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Another casualty in the great Confederate statues war: the grave of General Lee's horse. Good riddance to this rebellious and traitorous ungulate.
What is more significant than the event is reaction on twitter - reaction consisting, as usual, of empty talk of revenge and even more empty threats, with no hint that posters intend to take part in their fight themselves.
"Someone shall do something!"
Narrator voice: "No one did anything at all."
As @MelodicBerries says below, a lot of this is LARPing that happened 50-100+ years after the civil war (this horse was buried in 1971, so more than a century after it ended). The high point of ‘Dixie pride’ was probably in the mid-20th century. The north was fine with this for decades since it provided a pressure valve for genuine resentment (which was and is minimal enough not to concern them). Eventually, though, memory of war faded and assuaging the (arguably justified) contempt of black Americans for symbols, statues and memorials of those who would have kept them enslaved was prioritized over avoiding another (ever less likely) north v south civil conflict.
In general, southerners should accept that America would be a much worse place if the Confederacy had won. Brazil is best case, although racial relations were usually better there than they were in Dixie. South Africa is arguably more likely, especially because a victorious confederate government would have likely strongly restricted immigration from Europe (just as the Boers did from the 1920s). Wignats should say a silent prayer of thanks to Lincoln before bed each night.
The so-called one drop rule was never the norm in Brazil - in fact, the opposite was true.
In South Africa, whites were a minority ever since she existed as a single political unit, never mind a sovereign state.
For you to make your argument without mentioning these two crucial differences is sort of suspicious.
Also, there's hardly any grounds to say that the initiatives to remove Confederate documents originate from African-Americans. It's plain to see that the drivers of this are White and Jewish liberals, and their mulatto hangers-on. This is plain to see.
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Yeah but these standards aren't upheld for tragic losers of other vanquished nations. Sitting Bull's vision for America likely falls far short of the current USA on practically every metric, but he gets a monument as a vainglorious upstart who fought for what he believed in.
Those tragic losers fit into our frontier narrative. Born outside the system, representing the last vestiges of wilderness. People may not like to admit that they buy into the “noble savage” theme, but it’s always lurking there in the background.
Plus, the Confederacy was the definition of an entrenched interest. Everyone likes an underdog—why do you think post-Confederates tried so hard to eulogize the Lost Cause?
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South Africa was doing quite fine until the outer world decided to meddle in their internal affairs.
It was internally unstable and repression was getting ever more severe long before the end of apartheid.
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This nitpicking petty vindictiveness against the smallest confederate symbols sounds silly. But the value that some of the reds attribute to it makes me think maybe it's not as silly as I think - maybe it does symbolize something bigger than a horse. And if it does, what exactly does it symbolizes? How much of it is just resentment feelings about being conquered and reconstructed, and how much there's a desire to bring good old times back and what does it mean to bring them back exactly?
Speaking as a Southerner, it's the petty vindictiveness of (literally, this time) beating a dead horse. The Confederacy has been dead a long time. Jim Crow has been dead far longer than the average black American has been alive. Banning rednecks from flying the rebel flag at Talladega and cooking up a noose hoax to try and shame the audience into submission (something I felt actual feelings about; it's irrational but it was infuriating) isn't going to do a damn thing to improve things for black Americans. At some point you're going to have to quit blaming those pesky Confederates and either come up with a solution or admit that you don't have one, because it's not our fault that black kids in Baltimore can't read.
As I like to remind my northern relatives (My parents met in the military so half is from Alabama and the other from Michigan.), once they got a taste of Coleman Young (first black mayor of Detroit, born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama) they voted for George Wallace in '72 (and George Wallace came home with a GM plant that my grandfather worked for, completely turning around the economic fortunes of my family; no shit they liked George Wallace.). Don't pretend that you're innocent and that your statues aren't next. You're not and they very much are next. We're in the same boat here.
As for the good old days, I'd settle for the pre-2010s racial truce.
It's definitely not. And I agree both on the point that petty vindictiveness is petty, and that the left wants to go much further than banning the confederate flag. But I also can't help but wonder why one wants to associate with the confederate flag at all? I mean, they also (probably?) want to ban the Nazi flag, but nobody has any feelings about that, as far as I know. To me - and I'm not leftist at all - confederates were very much the bad guys, especially the ones that were in control at the time of the war (which was like less than 1% of the population, who owned pretty much everything, including vast majority of the slaves, as far as I read). Yes, beating the dead horse is silly, but why that horse is there to be beaten at all? Why it's the thing at all? That part it's not clear to me. I realize it's being used by the left to achieve their eternal purpose - power over everything - and that's wrong. But I also want to understand why Confederate thing is alive at all to be used too.
I'd do the same, but I don't think there's a way to unsail that ship... Recovering from all the "uniting the nation" and "healing the differences" of the Obama era and the following is going to take a long time, especially when half of the country wants exactly the opposite - they feel like they're winning so they want to push further and further. Why have a truce if we're about to sack their capital and pillage their homes?
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I personally never understood the reverence for the Southern Cause/Dixie Pride among the right. It was largely thanks to the slave states that the US got such a big black population, which in turn is responsible for turning formerly great cities like Detroit into basket cases and making downtowns of cities like Baltimore, St Louis, Memphis and many others very dangerous. Don't forget that some of these Southern plantation oligarchs even talked about incorporating parts of the Carribean directly to aid the plantation economy.
