@Smokin Joe
Yes, but none of that is what I take issue with or what my posts have been addressing. As much as I despise a Nazi, yeah, his free-speech rights are no different than anyone else's. That's a given and something that should go without saying, to my mind at least.
My problem is the knee jerk impulse to jump to the defense of a Nazi because Antifa/BLM is standing on the other side. Saying the guy should walk free, or a defense fund should be set up, or he was just a nice young man who was afraid his car's paint job would be damaged (yes, that WAS posted), is inexcusable.
One poster was told about the guy's physical abuse of his handicapped mother---hitting her, pulling a knife on her---and the response was, "Well, maybe he was headed in the wrong direction."
Yes, just a bit...to the point of murder.
It's just more kneejerk binary thinking that says, well, Antifa and BLM are over here, and no one can be as bad as them, so let me come in for the opposite side.
The problem is, someone CAN be as bad. Nazis are in that category. They ALL suck, they all deserve each other. It's not that hard.
What perhaps upsets me the most, is that any/every group who protests the destruction of monuments now will be colored with the actions of one troubled/demented/effed up person behind the wheel of a car and a handful of people parading around waving flags which had nothing to do with the war, or which are at most the co-opted symbols of Armies in the field. I did not see one of the Confederate political flags in any image of the riots, and frankly, I doubt that the participants on either side would have known the Flag of the Confederate States of America from any other.
All of these jerks have not just made it more difficult to retain our history, they have accelerated the destruction thereof.
An example is this Huffington Post article
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/confederate-monuments-history-trump-baltimore_us_5995a3a6e4b0d0d2cc84c952 by an historical illiterate who doesn't realize the first casualties on both sides in the War weren't in South Carolina, but Baltimore, MD.
The writer:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/jane-dailey is an Associate Professor of History, University of Chicago and is apparently unaware that the invasion of Baltimore, and Maryland by the PA and Mass Militias was greeted with rioting in the streets in opposition to another States' armies invading Maryland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore_riot_of_1861(Each State had its own Militia (army) prior to the War. There was a relatively small Federal Army, something well debated in
The Federalist Papers, established partly to
prevent the invasion of one state by another.)
People were killed on both sides: (From
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War )
Maryland's territory surrounded the United States' capital of Washington, DC and could cut it off from the North.[94] It had numerous anti-Lincoln officials who tolerated anti-army rioting in Baltimore and the burning of bridges, both aimed at hindering the passage of troops to the South. Maryland's legislature voted overwhelmingly (53–13) to stay in the Union, but also rejected hostilities with its southern neighbors, voting to close Maryland's rail lines to prevent them from being used for war.[95] Lincoln responded by establishing martial law, and unilaterally suspending habeas corpus, in Maryland, along with sending in militia units from the North.[96] Lincoln rapidly took control of Maryland and the District of Columbia, by seizing many prominent figures, including arresting 1/3 of the members of the Maryland General Assembly on the day it reconvened.[95][97] All were held without trial, ignoring a ruling by the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Roger Taney, a Maryland native, that only Congress (and not the president) could suspend habeas corpus (Ex parte Merryman). Indeed, federal troops imprisoned a prominent Baltimore newspaper editor, Frank Key Howard, Francis Scott Key's grandson, after he criticized Lincoln in an editorial for ignoring the Supreme Court Chief Justice's ruling.[98]
A glimpse of the Election map of 1860 shows where the State's sentiments lay, despite the concerted efforts of historians to diminish the egregious violation of the State by Union forces by calling Maryland a "Border State" or even claiming it was loyal to the Union.
The State remained militarily occupied until well after the war, until after its very Constitution had been replaced.
The author of the Huffpo article goes into tirades about things that happened in Alabama and Mississippi to "justify" the removal of statues 1000 miles away, where first blood was shed in a war that would kill some 1.2 million Americans, more than any other war in our history. God forbid that such ignorance hiding behind credentials will be used to further lead Americans away from the reality of the past.
Of 84 listed monuments in Baltimore
https://data.baltimorecity.gov/Culture-Arts/Monuments/cpxf-kxp3 only 4 were removed.
Despite the following:
Negro Heroes of the U.S Monument
Billie Holiday monument
Frederick Douglas monument
Thurgood Marshall monument
giving equal representation to blacks, if you will.
Yet four monuments in a City which had strong Southern ties, to those who were Confederates, were removed by the current management from the place where first blood was shed in the war, not just by armies, but by citizens fighting to keep their homes from being invaded. That is bad enough, but the removal was not to deflect controversy, nor to preserve the monuments as works of art, but as is rumored, to destroy them.
Things were far more complicated than the fable presented as a simplistic picture of events (at best, patently ignoring the complexities leading up to conflict at worst), goes without saying.
That's my grievance, admittedly, that in all this protest, the original issue of preserving monuments to our history, warts and all, has been lost. How can anyone learn from history if they don't know it?
So the destruction continues, if anything, accelerated by the cowardice of spineless politicians who will not call for an end to violence, who perhaps sympathize with those who would rewrite or erase our history, spurred by the diabolical or the ignorant, and thus diminishing the accomplishments of those whose ancestors rose from bondage as well, who could have walked past those monuments not in anger, but with the smug knowledge that they, indeed, had overcome.
