Well I hope they learned their lesson: don’t enslave people and commit treason. It shouldn’t be that hard.
People just don’t realize how sensitive these war monuments are. Many were built with small private donations.
How would you feel if monuments to Union soldiers were desecrated?
It’s going to be the best fund raising and recruiting tool to the racists and Klan imaginable.
They won’t win, but we’ve just seen the match lit on full scale home grown terrorism in the US. It may take a few years for them to build and organize. But it’s coming.
I’d guess maybe within twenty years there will be a fully organized underground alt right movement in the US.
It almost happened after Waco and Ruby Ridge. Thankfully that insanity died out after the Oklahoma City bombing. That sickened and shocked a lot of people and made even the radicals reconsider.
Given some of your prior efforts at explaining history on these boards, i think we can all be grateful for your forebearance here.
And i’m well aware of the books. I have some of them on my shelf right here. In fact, as i turn around, i can grab Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. It’s widely considered the best overall text on Reconstruction, and at almost 700 pages is full of incredible detail about how Reconstruction worked at the national, regional, and local level.
I’ve actually read it. Have you? If not, you’ll forgive me if don’t sit patiently waiting for you to lecture me about Reconstruction history based on your family memories.
Manufacturing gone?
The Southern economy had very little manufacturing. They had, through the use of slavery and a reliance on cash crops like cotton and sugar and tobacco, maintained a rather backwards agricultural economy, and had not diversified into manufacturing the way that the North had. It’s one of the reasons they lost the Civil War.
Haven’t you just been telling us how racism was almost over?
It would be an act of anti-patriotism, just like erecting the monuments to traitors and slavers was.
Haven’t you just been telling us how racism was almost over?
There already is, and has been for many years. Have you not noticed? “The Second Amendment people, I don’t know.”
Just out of interest, what do YOU lose if a few Confederate monuments are removed.
You say that you’re not one of the racists, you’re not one of the neo-Nazis. OK. How would removing a few statues detrimentally affect your life? Can you explain that?
I think that you are right about this-- the people who take this seriously take it very seriously. I suspect that many a Tim McVeigh are being born today
And just lookin’ for something to blame themeselves on!
Violence has a way of spreading.
Innocent people get hurt. I certainly won’t be at any rallies. But what if this spreads to domestic terrorism? Oklahoma City was only 20 years ago. That could easily happen again in another city.
I just don’t want to see people needlessly hurt.
I’ve seen many posts here where people have commented their grandparents or parents held racist views. They were appalled by that.
These hateful attitudes were dying out. Society was changing for the better. A couple generations from now it would be unthinkable for any sane person to openly express racist views.
But now we’re tearing open that old scar and creating a whole new problem.
Not a single thing you posted constitutes an answer to the question that i asked.
You speak in a series of non-sequiturs, individual observations that bear no real relation to one another, and that don’t add up to a coherent argument.
You’re right. That’s my biggest concern.
Some people get angry and post on message boards. No harm in that. 
It’s the nuts out there that we have to worry about. They probably don’t have direct ties to the alt right.
It’s the loners with a cause that you have to worry about.
Why is allowing society to slowly change so difficult to understand?
There’s been a steady change ever since WWII. It started in a small way with several black military units in that war. The Tuskegee Airmen is an example.
Truman integrated the military in 1948.
https://www.trumanlibrary.org/anniversaries/desegblurb.htm
Then there were several important Supreme Court decisions eliminating segregation.
There was some violence but we eventually got through it.
Things aren’t perfect but the world today is completely different from my childhood.
I think society is on the right path. The old prejudices and hate are dying away. There’s no need to provoke violence by tearing down our monuments and history. Let’s learn from the past and look forward.
Charles Barkley made a interesting comment. We’re similar ages. He’s from Alabama and I’m from Arkansas. We’ve seen how society is slowly changing. He has experienced racism but it’s nothing like what his parents and grandparents had to endure.
https://www.google.com/amp/rare.us/rare-news/race-in-america/charles-barkley-thinks-theres-a-bigger-problem-and-it-wont-be-fixed-by-removing-statues-im-not-going-to-waste-my-time/amp/
I’ve been seeing this all over the place – and, right on cue, here it is once more: “tearing down our monuments and history.” I see where people have been tearing down monuments; what, exactly, is “and history” doing in that sentence?