The argument that "what ruined Detroit was letting black settle there" is unconvincing because once you have such a large population, they will have to go somewhere. And Jim Crow could never have been kept forever. Really, the plantation owners were just greedy capitalists putting profits over their own people, not unlike their contemporary equivalents. Why glorify the generals who fought for such a system?
From what I understand, most of these statues were put up after the civil war as a way to placate Southerners at a time when Southern identity was still a live issue. So basically a form of pragmatism. As the years have gone by, and as whites in the US have become more monolithic, the need that necessitated these statues has faded. I suspect that's why you see these muted reactions. It may have been a big issue 100 years ago or perhaps even 50 years ago. But not now.
Hopefully the US right can come to understand two things. First, the south in the civil war deserved to lose. Second, they should have been stopped way earlier.
A people who for a time, formed a country and resisted the government’s desire to impose its will on an unwilling population? It’s not really that surprising to me. Confederate flags represent resistance to tyranny much like Gadsden flags do.
I can't tell if you are being facetious. Either against the cause of the Confederacy or the cause of the American Revolution. Or, if somehow you don't notice the contradiction.
Both flags are literally flags used in America by those rebelling against the government that they saw at the time as tyrannical. As such they became cultural symbols of resistance to tyranny especially on the right. I don’t see why the fact that they came from two different wars has much to do with why they might be popular among people who see the government overreaching into their affairs.
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«Loyalty» is the pillar of right-wing sentimentalism, same as «justice» is the pillar of the left. (Strawmanned versions: «bootlicking» and «envy», respectively). The Left can't not pander to the wretched and the weak, even if their weakness is purely a matter of theatrical convention. The Right cannot not elevate and justify champions, even if those are small-minded, pointless scum or, at times, straight-up enemies. Something something The Lion, Our Hero, The Manly Leader, The Great General and His Loyal Horse, the true Man of the Right feels part of his soul would die if those were trampled upon.
And so The Left feels compelled to trample.
Seriously though, defending a horse's grave from «desecration» makes no less sense than defending a street-painted pride flag from skidmarks, so this is a fine test of mobilization potential.
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I am in partial agreement with you, and have advanced similar arguments in the past; I had an extended back-and-forth with one user on /r/CultureWarRoundup a while back about this exact topic. In addition to your very trenchant points, I would add that not only is plantation-style slavery terrible for the slave, it’s also terrible for the master! It inculcates sloth and unbearable haughtiness, as the slaveowner lords lazily over a totally dependent class of workers who free him from the need to engage in even the most trivial personal labor. As a right-winger I’m positively-inclined toward some form of aristocracy and hierarchy, but I was also raised with enough Protestant Work Ethic such that I’m constitutionally unable not to feel some level of contempt for the slave-owning lifestyle, to say nothing of the morality of the practice.
That being said, I think it’s important to remember that a great number of slave-owners in the early 19th century were already beginning to feel trapped by, and ashamed of, the institution, and were desperate to find a way to end it. Some of the most important organizers and funders of the American Colonization Society - including several Founding Fathers and eminent statesmen - were slaveowners who were looking for a way out. Remember that many states had laws dictating that any slave-owner who manumitted a slave was then responsible for essentially providing a life-long pension for that slave - something which would have been utterly financially impossible and ruinous for owners of large plantations that employed dozens or even hundreds of slaves.
Thomas Jefferson repeatedly predicted that slavery would need to end, and quickly, and that subsequently it would be necessary to deport the entire black population of the country; he had no idea how to financially sustain himself and his own lifestyle in any other way, though. The same is true of many other slave-owning Founding Fathers. The ultimate failure of the American Colonization Society is probably the single greatest what-if in American history, and I want to at least give some credit to the slave-owners who realized, after it was too late, what they had wrought on the country and on their own descendants.
As for why so many modern white identitarians are pro-Confederacy, I think a large part of that is simply a founder effect: major figures in the racial right in the 90’s and 00’s such as Jared Taylor, Sam Dickson, and Sam Francis, were all Southerners with ancestors who fought for the Confederacy, and for them the issue was acutely personal. Given that some of the important intellectual voices on the white nationalist right, such as Gregory Hood (AKA James Kirkpatrick AKA Kevin DeAnna), were directly employed and mentored by those figures, they’ve sort of picked up the Confederate sympathies by osmosis. There is also certainly an element of Owning The Libs, associating the Yankee occupying government, which brought (partial) racial integration to the South with the barrel of a gun during Reconstruction, with the later forcible imposition of the Civil Rights Regime a century later, a process which is frankly still ongoing and has expanded to the entire country and even arguably the entire American Empire.
This is a great point which I haven't thought about.
This is actually an area where I feel some sympathy towards Dixie, but they never understand that they created the problem in the first place. So it is hard to sustain it. Besides, they often make the North more liberal than it really was. Lincoln himself wanted to deport all the blacks for much of his life. The hardest fight against desegregation of public schools didn't happen in the South: it was in Boston.
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Between this and the sometimes-gay bench in Budapest, this week’s culture war roundup has had a distinctly whimsical and madcap flavor. Acts of ultimately-petty vandalism like this are not exactly benign, and certainly I don’t take lightly the aggressive erasure of Southern history represented by the ongoing campaign against memorials to important Confederates, but it’s really tough to take stuff like this seriously given the endless deluge of more important and potentially-catastrophic developments the world of currently facing. May this racist horse rest peacefully in horse heaven. (Hooven?)
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