Let's Teach Republicans Why Preserving Confederate Statues Isn't Like Preserving Auschwitz!
The Cape Ann Republican Committee, of Cape Ann, Massachusetts, is making apologies after posting a meme to their Facebook page in support of keeping Confederate statues... and comparing keeping those statues to keeping Auschwitz standing as a reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust. Behold, said meme:
Oh, and by the way -- you did read that correctly. We are talking about Massachusetts here -- which, you may know, was not part of the Confederacy. Of course, some of us may have grown up in the state during what was ever-so-delicately referred to as the "busing crisis," and may not be particularly surprised by this at all.
Following an outcry -- particularly among Jewish members of the community who understand the difference between Auschwitz and a statue of Robert E. Lee -- Amanda Kesterson, the Chair of the Cape Ann GOP, attempted to explain their rationale for posting the meme:
Kesterson, who is also chairwoman of the Gloucester City Republican Committee, said she understands that any post comparing any event to the Holocaust would be disturbing. Neither the local or national GOP stand for hate speech, she added.
"My take is that history has a lot of horrible things in it — history can be good, bad and ugly — and the Holocaust and (Civil War) are two of the most ugly parts of our history," she said, acknowledging that many statutes of Confederate generals were erected in the 20th century as a means of intimidating blacks during the Jim Crow era. "That again was an ugly part of our history."
They have since apologized on their Facebook page, but without fully seeming to recognize where it is that they went wrong:
Yesterday's post which sparked much outrage has been removed. Our elected officials who are members of our group have all expressed publicly via official proclamation this week their hope that as a community we will push back against any attack on our community values of inclusion and tolerance. For any questions, please feel free to contact Amanda Kesterson. Thank you.
This was, of course, a very bad analogy. There is a very big difference between the way people see Auschwitz and the way many White Southerners, at least, see Confederate Generals posed triumphantly on horses. Auschwitz serves as a reminder of those who suffered, while the Confederate statues glorify those who fought for continued suffering. You will notice that there are no triumphant looking statues of Hitler in Germany.
There is, however, a far more accurate analogy to be made here. Imagine if, in Germany, 50 years after WWII, groups of Holocaust deniers did put up statues of Adolph Hitler looking triumphant? And then got mad that people wanted to tear them down, because how dare they not remember history ?
Well, that is exactly what happened in the United States after the Civil War. The Lost Cause of the Confederacy is revisionist history just like Holocaust Denial is. It is also about as accurate.
Germany, as you may know, bans people from promoting Holocaust Denialism. After the Civil War, America did the exact opposite. It allowed the Lost Cause bullshit to proliferate, believing that it would help the nation to heal. Lost Causers were allowed to pretend that not only was the war about more than just slavery (it was not), that t was noble in some way, but also that slavery wasn't really all that bad anyway. This was taught in schools and even promoted in Hollywood, with movies like Gone With The Wind and The Birth of A Nation. My mother grew up living in Florida for half the year because of her father's job, and she was taught in school that it was not the Civil War, but The War of Northern Aggression. That the real villains in this story were the carpetbaggers. If slavery was ever mentioned, she says she does not remember it.
To this day, many textbooks in the South teach that slavery was but a "side issue" to the Civil War, rather than the reason it was fought in the first place.
A fake history was created to make the South feel better about losing, to help us heal as a nation. That was a bad idea. It did not help, it hurt. Rather than dealing, as a nation, with the devastating horror of slavery and the evil that produced it, we allowed the South to whitewash the whole thing and still think of themselves and their generals as heroes. Who want to believe they were good, because they don't want to confront a "heritage" that was wrong. We did the wrong thing.
Because now we have people who have been taught, and who truly believe in, the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, freaking out because they can't understand why anyone thinks they shouldn't celebrate their glorious heritage. All of this should have been dealt with over 100 years ago, and it wasn't, because America would rather ignore pain than deal with it. The Germans dealt with their atrocities responsibly, and we simply refused to. Because it was easier this way, because it preserved everyone's idea that America is and was always basically good . Because if we lost that, then who would ever fight our wars for us?