Thanks for that complex and sophisticated and eloquent historical analysis. I had never thought about the Civil Rights movement in those terms before. I don’t know why i’ve been reluctant to take my history lessons from you; you’ve clearly got an amazing grasp on the nuance and complexity and contingency involved in long-term historical change. You should write a book!
You understand that monuments and history are not the same thing, right? The elimination of a few monuments will not change the history of Reconstruction or of the Civil War. A few posts back, you told me about all the books written about Reconstruction and the South. I presume you understand that getting rid of a few statues will not automatically cause all of those books to crumble into dust, right? As a historian, i’ve always tended to believe that monuments are mainly for people who can’t be bothered actually reading history.
Also, why do you blame the violence on the people who want to take down statues, rather than on the people who respond with violence to the removal of statues?
I don’t think that the statues are the biggest deal in the world. As one black writer observed a couple of days ago, no Confederate statue has ever jumped down off its podium and taken his civil rights away. This African American said that he would prefer to fix the real problems, like the treatment of blacks by law enforcement, the disproportionate number of blacks in the prison system, and other structural inequalities in our society.
I completely understand that position. For many blacks, i’m sure that Confederate statues are probably not exactly high on their list of priorities.
But, to be honest, i also believe that defending these statues is basically defending the indefensible. Most of them were erected not in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, and most of them were erected not simply to appeal to some nebulous idea of Southern culture. Most were erected at times when Southern whites were making every effort to assert white supremacy, and to squash every effort at black independence and autonomy. And most were erected with a desire to demonstrate that Southern culture is white culture, and those darkies better not forget it, on pain of physical violence or death.
While there is no doubt a Southern culture that is not racist (or, more likely Southern cultures, plural), the Southern culture represented by Confederate statues is a culture of white supremacy and racial superiority and segregation. Is that the battle you really want to fight in your desire to preserve your culture?
A few monuments? LOL
Try thousands.
Many, many Southern small towns have one. My hometown of 20,000 has a Confederate monument downtown.
Cemeteries have them.
Every time you desecrate one there will be a angry backlash. It’s like throwing pig’s blood on a Mosque. You’re going to be needlessly enraging people.
These monuments represent people that fought and died in a horrific war. They represent the people from that area that sacrificed their lives.
I don’t agree with slavery. But the war was much bigger than that. Many of these people died trying to protect their communities from an invading army.
That’s something anyone can understand.
I just want to emphasize this.
The American South is an incredibly diverse place. It has all sorts of people, and all sorts of cultures. It is not a monolith.
In fact, one of the few things that is common to the American South as a whole is a history of slavery and white supremacism and opposition to black civil rights. If you talk about Southern culture in the singular, as something that all the South shares, and that you want to defend, then that’s pretty much what you’re talking about.
I think the descendants of the people who were the actually victims should get to decide how important those monuments are, not the descendants of the abusive class.
Listen to this voice:
“I don’t agree with slavery, but…” is the new “Not to be racist, but…”
Want to know why Jews are moving back to Germany, only a couple generations after the Holocaust?
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Germans teach the truth of what the Nazis did in their schools. No equivocating, no qualifying, no white-washing. They teach the unvarnished truth.
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They removed monuments to Hitler and the Nazis and erected museums and monuments to the victims of the Holocaust.
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They have, in word and deed, apologized for what they did.
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They pay reparations to the victims.
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They made Nazism illegal, so people could feel safe.
It’s not perfect but good lord they tried to make it right. The Southern states fight tooth and nail to hold claim to that part of their history. En masse, they never taught the truth, apologized, or tried to make it right.
Perhaps the descendants of slavery could start getting over it, when the south actually takes steps to embrace what happened and acknowledge to incredible damage done to generations of black people. Maybe, just maybe, they could acknowledge that their own history is *not more important or even as important * as dealing with the truth of what happened to victims of slavery and Jim Crow.
I don’t live in the south, so I don’t know, but in my experience, accepting things with racist roots is part of being a black American. Everyone gets fed the same romanticized view of history in entertainment and sometimes in school, and it takes hold. Dixie is a catchy song, so I’m sure it gets stuck in black southerners’ heads, at the very least, even if they don’t walk down the streets whistling it.
No you don’t. Not unless you’re over 100 years old.
You are aware that many of those monuments were created specifically in protest of desegregation, right? That was the very reason the Confederate flag was brought back in the 1950s, in fact.