No, Confederate Monuments Don't Belong on Public Land

I'm going to do a thing that is going to annoy a lot of people. I'm also going to be accused of 'invoking Nazis' - the dreaded 'Godwin's Law'. But there is a reason people use Nazi comparisons. It's because, with the exception of well-established anti-Semites, everyone knows Nazis are the literal worst and they don't go around trying to defend them. What I'm going to posit is not a perfect comparison, nor am I going to equate all southerners to Nazis. I am, however, going to explain why glorifying, commemorating, reverent monuments to Confederate leaders and generals has no place on public land.

This is an emotional topic, and I went to college in the South, so I expect backlash. I've been unfriended already on this topic just in the last 24 hours. If you can, please try to remember that I'm not attacking the South. In fact, I loved going to college in the South. It is very likely that one day I'll move there. People are warm, friendly, and usually less neurotic. But we have to talk about the reverence for The Confederacy.

The first thing I'm going to be told is something along the lines of 'It's heritage, not hate'. You will notice this is a luxury of only white people to say. Because the heritage of the Civil War for black people isn't quite the Scarlette O'Hara melodrama. The 'heritage' that preceded the Civil War for black people was enslavement, beatings, rape, torture, child abduction, and worse. Ignoring these facts is no different than calling the 1950s the 'good old days' and not having the ability to understand that the 1950s were abysmal for anyone who wasn't white, heterosexual, cis, and straight.

Next, will be that The Civil War wasn't really about slavery. Well, okay. It wasn't only about slavery, but it was about slavery. Yes, there were other State's Rights issues. Yes, there were taxation issues. Yes, the North did envy the Southern Economy. There are various untruths perpetuated by Confederacy Advocates that claim Southerners were soon to ban Slavery (they weren't), or that the North aggressed them first (Ft. Sumter would suggest otherwise), or that the generals themselves may not have even supported slavery. But let me get to the crux of the issue here. Even if the Civil War were about 50 things, if one of those things was to keep the 'right' to own human beings, you are on the wrong side of the conflict.

Here's where the Nazis come in. Nazi Germany was not 100% bad. They did a number of things to help the people of Germany crawl out of desperate poverty and depression. Not everything they wanted was entirely insane, either. The Treaty of Versailles was draconian. Some of their sovereign land had been confiscated. Are we to say that because they had some cause, because they were taking back what was rightfully theirs, that the other parts don't matter as much? Becuase we can find some reasonability in some Nazi goals, do we write off their genocide? Or the global domination they sought? No. Of course not. And therein lies the problem with Confederacy Advocates. You are, by nature of your argument, delegitimizing the horror of American Slavery. It was no less horrifying than the Holocaust. I was no less unjust than any other human rights atrocity of the same scale.

When you gloss over slavery to talk about taxes, you are, essentially, glossing over the Holocaust to talk about the Treaty of Versailles. When you say slavery is but one small factor, you are saying global domination and racial purity is just a small part of the story, not as important as the other parts, like the Germans in the Sudetenland being repatriated. When slavery, genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass deportations, etc are your reasons for doing something, or even in your solution to a problem, you are on the wrong side of the fight. Every. Time.

Which brings us back to the monuments. If we can agree that Slavery was at least a contributing factor to the Confederates' secession (and all reasonable people can. Read a book) the personal ideology of the generals doesn't matter, in the least, when talking about appropriate monuments for public land. Many Nazi generals didn't side with Adolf Hitler. They were fighting because it was their duty to fight and they believed in Germany First. Nothing inherently wrong with that. But would you say 'it's just history' if Munich City Hall erected a statue or monument to a Nazi General? Do you think Jews who would be outraged by such a thing are being 'snowflakes'?

Why is it so hard for you to understand that people are outraged by the commemoration of generals in a war that was fought, at least in part, to maintain the right to continue human rights atrocities? Is it because you don't know how horrifying slavery is/was? Is it because you don't care? Or do you think the very thing that separates the South from the North is this bitter insistence that the Confederacy was a noble 'last stand' against Federal tyranny? Newsflash, States never had the right to own people, it just took until 1860 for the Feds to actually stand up for what was already expressly part of The Constitution and what are now obviously understood as natural civil liberties.

So, no. Homages to Confederate soldiers and 'Old South' ideas of white supremacy have no place on public land. If they mean that much to you, I fully support you erecting them on private land, though. But maybe ask yourself why you want to.