century to the revival of KKK in the teens and twenties, and then during the later 40’s through the 70s. Notice anything? The most monuments went up at times when civil rights were being pressed. It was the 50s and 60s, the ‘Civil Rights Era’ (really, every freakin’ year should be part of a ‘Civil Rights Era’) that the Confederate flag was being adopted (yes, I know it was never the real flag of the Confederacy, don’t ‘actually’ me) as a well, a flag for white supremacy.  

The statues, these monuments, these plaques, these named buildings were all part of a campaign to spread lies and to intimidates and terrorize innocents. They do not commemorate history, they push lies. Ugly lies. We don’t need any more of their crud in our public spaces or our private minds.

They need to go.