Saturday, August 19, 2017

When the world is in chaos...confederate statues?

When the world is in chaos many people respond with virulent and violent appeals to racial purity. After World War I Germany joined movements exalting the purity of the Aryan race, parts of the United States exalted white supremacy by building Confederate statues, and Japan moved into the militant exaltation of their race and their perceived world destiny.  We ended up with over 50 million dead in World War II.

During the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam war of the '60s and '70s more Confederate statues were erected in America - a defiant statement of white supremacy.

Today in response to radical Muslim terrorism Europe and the United States are reviving old, pathetic, failed white supremacist nonsense. 

I see two possible solutions to the Confederate statues issue. The first is take them down - they are proclaiming white supremacy, not honoring the confederate war. They were raised in response to the Civil Rights movement, not to honor the dead.

My second solution is to suggest leaving them up, and placing next to them in equal prominence statues of slavery – slaves being whipped while tied to a post by their cruel white supremacist masters, or slaves on the auction block while separated family members weep in despair.

The Confederate statues are not honoring the history of the south, they are white-washing the history of the south – or perhaps white-supremacy-washing the history of the south. When they stand alone without an equal reminder of what those Confederates were actually fighting for they are transparent propaganda, not history.