Dual symbols of hate: The Confederate flag and Nazi flag. No coincidence they were held aloft by the hateful Alt-right marchers in Charlottesville. The symbols are what the extreme Right is all about. If one claims he's "pro-white" but "not racist" - he's using weasel words to disguise his racism.
How should we regard Confederate monuments? As icons of a respectable historical legacy or - as New Orleans' Mayor Mitch Landrieu put it, "a part of … terrorism as much as a burning cross on someone’s lawn." The answer delivered yesterday by angered citizens of Durham, NC is one with which I agree, e.g.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-uAZa4H1vk
It had to be one of the coolest takedowns of an egregious monument ever, reminding many of the pull down of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad.
Let's note that the Charlottesville white racist rally and terrorism was ostensibly about protesting the takedown of a statue of the Traitor Robert E. Lee. Deluded young Southern sympathizers - many ignorant college kids with no knowledge of history - maintained over and over that it was not about hate but rather protecting "Southern heritage". But that trope was torn asunder as we beheld the hate spectacle unfolding with Nazi swastikas held aloft along with Confederate flags. Why? Because both are symbols of hate and the Alt right nuts parading were revealing more about protecting their own hatred toward others than about their defense of history.
When two months ago, a woman (Diana Belles) writing in our local Colorado Springs Independent defended Southern monuments, stating the attacks on the Rebel flag and monuments were “dragging Confederates through a cesspool of misinformation”, I had to write a reply which was published a week later; That reply can be read at this link:
https://www.csindy.com/coloradosprings/reader-what-civil-war-history-did-you-study/Content?oid=5869315
The Robert E. Lee statue in New Orleans before being taken down is shown above. The building behind was the Pan American Oil Corporation where I worked from 1967-69. The removal of Lee from his perch is shown at right.
I have not changed from that viewpoint one iota. So again, given that perspective, why the display of both Confederate flag and Nazi swastika at the recent Charlottesville rally? The Confederate battle flag, like the Nazi swastika, is the emblem of hateful aggressive losers. After the Civil War, given the South had lost, it ought to have been retired to museums (like swastikas in Germany) but instead had found its way to rise above state capitols, such as in South Carolina. This transpired along with the erection of foul monuments to the cause of slavers, secessionists.....traitors and refuse all.
What about those Confederate monuments? Their presence blights communities across the nation, large and small, mainly in the South which has held on to them too long as it is. . As of August 2016, there were 1,503 public commemorations of the Confederacy, even excluding the battlefields and cemeteries: 718 monuments and statutes still stood, and 109 public schools, 80 counties and cities, and 10 U.S. military bases bore the names of Lee, Jefferson Davis, and other Confederate icons, according to a tally by the Southern Poverty Law Center. More than 200 of these were in Virginia alone. It's about damned time ALL were ripped down, like occurred yesterday in Durham, NC.
The one of Lee - at the center of the racist rally in Charlottesville was commissioned exactly 100 years ago, a gift to the city from a local philanthropist, to honor his parents with a physical incarnation of Southern ideals. But the statue was hardly the only contemporary effort to enshrine and defend these ideals. As it was being commissioned, sculpted, and erected, the Ku Klux Klan was surging through the country. In Charlottesville, the local Klan gave $1,000 to the University of Virginia’s Centennial Endowment Fund in 1921. At the time there was also a second Klan chapter for the students on campus. Thank goodness as the civil rights era dawned and Jim Crow ended those days are gone. The people, students themselves changed perspective - at least most of them.
The Charlottesville Lee statue stands 26-feet tall, despite its oddly small pedestal, unlike the one in New Orleans' Lee Circle which had a much taller pedestal (about 75') . But while latter day Johnny Rebs - like letter writer Dianna Belles - castigate New Orleans' Mayor Mitch Landrieu, he did the right thing in hauling it down.
