Imagine if half a dozen states out west decided they ought to be allowed to imprison homosexuals and deny women the right to vote, and said they wanted to secede from the United States and form their own country so they could do that. And then imagine that when their right to secede was challenged by the United States, they raised an army and attacked, say, Ft. Riley, Ks., thereby igniting a war that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of their people and hundreds of thousands more on the “union” side – a devastating, years-long conflagration that left unimaginable death and destruction in its wake.
I think it is safe to say that after it was all over, we wouldn’t be erecting any statues honoring the leaders of this movement.
With regard to the subject of statues and memorials in Forest Park, it helps to take a look back at the Gettysburg Address, a dominant theme of which was the deaths that resulted from the Civil War – 10,000 at Gettysburg alone.
“We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives…”
“The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here…”
“…that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion…”
“…that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.”
The message that Lincoln’s words conveyed so elegantly and eloquently, and, above all, sorrowfully, was that so many people died in this awful conflagration, and for what? What cause was worth such upheaval and carnage? What principle was the confederacy defending that justified the unutterable misery, destruction, and death the Civil War brought? What was it all for?
Answer: It was for the defense and preservation by southerners of a system by which they enriched themselves through the use of free labor to produce their goods and services – free labor they availed themselves of by enslaving millions of their fellow human beings; a system that treated blacks as a sub-human species, to be bought and sold as if they were cattle or furniture, to be kept in chains, to be capriciously and forever separated from their kith and kin, to be understood as possessions, not people, to be whipped, shot, beaten, maimed, and slaughtered; to be not cared for and loved but owned; to be literally worked to death.
And we should have statues and monuments honoring this movement and its leaders?
As for the argument that most of the soldiers in the Confederacy had no real understanding of what they were fighting for and should be honored not for their commitment to a cause but for their sacrifice -- for having fought and died in battle: Well, there are no monuments in Forest Park or anywhere else in America honoring soldiers who died attacking and fighting against the United States in other wars. And let there be no doubt that the Confederate army attacked and fought against the United States.
Nor is this about preserving history. The history of the Civil War will be preserved quite nicely without these items which are not themselves Civil War artifacts deserving of preservation, but ex-post-facto metal and stone objects that point to, but are not part of, the history of the war. Their disappearance will not make us forget the war and doesn’t constitute a denial of its existence or meaning. It is simply an acknowledgement that there’s no good reason to be paying homage to an ignoble cause by maintaining statuary that is a sickening affront to the descendants of the millions who suffered so terribly under the institution of slavery.
No comments:
Post a Comment