Robert E. Lee Is Back! Confederate Statues Are Restored As Revisionists Flee

'History is back!', said Donald Trump as he pledged to restore America's past, so derogated, dismissed, and rejected by historical revisionists. Under the previous administration, anything that smacked of the Confederacy was targeted.  Neo-Orwellian advocates claimed that America's scurrilous history of slavery must be eradicated before a new age of doctrinal purity could be ushered in.  If future generations could have no recollection of the Civil War period, they ironically argued, African Americans would become white, and the period of racial identity, the heart and soul of progressivism, would end. Black this, black would disappear.  

 

Future black Americans would never know about the brutal African tribal chiefs who bought and sold their ancestors to European slavers.  Africa would become only the promised land, the land of primitive purity, native intelligence, and moral superiority.  They would never know that slavery in one form or another has been part and parcel of human society for millennia.  

Paleolithic man fought clan wars for resources and territory like all subsequent societies and took slaves for barter and work. The journals of Mungo Park, British African explorer of the late 18th century reports how he was taken as a slave again and again, traded, bartered, and sold from tribe to tribe. The Greeks and Romans took slaves from all their colonies and used them for both skilled and unskilled labor. 

 

If looked at from this long historical perspective, there is no room for inchoate hatred.  Progressives want to cancel European civilizations because they were colonizing slaveholders, but with that cancellation goes the millennia of enlightenment, prosperity, and human development for which Europe is most noted. 

The American Robber Barons cannot be hated for their exploitation of labor - they were simply acting like all human entrepreneurs from shoguns to shamans and continued to do so until countervailing forces limited them and changed the way business was done.  When slavery was officially ended, the Southern grandees didn't get down on their knees to beg forgiveness, but under Jim Crow and anti-Reconstructionist maneuvering, established a system of land tenancy little different from enslavement.  They weren't evil, just human.  

Any black man studying Reconstruction will come away not with increased hatred for the white man, but a head-shaking quizzical reaction to the ineluctability of human behavior. 

Slavey aside (and yes, historical analysis can and do disaggregate and isolate), the South was a unique cultural phenomenon, one derived differently, settled by different types of Europeans, Cavaliers who brought a culture of refinement and gentility.  The Cavalier culture was an enabling factor in slavery, but also responsible for a particular sophistication.  A study of antebellum history provides insight into the essential idea of duality - The South can be both genteel and noble and slave-owning; so to cancel both is ignorant at best. 

Of course to ignore the causes of the Civil War, the antebellum South, and Reconstruction means that suspicion of the white man will have no historical antecedents.  White is bad will be the only meme.  George Orwell anticipated this in Animal Farm when the animals shouted, 'Four legs good, two legs bad', howls of hatred with no logic, no history, no meaning. It was a revisionist, anti-historical erasure  of the past.  

Expunging all traces of slavery eliminates any and all possibility of understanding racial differences, race relations, and most importantly the persistent, endemic, seemingly innate social gaps between blacks and whites.  Once the past is gone, once antecedents, causes, variables, influences, and sequelae evaporate and disappear, then nothing is left but a harsh 'four legs good, two legs bad' ethos.  

Without statues of Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis to incite thinking and reflection about the nature of race and racial differences, unmoored, reflexive, debilitating white hatred can only increase.  The white man becomes the devil, Beelzebub himself, not a product of a history which determined and made him. 

Confederate flags should once again fly over Confederate graves.  The boys who fought at Vicksburg, Shiloh, Gettysburg, and Atlanta and died courageously were not fighting for slavery or for the South.  They were conscripts, poor boys drafted and impressed into military duty, and who died in as bloody and horrendous a way as their Union brothers.  Unmarked Confederate graves, unmarked cemeteries are spiteful, disrespectful, hateful dismissals of these young men. 

The Civil War was also about military brotherhood, honor, duty, and courage.  Officers of both North and South attended West Point, and when called to duty, they accepted - they were soldiers, military men, trained to fight, to lead, and to follow the directions of civilian authorities. The men whose names are being systematically removed from military bases across the US were not slavers, brutal racist oppressors, but honorable men who fought in a losing cause.  Should this honorability be forgotten, tossed aside, dismissed, and forgotten?

The influence of slavery was universal in 18th and early 19th century America.  Some of the most legendary leaders had at least some tie to the slave trade.  Northerners built the ships that traversed the Atlantic taking slaves from Africa and transporting them to the Caribbean.  Bostonians, Philadelphians and New Yorkers benefited from investment in shipbuilding, the slave trade, and the molasses and rum trade of which it was a part.  

Yale University is one by one renaming all its residential colleges because some taint of slavery was found in the men for whom they were named; but these men were notable statesmen, political leaders, influencers who moved the country towards full democracy and prosperity.  Why should they be cancelled for having participated in an economic enterprise which was legal, acceptable, and universal? It is revisionist thinking par excellence. 

Monument Avenue in Richmond is no longer an allée of history, lined with luminaries of the Confederacy, standing not in defiance of the North nor as an embrace of slavery, but as an acknowledgement of Southern history and the role of Richmond, the Confederate capital.  The Avenue is bare and no longer an axis of reference.  It has become a street like any other, devoid of its special nature, its intelligent reminder of the ineradicably permanent nature of history. 

Do portraits of Hitler make Jews uncomfortable? Or Cambodians who survived Pol Pot? Or Chinese who survived the Cultural Revolution and the famines? Or the Russians whose parents were exiled to Siberia by Stalin?

Of course they do, but they give pause for reflection, so history has not been cancelled.  It happened, and nothing can change that. Only in progressive America is there a political movement to erase history because black people might feel uncomfortable.  This ignorant revisionism must stop, and Donald Trump has signaled his intention to do so.