In defense of Confederate statues

I'm actually talking about all monuments here. Statues, cemeteries, war memorials, etc. Confederate monuments need to be defended, not because of what they stand for people who are revulsed by them but because of what they stand for the people who put them up. As I have written before, a compelling case can be made in support of the Confederate secessionist movement from the Union. Before casting judgments, that article should be read in full because I provided a very well sustained argument for the Confederacy.

People these days talk of "charity" and "love for your neighbor" as if that is the equivalent of "do not offend your neighbor". It is nothing of the sort. It is to be understandable that things we come across will offend us and cause revulsion. Some things will cause revulsion to us throughout our lives. This is part of becoming an adult. It is how we respond. The problem with Confederate monuments is not their existence but the response to their existence.

In the history following the defeat of the Confederacy there was a long and bitter reunification process called "Reconstruction". Reconstruction is almost universally disparaged by American historians. Former Confederate states were held under what was essentially a military occupation which damaged their economic production and held them as essential slaves of the GOP. The period of Reconstruction ended with the heated and contested Presidential election of 1876 as Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden soared in nationwide popularity with nearly 51% of the majority voting for him. His Republican opponent, Rutherford B. Hayes, staggered with three points less in the nationwide vote. For a long time 20 electoral votes were contested as Tilden held a 184-165 lead. Back then, 185 was the deciding number. After long and bitter contentions, the electoral votes were given to Hayes with the concessions that Republicans would withdraw military troops.

The period of Reconstruction ended. Then came the Jim Crow laws and with them, the Confederate monuments. While it is easy to connect these statues to a "culture of racism", historians tend to know that people are more complex then what our modernist sensibilities seek to limit to them. For these Southerners, it wasn't simply about an animosity they held toward blacks, it was an animosity they had been fostering from the Reconstruction period toward the Union. The Union were centralizers and oppressors. These statues were put up in protest. But statues were put up, nonetheless.

This is the difference between Black Lives Matter, Anti-fa, and White Southerners. White Southerners have a culture. BLM and Anti-fa are about cultural destruction and annihilation. To White Southerners, these things have strong significant meaning and represents their history of oppression. BLM and Anti-fa have been able to scream that they have victimhood status but they use their victimhood to drag people down to their own inhuman level. They do not build culture or contribute to society. They denigrate and degrade society. The people who put up statues of Martin Luther King, Jr., Booker T. Washington, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, these are the people who build and contribute to culture. Confederate statues were placed in protest of the Union and they built up a culture and contributed to American culture. The solution to their existence is not to destroy or remove them but to leave them up and add more statues of honorable men.