On being proven wrong, hopefully

Burt Likko says:

I know I’m coming in a little bit late to this discussion.

I have been saying for years and said so even when I lived in Tennessee, that the flag in question was used as a rallying point for those engaged in a violent treason to defend slavery. I do not believe I ever have seen anything particularly noble in the iconography of the Confederacy. Not for lack of trying.

I understand the abstract political point the secessionists made back in 1860. It wasn’t a noble aim to strive for then, and its ghosts in the modern day are little better. I never, ever understood how someone could fly that flag and call himself a “patriot.”

I understand that there are those who argue that secession and the subsequent Civil War were really about tariffs. I have always thought that argument was not only incorrect, but actual bullshit.

I understand that there are those who insist that Confederate soldiers, Confederate military leaders, and especially Robert E. Lee, fought with something they call “honor.” Revisionist historians, including Lee himself, have attempted to rewrite history to suggest that they were morally reluctant to embrace slavery, that slavery was somehow dying of its own accord, and that they fought instead for something else. But the Confederacy was hardwired to preserve slavery. Slavery was baked into the CSA’s constitution. Robert E. Lee was no hero. He was a military leader of remarkable ability and charisma, who intentionally chose to fight his own country so that white men could own black people.

I’ve heard it argued that there were some free blacks who owned black slaves. I’ve heard it argued that there were some white (Irish) slaves too. I’ve heard it argued that blacks volunteered to fight for the Confederate Army. So what? Anomalies and isolated incidents, even if they could be backed up with her and historical evidence, do not change the fact that slavery was overwhelmingly white people owning black people. The legacy of that tainted “institution” continues to stain our culture, our laws, and our nation to this day.

Taking down the battle flag from the capital of South Carolina is a fine start. But it doesn’t go far enough. @Chris wrote a post recently about the pervasiveness of Confederate iconography throughout the South. Particularly when I lived there, I found the celebration of all things Confederate, the veneration of leaders of the Confederate movement, and the claims of “pride in heritage” associated with the same to be creepy and weird. Politicians who patted Confederate apologists on the head to pander for votes have always struck me as craven, ignorant, or morally suspect.

Let’s not stop with taking down the battle flag. Let’s go further and acknowledge the fact that men like Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, intentionally and after sober deliberation, employed their considerable talents and abilities to advance a dark, dishonorable cause. Let’s stop celebrating these men by naming highways and schools and counties and cities after them. Let’s convert the monuments to the dead soldiers of the Confederacy to be cenotaphs to all the soldiers who died, and to all the slaves who endured our nation’s greatest hypocrisy.

Germans discreetly honor the soldiers who fought for their country during both of the world wars, but they have earned the right to do so by coming to cultural grips with the evils that the regimes for which they fought perpetrated. Those Southerners who insist that they have a distinct culture and stridently give honor to their Confederate predecessors have failed to reach a similar moral reckoning. Rather, too many of them have insisted for too long on strained, elaborate apologia and sophomoric displays of spite.

To cease to give honor is not the same thing as to dishonor. The secessionists, the slavers, the Confederates do not deserve special honors. After all, the contemporary practice of extending honor to such figures grows out of a political resistance to the federal government involving itself in enforcing our constitution’s guarantee of equality to all. There’s little defensible about that, either.

It’s too bad that so many people have had to die in order for these facts to become clear. And it’s too bad that those people in the church group were among that number. Let us hope and pray that they are, finally, the last.Report