As Mayor Landrieu explained:
"These statues were a part of … 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,”
More recently, on the news last night, we saw the mayor of Lexington, KY- Jim Gray - respond to Charlottesville by accelerating his efforts to move statues of two Confederate leaders from the courthouse lawn to a public park. As Mayor Gray explained in an interview with CBS News last night:
"Mayors on the razors' edge. When you see the tension. When you see the violence that we saw in Charlottesville then you know that we must act..
Civil War historian Amy Taylor (University of Kentucky-Lexington) - in the same segment - also put a finger on the nature of the ignorance:
"People haven't learned or stopped to think about the history behind these monuments. Clearly this is not about the Civil War. These are artifacts from the Jim Crow South"
In other words, they're being used merely as totems to project personal hate, bigotry or animosity against assorted minority groups. Now we know, from the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville - that includes Jews, given the Confederate supporters marched along with the Nazis.
Ironically, the rising tide of change to tear down the monuments was what the Charlottesville rally hoped to stem. The white racist punks who'd marched with their Tiki torches burning while shouting hateful slogans failed. The next day the same punks supporting Confederates joined hands with the Nazis showing one single march for hate. Chris Floyd, in one of the links I posted yesterday, aptly described these entitled little white punks:
"Close-ups reveal most of them to be young white college-boy types, pudgy, coddled, comfortable, smug. They're not driven by, say, economic privation or lack of opportunity or lack of education or dire threat or any of the other reasons often adduced for people turning to extremism. No: these smug, well-wadded bastards are driven solely by cankered bigotry & their delusions of racial superiority. You can look in their faces and see what quivering cowards they all are, weak and stunted souls too stupid and too scared to see themselves for what they really are. It's like an oozing sludge of Stephen Miller clones."
Was there any "history" that we needed to know in their defense of the Charlottesville Lee statue ? Hell no! Only a history of hate and enslavement of others - Jews by the Nazis, African-Americans by the Confederates. That's where it begins and ends. What all these little turds really need is being sent to a year long remedial American history class.
WHO is this Lee currently honored by a monument at Charlottesville which one hopes a judge allows torn down - or by the citizens themselves? He’s the general who took an invading army north into Pennsylvania in 1863, in defense of a slave society. And not merely in the abstract. Lee’s army was ordered to respect white property, but to regard the blacks encountered as contraband—to be seized and returned to the South, whether born free, manumitted, or escaped. Lee himself offered to whip a slave woman to death if it meant "justice" rendered after an escape. He was a foul, vicious maggot, no better in the end than Hitler - whose own followers his white racist worshippers now march with.
As Esquire columnist Tyler Coates recently wrote:
"To my fellow Virginians and Southerners who have stood so steadfast in their refusal to see our Confederate monuments for what they are, I ask you: What does this say about our heritage? These men and women are not protesting the elimination of Southern culture and history, but rather reacting to their own deluded notions that white people are losing control of our country. When a group of men and women shout out "Jew will not replace us" in front of a statue of Robert E. Lee, what does that say about your symbol of Southern heritage? When these people brandish Nazi symbols and scream "fuck you faggots" in front of your idol, what does it say about a historical figure who supposedly stood up against a tyrannical government to protect his land?
Excerpt:
"Lee was an icon of the Confederacy and the architect of its defeat. He was a traitor to the United States of America. He cost humanity uncounted lives….right up to now. Lee’s gentlemanly portraits are a surface illusion. He could be gracious and chivalrous, a dashing strategist and later a beloved college president. .
But his core was medieval and obsolete. He was the ultimate undertaker of a culture of death."
"Mayors on the razors' edge. When you see the tension. When you see the violence that we saw in Charlottesville then you know that we must act..
Civil War historian Amy Taylor (University of Kentucky-Lexington) - in the same segment - also put a finger on the nature of the ignorance:
"People haven't learned or stopped to think about the history behind these monuments. Clearly this is not about the Civil War. These are artifacts from the Jim Crow South"
In other words, they're being used merely as totems to project personal hate, bigotry or animosity against assorted minority groups. Now we know, from the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville - that includes Jews, given the Confederate supporters marched along with the Nazis.
