Confederate Statues and the Open Sores of War

When the Soviet Union began disintegrating in 1989 my father, a professor of American and Political History, said to watch what happens in Yugoslavia. He had been stationed there at the end of World War II and, always the historian, had consumed as much of the region’s history and culture as he could in the time he was there. He quickly learned that it was not one country but many, not one culture but dozens. And they absolutely despised each other.

“The only thing holding Yugoslavia together,” he told me, “is the iron fist of the Soviet Union. Without it, the region will explode. Just watch.” He said that the centuries of ethnic tensions there had never died and instead only intensified. Though few people alive in 1989 could really say how any of the conflicts had started, they had all been raised to maintain old hatreds, to be suspicious of “the others” and to remain a coiled spring of anger ready to snap when the time was right.

As the poet and NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu once said, the typical mindset could be described as, “The stinking ravine in which your mother was conceived is infinitely more vile and putrid than the stinking ravine in which my mother was conceived.”

Sure enough, with the fall of the USSR came the violent breakup of Yugoslavia, and others, and years of wars, ethnic cleansing, and a pretty awful Owen Wilson movie that I will still watch occasionally.

My dad was named for my grandad, who was named after Robert E. Lee. Dad grew up in Lexington, Va., went to Virginia Military Institute on the G.I. Bill, and later received his Masters and PhD at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Most of my summers were spent in Lexington, often playing under the watchful gaze of Generals Lee and Jackson (and Marshall) who stood immortalized above on their tall plinths. That the South with its Confederacy was our heritage was a foregone conclusion. It wasn’t about states rights or slavery or racism, although my grandfather was a racist of the worst sort, it was about history and geography and bronze men striking the poses of heroes.

If you give even a sideways glance at the histories of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Croatia, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, Eastern Europe in general, the Middle East, India and Pakistan, Turkey, Israel and Palestine, Chechnya, Crimea, Russia, the Sudan, Syria and Iraq and Iran and Kurdistan and Afghanistan, you can see that there are conflicts raging today that have their origins many, many generations ago. In some cases, people fight because their people have always fought. In others, the land has changed hands so many times that war feels natural.

In every case, the current and future violent conflicts can be traced to old wars — old ethnographic chasms — that on some level are still being fought on purpose. In each instance, great pains have been taken by ethnic factions to maintain and nurture old hatreds, to remember that the hate is there, to encourage the fragmentation of societies and cultures and families through the deaths of new bodies of old enemies. And so these battles rage on, sometimes violently, more often as scar tissue reopened again and again to be filled with bitterness and left to fester in the sun.

This is the problem with protecting our nation’s publicly displayed Confederacy memorial statuary. Whether we’re willing to admit it or not, these are normalized daily reminders that at one time our country was locked in a war that cost it more lives than all the other wars we’ve fought combined. A side won and a side lost. The defeat was decisive; one side surrendered to the other. Yet the deification of the defeated leadership is divisive.

Back in the 80s in a club in Virginia, I saw a stand up comedian tell a long stream of jokes poking fun at Southerners. And not in the Jeff Foxworthy way. Finally after about ten minutes of abuse, a proud southern tobacco enthusiast heckled him with the one line he’d doubtless heard repeated all through his life. He shouted, “Hey, buddy, the South’s gonna do it again!” Without pausing a single beat, the comedian responded, “What? Lose?” And that was that.

But this “do it again” sentiment is one that’s been pushed forward by everyone from Charlie Daniels to David Duke. The statues of Lee and Jackson and Davis and others, erected most commonly in the wake of any attempted leap forward in the rights granted to African Americans (the vast majority were erected after the death of the first American Civil Rights Movement and the Plessy vs. Ferguson “separate but equal” decision), are heroically-posed reminders of old hatreds, ethnic divisions and the separation between the North and the South.

So were Jim Crow and segregation. Don’t forget that, around 1940, Adolf Hitler was absolutely certain that the U.S. would enter his war on Germany’s side. Why? Because of our history of slavery. Because of the iron-clad, law-bound separation of the races in the American South. And because, to his mind, our Civil War was far from over.

And make no mistake, we have a reputation around the world for being a vibrant and beautiful cultural melting pot that struggles with a long-standing race problem. We’re the Mel Gibson of nations — we’re talented and entertaining, but we should really stop saying all this racist shit. When the world sees events like in Charlottesville, we look like Yugoslavia to them. At least a little bit.

