New Orleans Is Wrong To Remove Its Confederate Monuments

[corbe]

New Orleans Is Wrong To Remove Its Confederate Monuments

The progressive impulse to purge public spaces of Confederate monuments isn’t about inclusion and tolerance, it’s about politics and power.
   
By John Daniel Davidson
April 25, 2017
 
In the early morning hours of Monday, masked men in black bulletproof vests gathered at the Battle of Liberty Place in downtown New Orleans. They arrived in flatbed trucks, the name of the company on the trucks’ sides concealed by tape and cardboard. Snipers took up positions on nearby rooftops.

This wasn’t the scene of a bank heist or a mob hit. The snipers were New Orleans police, and the workers were under contract with the city. They were there to tear down a 126-year-old monument linked to the Confederacy. New Orleans is the latest city to embark on the removal of its Confederate monuments, a rising trend among progressive municipal leaders and activists who claim to be acting in the name of tolerance but whose true purpose is political.

By dawn on Monday, the first of four monuments to be removed, a white marble obelisk on Canal Street, was gone. The city went about the removal amid an air of official secrecy and heightened security measures in response to threats against the city’s contractor earlier this year. New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu issued a statement at 3:15 a.m. Monday, while crews were still at work, saying the removal “sends a clear and unequivocal message” about the city’s focus on celebrating “our diversity, inclusion and tolerance.”

Because nothing says inclusion and tolerance like tearing up century-old monuments and carting them off in the dead of night.

Tearing Down Statues Is Always About Politics And Power

The push to remove Confederate statues and monuments has gained traction in the wake of the racially motivated Charleston church shooting in 2015 that left nine African Americans dead. South Carolina’s legislature and then-Gov. Nikki Haley made the wise and prudent decision to remove the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds in Columbia, where it had been flying on a Confederate war memorial since 2000. Before that, it had flown atop the capitol dome beginning in 1961, in defiance of the civil rights movement.

But it didn’t end there. Almost immediately, colleges and municipal governments across the South began efforts to remove Confederate memorials, rename schools and public spaces bearing the names of Confederate leaders, and in some cases even exhume the remains of Confederate dead. Although this trend is relatively recent, the impulse to destroy monuments is very old.

In ancient Rome, it was called damnatio memoriae, the “condemnation of memory,” and its purpose was overtly political. The point was to dishonor traitors and deposed emperors by purging them from public memory. Rome would seize their property, remove their name from public monuments, and destroy or re-work their statues.

Today, the practice has been revived, albeit under the pretext of inclusion and tolerance. The University of Texas at Austin removed a statue of Jefferson Davis from the school’s historic mall in August 2015. It now resides at UT’s Briscoe Center for American History. Last fall, Texas State University in San Marcos quietly removed a statue of Jefferson Davis and sent it seven miles south of town, to private land donated to the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Similar efforts by cities have cropped up in Virginia, Kentucky, South Carolina, and elsewhere.

Not all of them have been successful. In August 2015, the Memphis City Council voted to remove a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, along with the remains of Forrest and his wife, from a park near downtown Memphis. But the Tennessee Historical Commission stepped in, citing a state law passed in 2013 that prevents cities and counties from relocating, removing, or renaming war memorials on public property.

A handful of states have such laws on the books, and if the past few years are any indication, they’re the only thing preventing the destruction or removal of Confederate memorials in dozens of southern cities.

This Is Not About Honoring Confederate Principles

Plenty of Americans would like nothing more than to see them go. They ask, why shouldn’t we get rid of these monuments? After all, the Confederacy was a rebellion of slave states that cost the lives of some 620,000 Americans and left the country shattered. If it was right to remove the Confederate flag from the statehouse in South Carolina, why not the statues and obelisks?

There is good reason to leave the monuments where they stand, but let’s be clear. The reason for keeping them has nothing to do with honoring the cause of the Confederacy or the memory of slavery. Even though many of them were erected for that purpose in the decades spanning the 1870s to the 1930s, that should not be our purpose for keeping them now.

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http://thefederalist.com/2017/04/25/new-orleans-wrong-remove-confederate-monuments/

[ABX]

It is only fair that as these are taken down, they also remove the statue of Andrew Jackson and rename Jackson Square.

[skeeter]

"Progressives" always try to obliterate tradition and history. Happened in Russia 1917, China 1946, S Vietnam in 1975.

But sometimes some degree of sanity returns and the history restored. With the demographic changes underway in the west I doubt we'll ever be so fortunate.

[corbe]

   Another angle by Erickson:

Conservative Overreaction Shouldn’t Exist

By Erick Erickson  |  April 25, 2017, 01:02pm  |  @ewerickson

The other day, MSNBC host Chris Hayes suggested conservatism has become about victimhood and grievance. I think that is laughably not true and that grievance thrives in liberal ideology that pushes identity politics and speaks in the language of privilege. The leftwing chatter about “privilege” is founded on victimhood and grievance. Conservatives tend not to go there. The entire “social justice warrior” schtick on the left is about victimization and grievance and Hayes is engaging in projection.

One area where a lot of conservatives are tending to go, however, is overreaction to things the left is doing. Instead of considering the action on the merits, the immediately reaction is it is terrible. To be fair, in many cases that is justified. But occasionally an action started by the left winds up not being terrible, but is something people can unite behind.

A case in point is the destruction of the Liberty Monument in New Orleans. There has long been an inert, bipartisan effort to tear it down, but it gained steam in the last few years of social justice warrior nonsense. The Mayor of New Orleans has targeted a series of civil war monuments to Robert E. Lee and others that I think the city would be wise to preserve. But there is wide spread consensus in New Orleans to tear down the Liberty Monument.

As I explained here, the monument celebrates an attempted violent coup by the Democratic Party in Louisiana in the post-civil war South. An actual paramilitary unit funded by a political party tried to oust a bi-racial, lawfully elected government. They were unsuccessful, but after Reconstruction they came to power and rewrote history to claim the monument was about taking back government from usurpers. Who usurped power? Well, in their mind, black voters who they still believed should have no rights.

Thankfully, the reaction against this monument has mostly been on the fringe. But there are some prominent conservative, and not just alt-right, voices who are upset about the monument removal. The entirety of their argument is that if the left wants it, it must be bad.

Lots of what the left wants is bad, but I think conservatives should avoid overreacting or even reacting without all the facts. Otherwise, we will fall into victimhood and grievance like we are already being accused.

I think much of confederate history should be preserved. It serves as a reminder of a part of our history and many of the famous Southern generals helped stitch the nation back together after it was over. We should be willing to highlight those efforts at unity after national trauma.

But let’s not defend the Liberty Monument just to be contrarian against the left. It was erected to celebrate, not commemorate, a violent effort to overthrow democracy by a group of Democrats.

http://theresurgent.com/conservative-overreaction-shouldnt-exist/