These statues are not about remembering history, they are about misremembering history. And this war is being fought between those who want to remember history correctly, and those who want to protect their made-up history, because actually confronting the real history feels bad .
Auschwitz is ugly. It's harrowing. It makes you sick to look at it. It makes you say "NEVER AGAIN." Keeping it up is necessary for that reason. It is not there to provide comfort to Nazis. These statues, however, are meant to provide comfort to those who wish to celebrate the South and fondly misremember what it stood for. And they don't deserve that.
[ Salem News ]
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Thank you! That's the one.
Tk: I made no such assumption. I selected from several parts of the country where the ethos of moral and intellectual superiority is strong, as on this forum, then picked from a nearly infinite number of examples to refute it. The assumption was yours.
As for the first sentence of your earlier comment to me the answer is an unequivocal and unapologetic yes because that is what I saw. If you want know what the face, at least the organized face, looks like just search Samir Shabazz. Mr. Shabazz in conjunction with the New Black Panther Part staged public spectacles in Philly where they called for the killing of white people. There weren't just one or two of these, there were at least a half dozen over six years. The You Tubes that are easiest to find have been cleaned up a bit but there will be no question that his words are as I have described them. What I believe was a free lance group across the river in Camden was even worse. They called for the killing and skinning of "cracker babies." Its the vilest stuff imaginable and other than an occasional nervous laugh nobody said a word. If I hadn't been in PHL I wouldn't have even been aware of these gatherings, any of them. If you don't want to know don't look and the more you look the more you will find.
Today a young black man was arrested for a series of killings in Kansas City. He targeted only older white men. None of the men were robbed after they had been shot, mostly in the back of the head at very close distances. The likes of Mr. Shabazz and company provide a motive force for acts like those and there are far more of them than anyone will know about unless they are specifically looking. You will likely only find the Kansas City murders if you search for them. You can explain why.
In Essington close to the airport in PHL which was very safe I listened to the bi-monthly firefights in West Chester just a couple of miles away as a straight line. After a bad weekend in Philly, and there were a number, the response on the part of Mayor Nutter and the local media was entirely predictable. Both implicit and explicit was the assertion that the majority was "preying" on the minority. The untruthful idiocy of that was almost unfathomable. I don't think even they believed it. The government's own stats on who is doing what to whom are available to anyone who wants to look. To say that these stats paint a stark picture of where the violence is concentrated is an understatement. The demographic most likely to have violence visited on them is the same one perpetrating it. The cross racial violence in the US is biased at least 8-1 and not in the direction current conventional wisdom demands it must be.
The gentlemen in West Chester were likely launchers of the 40 caliber projectile that went through the fuselage of one of our aircraft sitting on the de-ice ramp on the west end of the PHL airport.
Perhaps the Irish didn't forget they were as you put it "shit on" but rather considered in a little over three generations one of their own was the President of the United States. It makes a rather powerful argument that opportunity was there. To whom did they have the need to "feel superior?"
Perhaps the Irish fought the forced busing of their children because they felt that, rather than raising the standard where it needed to be raised, their children were being forced toward the lowest common denominator as far as schools went. If that was their objection it was one of substance.
Not one Confederate officer was ever tried for treason. The only traitor on either side that I'm aware of was General David Twiggs who surrendered about twenty US facilities to Confederate officials prior to Ft. Sumter.
Yes indeed "both siderism" because the words and deeds of all involved on both sides in the context in which they took place are the only way to evaluate the conflict. I'm not revising anything. Judging one of the belligerents in a conflict 150+ years ago by the standards of the 2017 Georgetown social sciences faculty and the other by those of the time of the conflict is ahistorical and dishonest if an accurate appraisal is the goal. It may not be.
Respectfully