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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28318 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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The destruction of civil war statues is symbolic of a culture war the American right lost 150 years ago. More damning is their failure, again and again, to not lose culture wars five, ten, twenty, fifty years ago. As someone said here last time this topic came up, this is like complaining about the destruction of statues of some long dead king, whose values were eradicated, whose mission was abandoned, whose faith disintegrated, whose identity has vanished. Whatever old Dixie was, whatever it meant, it’s gone.

The statues are the last thing to go, after everything else. If they are anything, they’re only coffee and petit fours after an entire meal of cultural destruction and defeat. If you’re complaining about statues, you lost the battle aeons ago.

This statue was erected in the 20th century. They were winning the culture war at that time.

They lost the conventional war 150 years ago, not the culture war.

The statues are the last thing to go, after everything else.

The statues being destroyed precedes the people the statues represent being destroyed.

people the statues represent

Confederates?

Americans.

I feel it would be a strange choice to represent Americans as a whole by a man who fought in a war specifically to not be American. (Assuming by "America" you refer to the United States of America and not to the American continent as a whole, but in the latter case I don't see how you can't consider Hispanics to be not American too). I'll admit I'm not American in either sense, so there might well be a third interpretation I haven't thought of yet.

Well, he was Virginian, not American, but the statue was built fifty years after his death, by Americans who had chosen him to represent them.

Well it sounds like they want to replace it with a statue of a different American, so I guess it's a wash.

Did I miss something?

Just what you wrote:

slated to be replaced with some statue for black people

This statue was erected in the 20th century. They were winning the culture war at that time.

The Union states allowed the South to put up some Lee statues and teach the lost cause as a consolation prize in the early 20th century for being politically, culturally and economically fucked by Yankees, and this counts as winning the culture war?

What counts as winning the culture war is resisting then ending Reconstruction within 12 years of the end of the lost conventional war.

The confederates lost the conventional war and won the culture war.

In the end slavery ended, reconstruction ended, segregation ended, the south was forcibly integrated by the federal government with minimal resistance, and Southerners today are among the most patriotic good little Americans with the Stars and Stripes flying behind their picket fences. So again, what culture war did they really win?

The one that allowed them to raise all the statues, name all the bases, and revere their own figures, probably. And that forcible integration went both ways. Where did Jim Crow come from if not from the culture of the South? The war they lost wasn't 150 years ago, it was 50 years ago. You're off by a full century, at least.

Is there any point in the 150 years since the end of the Civil War where, looking at the United States, Confederates would have more positive opinions of how things went culturally than the Yankees? The tasteful statues dedicated to them aside.

Even people who publicly fly the Stars and Bars mostly do it to piss off their domestic opponents, not because of any real ideological affinity to Confederates. It's almost certainly positively correlated with flying the same Star Spangled Banner that killed a quarter million Confederates.

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