Date: Tue, 5 Nov 2019 11:07:53 -0500
From: Brad Page
Subject: Re: Chatham Chatlist #6549
More statue stuff
The culture war around the statue isn’t about history. I see the UDC has filed for a temporary injunction to enjoin the Commissioners from taking this evil down. It’s sad that we are waging a war over flags and statues when so many other things are scaring us silly. We might keep a few things in mind.
1. The Civil War was fought over 150 years ago. Not as long as the years most TV shows last in 2019.
2. The statue doesn’t represent the valor of Confederate soldiers, it represents the death of over 600,000 American human beings.
3. The southern culture that followed is most represented by the Jim Crow era of southern laws that enforced segregation and ultimately endorsed the evil of 4,000 lynchings.
4. The Civil War ended the evil of slavery and the intentions of the Confederate States to push slavery all the way to California.
5. That the United Daughters of the Confederacy even exists continues a practice that started before the Civil War where ordinary people fought to the death in the interests of southern elite planters until the civil rights battles that began in earnest with Brown v. Board of Education in Topeka.
6. Ordinary people are marching and protesting these vicious symbols because in our classes, our history books we have never come to terms with the deep hatreds that still serve these southern elites.
7. Just to put things in proportion: Go to Germany. Where are the statues to Hitler, the SS and his other henchmen? They killed millions of their own citizens as well as millions of “enemies”.
We can do so much better.
Brad Page