Ironically, the rising tide of change to tear down the monuments was what the Charlottesville rally hoped to stem. The white racist punks who'd marched with their Tiki torches burning while shouting hateful slogans failed. The next day the same punks supporting Confederates joined hands with the Nazis showing one single march for hate. Chris Floyd, in one of the links I posted yesterday, aptly described these entitled little white punks:
"Close-ups reveal most of them to be young white college-boy types, pudgy, coddled, comfortable, smug. They're not driven by, say, economic privation or lack of opportunity or lack of education or dire threat or any of the other reasons often adduced for people turning to extremism. No: these smug, well-wadded bastards are driven solely by cankered bigotry & their delusions of racial superiority. You can look in their faces and see what quivering cowards they all are, weak and stunted souls too stupid and too scared to see themselves for what they really are. It's like an oozing sludge of Stephen Miller clones."
Was there any "history" that we needed to know in their defense of the Charlottesville Lee statue ? Hell no! Only a history of hate and enslavement of others - Jews by the Nazis, African-Americans by the Confederates. That's where it begins and ends. What all these little turds really need is being sent to a year long remedial American history class.
WHO is this Lee currently honored by a monument at Charlottesville which one hopes a judge allows torn down - or by the citizens themselves? He’s the general who took an invading army north into Pennsylvania in 1863, in defense of a slave society. And not merely in the abstract. Lee’s army was ordered to respect white property, but to regard the blacks encountered as contraband—to be seized and returned to the South, whether born free, manumitted, or escaped. Lee himself offered to whip a slave woman to death if it meant "justice" rendered after an escape. He was a foul, vicious maggot, no better in the end than Hitler - whose own followers his white racist worshippers now march with.
As Esquire columnist Tyler Coates recently wrote:
"To my fellow Virginians and Southerners who have stood so steadfast in their refusal to see our Confederate monuments for what they are, I ask you: What does this say about our heritage? These men and women are not protesting the elimination of Southern culture and history, but rather reacting to their own deluded notions that white people are losing control of our country. When a group of men and women shout out "Jew will not replace us" in front of a statue of Robert E. Lee, what does that say about your symbol of Southern heritage? When these people brandish Nazi symbols and scream "fuck you faggots" in front of your idol, what does it say about a historical figure who supposedly stood up against a tyrannical government to protect his land?
The South lost the war. Over a century later, we're still fighting one—but it has nothing to do with states' rights or Southern pride. It is about racism, intolerance, and hatred. And at the center of it all are symbols that, despite the well-intended Southern narratives that have failed to reframe them as anything else, are the strongest representation of racism in our country's history."
It is long past time now to tear all these disgusting monuments down as the good citizens of Durham NC did yesterday. These monuments, like the associated hate flags, are merely vehicles to advance more racial violence. In that respect let us note the tally of white domestic terror killings now numbers 40, or far more than committed by "radical Islamists" or Muslims. Will the white hate mongers pay attention or double down on the hate? It remains to be seen. But the genuine citizens of this great country can no longer stand by in silence as these desperate white supremacy mutants attempt to tear it down in their benighted ignorance and hate..
See also:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/harvey-wasserman/74573/robert-e-lee-s-treason-still-divides-and-kills
See also:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/harvey-wasserman/74573/robert-e-lee-s-treason-still-divides-and-kills
Excerpt:
"Lee was an icon of the Confederacy and the architect of its defeat. He was a traitor to the United States of America. He cost humanity uncounted lives….right up to now. Lee’s gentlemanly portraits are a surface illusion. He could be gracious and chivalrous, a dashing strategist and later a beloved college president. .
But his core was medieval and obsolete. He was the ultimate undertaker of a culture of death."
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