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What's strange to me, is those clinging tightly to the monuments are the same folks saying it's the democrat party that's to blame, and not acknowledging a shift in names of the parties that happened during the Civil Rights movement.
THAT seems weird. Cling to the damn statues and flag, and then claim it's the party you hate that created them.
A real head scratcher, there.
"Truth Is Stranger than Fiction, But It Is Because Fiction Is Obliged to Stick to Possibilities; Truth Isn’t."
~Mark Twain
From George Orwell's fiction Nineteen Eighty-Four:
“War is Peace;
Freedom is Slavery;
Ignorance is Strength.”
interestingly, Gov Lee is a Republican. The politician who got it put there in 1978 was a Democrat, one who stayed a Democrat until he quit serving in 2014.
that is because for some folks if they are truly honest about slavery they will say they dont think it was that bad since it was protected by “laws” or they know its so cruel to admit it would make them feel guilty.
No one should feel guilty for slavery today.. but damn, is it really that hard to say it was an ugly stain our our history and we shouldn’t praise those who were willing to die to defend it.
Oh, I'm fairly comfortable. I'm not treating this as a scholarly debate, dear Lord.
They called themselves the slave states, they modified their constitution for the purpose of maintaining slavery, and their vice president called the black man's servitude the cornerstone of their government. I'm happy with my assessment.
Sure, they aired every other grievance they could think of. And - in fairness - some of them were decidedly half-hearted and seem to have joined mostly in order to be on the winning side. Meh.
Anyway, they did nothing that all that elevates their leaders to the stature where they deserve to be in a place of honor.
I've read about this topic so much. I've been reading about it for years.
What you mentioned about what the southern states called themselves, it goes to the heart of the matter. The southern states referred to themselves as the slave states in the Article of Secession. The Cornerstone Speech of Alexander H. Stephens, you can't get more blunt than that. The Confederate Constitution spelled it out loud too. Anyone who would attempt to bring up George Washington or Thomas Jefferson should just save it. Neither one of them were fighting or trying to establish a nation for the same reasons that the Confederates were.
What matters the most is what the Confederates were fighting for. The Confederates were fighting to keep slavery. It doesn't matter that George Washington "didn't need to fight for slavery". What matters is what the Confederates were fighting for. Nothing else. Bringing up George Washington is merely a gaslighting wrapped in a whataboutism.
The last sentence is the point both of us have been saying. The Confederate generals do not deserve to be in a place of honor. They do not deserve to be memorialized in statues. And no one has come up with a good reason as to why Confederate leaders should have had statues in their honor, in public places of honor. No one has come up with any good reason.
Mark Twain observed, "Truth Is Stranger than Fiction, But It Is Because Fiction Is Obliged to Stick to Possibilities; Truth Isn’t."
Demonstrated here, in this thread, & in real life.
True. Fiction is left up to interpretation. The truth is the truth. The truth is more than just strange. It scares some people. It scares some people because sometimes the truth isn't always what a person wants to hear. A person will believe a lie as long as that lie makes them feel good. The Lost Cause lie made alot of people feel good about themselves.
Adam Smith discussed both the economic & psychological energies at play in his time, he was prescient & misunderstood in his own time, & in ours, in 1759, he offered this in The Theory of Moral Sentiments:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Adam Smith
“He is a bold surgeon, they say, whose hand does not tremble when he performs an operation upon his own person; and he is often equally bold who does not hesitate to pull off the mysterious veil of self-delusion, which covers from his view the deformities of his own conduct.
Rather than see our own behaviour under so disagreeable an aspect, we too often, foolishly and weakly, endeavour to exasperate anew those unjust passions which had formerly misled us; we endeavour by artifice to awaken our old hatreds, and irritate afresh our almost forgotten resentments: we even exert ourselves for this miserable purpose, and thus persevere in injustice, merely because we once were unjust, and because we are ashamed and afraid to see that we were so."
True. Fiction is left up to interpretation. The truth is the truth. The truth is more than just strange. It scares some people. It scares some people because sometimes the truth isn't always what a person wants to hear. A person will believe a lie as long as that lie makes them feel good. The Lost Cause lie made alot of people feel good about themselves.
He sure did. He called it out, in the early 20th century. Of course, there were many who would soon ignore W.E.B. DuBois.
Whenever I hear people claim that no one was bothered by Confederate states/the Confederate flag until now, I disagree. No one ever asked Black people how they felt about such monuments in those days. We always here about "the woke".
Consider this. There has been a long connection between the Confederate flag and bigotry. And not just in the South. Marquette Park in Chicago was a major flash point for racial tensions. In August 1966, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr led a march through Marquette Park and Gage Park. People who were against Dr. King were flying Confederate flags and Nazi flags, and were attacking the marchers. Why was the Confederate flag being flown so frequently by those who opposed integration and wanted to keep racial segregation? That is a question many people need to ask themselves.
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Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows
