Marxists Remove US Heroes To Erase History, But Confederate Monument Removal Is National Survival

Images from Harper’s Weekly, Always Want to Go, and Sutori. Left: Confederates round up and enslave black Americans. Right: assassination of Lincoln by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth. Background: Stonewall Jackson monument at Manassas Battlefield.

(This article was originally written for and published in full on The Rogue Review. You can read the full piece at my column there.)

As New York City considers removing the statues of men vital to the creation of the U.S., including George Washington, leftists are once again showing their determination to rewrite and erase history. But conservatives are losing the monument war precisely because our own defense of monuments as a whole is founded upon historical lies and false premises…

As someone who has agreed with neither side in the statues debate, I wanted to explain why this NYC removal is so wrong, while also making the case for removing Confederate monuments.  And before you assume that those two opinions are incompatible, or that I’m advocating for what is inevitably a “slippery slope,” hear me out.

Marxists and Democrats (but I repeat myself) remove monuments to a nation’s heroes because they want to erase/rewrite history.  No human is absolutely perfect, and most great men in history have had serious moral failures in one or more areas of life.  We put up statues to our national heroes not because they were perfect, or because they fit our current modern code of ethics (a highly unreasonable expectation), but because they contributed something vital to this nation. America, with all her faults, brought liberty and justice and opportunity to more people than any other country in history, which is why we celebrate Columbus and Jefferson and Washington for making America possible.  Symbols are essential to a society—we must have physical signs and monuments and banners to gather around, to inspire and remind us what we believe as a nation.  Marxists take down our heroes because they want to impose an oligarchical tyranny, so they have to pretend that the champions of liberty and Americanism were evil.

But when it comes to Confederate monuments, the case is quite different.  A nation that erects and maintains monuments to its traitors is setting itself up for failure.  This is a simple fact.  You cannot honestly praise treachery and then expect only loyalty from your citizens.  By their own account, both by their words and actions, the Confederates proclaimed that they wanted to split and thus destroy America; they spent four bloody years trying to conquer the U.S. Army and Navy before U.S. Grant, Lincoln, and Sherman finally forced a surrender.  After the war, the Confederates by and large expressed no remorse or regret.  They were very proud of their traitorous actions.  Indeed, they continued to implement their racist and anti-American ideals through Congress and state laws for many decades after.  Thus, whether you happen to agree with their treachery or not, the fact remain they were traitors.  Celebrating treachery and expecting no self-destructive consequences is like glorifying adultery and expecting your spouse to stay perfectly faithful.  Or one might as well ask a man to erect a monument to the person who repeatedly drove a knife into his back.

Of course, there are also the appalling war crimes of the Confederates.  There was Jefferson Davis’s letter and then the Retaliatory Act mandating by law that captured black Union soldiers and their white officers be killed or enslaved.  Multiple states were ravaged by Lee’s army, rounding up every last black man, woman, and child they could (even lifelong freemen) and enslaving them; in Gettysburg alone, a thriving free black population was decimated practically overnight.  There was the Ft. Pillow Massacre, after which Nathan Bedford Forrest boasted that he had dyed the river with the blood of black soldiers and their white Union officers.  Confederate papers defended Forrest and, at the war’s end, Lee praised Forrest as his greatest general.  But you can read my full article on the mind-blowing crimes of the Confederates and post-war Democrats; ultimately, my argument against Confederate monuments is not that they were criminals but that they were traitors.  It is indeed a slippery slope to argue for take-downs based on personal morality.

And yes, statues and monuments are inherently celebratory.  No person or child who looks at the magnificent statue of Stonewall Jackson at Bull Run/Manassas Battlefield would assume anything other than that it is meant to reflect positively on Jackson.  We don’t put up statues to Benedict Arnold (who did in fact contribute notably to the Revolutionary War effort early on); and yet, we remember him so well that his name for centuries was a household synonym for “traitor.”  We can remember history without having monuments to Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.  A group of American Revolutionaries once tore down a statue of King George III and melted the metal ornaments into bullets because they understood that a statue is a celebration.

That story leads me to another point.  I do not argue merely to remove Confederate statues—I want to erect statues of other American heroes who fought for civil rights in their place.  Put U.S. Grant in where Robert E. Lee stood, erect Elijah Anderson on the pedestal that once held Jefferson Davis, and put Frederick Douglass or John Laurens in the place of Stonewall Jackson.  Thus there would be not an erasure of history, but an education in the truths of history.  Just as the Revolutionaries melted King George into bullets, we can replace Confederate monuments with patriotic American monuments…

To some extent I can sympathize with the argument that people who did evil things should not be honored with monuments (as noted above with Confederate war crimes).  It is a simple fact of life, however, that every single human in history has sinned.  Not only that, but most people have been complicit in actions or events or systems which we as moderns find repulsive…My point is that the argument for removing statues based on the individual’s morality was always a dangerous and subjective one.  All have sinned, and have fallen short of our current standard of perfection.

But, again, that applies as a defense for statues of Washington or Columbus, but not for statues of Confederate leaders.  Whether you agree with the Confederates or not, the plain fact—by their own account—remains that they tried to divide and destroy the United States.  The Democrats, who were the Confederates, have continued their destructive work ever since the Civil War with great success, and that is partly because we put up monuments and ignored the reality of what the Confederacy stood for.

The Confederates/Democrats murdered and enslaved an unknown mass of black and white Americans during the Civil War even off the battlefield, a war which they started so as to break apart the United States because their candidate didn’t win an election (Democrats, the party of election fraud, have always denied the legitimacy of elections that don’t go their way).  The Democrats after the war continued their efforts at racial genocide, instituting tyrannical, racist laws and becoming so violent that in many places in the South for years after the war it was not safe to be a black citizen or a Republican, white or black.  Murders, beatings, and brutal rapes were a fact of life.  There was no such thing as a fair election where the Democrat terrorist groups like the KKK and Red Shirts held sway.  And we turned a blind eye, and said we were all really just Americans who had slightly different political theories, and pretended that all was well and normal and sane.  “We must have peace,” we said, our ears deaf to the screams of the thousands of victims of Democrat violence.  There was no peace.  It was all a lie.  The war simply shifted from the battlefield to the streets and homes and voting places and halls of government.  But if we didn’t see its full ugliness ourselves, we didn’t care.

“This is not the Democrat Party of your grandfathers,” we are told.  It is, it is!  It is the Democrat Party of your great-great-great-great grandfathers.  Until we admit that, the Democrats will continue to rip apart this great country of ours.  This lie has brought us perilously close to national suicide.  Since Andrew Jackson on, the Democrats have defined their platform with one or more anti-constitutional principles; furthermore, they have always used violence and fraud and corruption to get their way…

The takedown of Washington, Jefferson, and the other founders is Marxist erasure of history, but to exchange Confederate monuments for monuments celebrating loyal patriots is a matter of national survival.

(Read my full piece at The Rogue Review.)