I recognize that the vast majority of Southerners are just proud to be from the South and in no way wish to enslave a race of people or even withdraw from the Union. They just like southern charm and sweet tea and a thick drawl and cicadas and so on. Their heritage may include ancestors who fought, but they have no intention or desire to open those old wounds. I was born in the South, raised in the South and live in the South. I get it. I like the South too!

While this notion that the South is somehow going to rise again and secede from the United States may seem laughable to you and me, for too many white nationalists and militants it’s a roadmap to some sort of fantasized “freedom.” And that “freedom” means freedom from working with or voting with or shopping with people of color. That freedom means it’s always OK for a police officer to kill an unarmed black person because black people are not human. That freedom means my white kid shouldn’t have to sit in a classroom or a bus or a movie theater within viewing distance of a black person or an immigrant or a Jew or a Catholic or a homosexual or a liberal or a cripple. Indeed, it is a fantasy of a society free of any “others” at all. And it’s very white.

The revelers in Charlottesville chanted as much. They glorified the memories of American slavery, the savagery of the Holocaust and the leadership of Adolf Hitler. All of them marched under the Swastika and the Confederate flag — two icons representing misguided uprisings, which aimed to cement the white race’s dominion over other races and led inexorably to an incalculable loss of human life, and which were definitively defeated.

And then one of their number, convinced that no banner or slogan or torch or statue could possibly convey all the deep-seated rage he felt toward people with whom he did not agree, rammed his car into a crowd of his fellow American citizens, injuring 18 of them and killing — murdering — Heather Heyer.

All of this, it cannot be denied, was inspired by a statue, in a public park, depicting Robert E. Lee, a Confederate General and educator, sitting astride a horse in the middle of the most beautiful community I have ever seen.

So, when my tax dollars go toward the construction or maintenance of a memorial to the vanquished, to the leadership that gave the orders to kill American soldiers, to commit the high treason of seceding from the United States of America, and to fight to preserve the rights of white men to own black men, women and children, to torture them, to work them to death, and to rob them of education, opinion, freewill, property, kinship, faith, and indeed their humanity, I call bullshit.

Erecting statues to commemorate leadership or fortitude or heritage in the face of agonizing defeat may indeed memorialize the man and his courage. But it also celebrates the sentiments that ignited the conflicts and the resentments that throbbed when the war was lost. It makes sure the wounds stay open and festering. It’s a bucolic parkway overlook into the stinking ravine in which one ideology died and another, just as sinister, was then conceived. Were it otherwise, the removal of these statues would hold no fascination or emotional tie or symbolism for America’s white nationalists at all. And that’s the truth of it.

These statues represent something to them. Something worth marching for. Something worth killing for. And as long as they stand, they provide hope and faith and idolatry to a coiled spring of anger ready to snap when the time is right. That’s when the South will “do it again.” So they say.

What about the “alt-left?” The Antifa? Aren’t they equally at fault here as our president insists? Aren’t their violent acts the same thing? I don’t believe so. Not by a long chalk. For one thing, you have to ask yourself what exactly drew this “alt-left” to Charlottesville? The presence of a large and vocal confederacy of white nationalists, many armed with firearms, truncheons, shields, and Polynesian patio torches intent on intimidating — indeed terrorizing — blacks, Hispanics, immigrants, gays, Jews, Catholics, liberals and other American citizens. And what drew this Vanilla ISIS to Charlottesville?

The statue.

Notice how carefully the Antifa narrative has been crafted to distract the conversation away from this root cause — “THE Cause.” People who are in favor of keeping these confederate participation trophies up in public spaces like to say that tearing them down will be the beginning of “a slippery slope” that will lead to a dismantling of history. I mean, look at how the lack of statues of Hitler have all but blotted him from world memory. Our president asked, “Where does it end?” To him and to many of his followers, this is a rational question.

But in reality, when we built those monuments, celebrating men who tried to rip our country apart and who killed people in order to preserve the right to own other human beings, THAT was when the slippery slope began. And that slope slips ever so gently into a familiar stinking ravine.

The time has come. Let’s take them down.

© 2017 Chris Henson

All rights reserved.
See also: “Whose Heritage: The Symbols of the Confederacy” from the Southern Poverty Law Center