National Review: Anti-American liberals want to destroy Confederate monuments to “honor and valor”

Confederate monument torn down by protestors in Durham, NC

The National Review has published a defense of Confederate monuments and the “timeless virtues” they represent from the “extremists on both sides” and particularly the America-hating Left. The author is Arthur Herman, who describes himself in the piece as “a scholar, a historian — a Pulitzer Prize finalist historian, and the New York Times–bestselling author of nine books”. In other words, he’s one of those esteemed Right-wing intellectuals. And judging by what he puts to paper here, it appears the Right’s intellectual leadership is the equivalent of Tea Partiers who’ve been taken off the street, dropped in front of a laptop and handed a thesaurus – it’s the same racist nonsense, but with a thin veneer of respectability.

It doesn’t help when he starts off saying things like …

Yet even with all these policemen in riot gear, no one could control the violence when extremists from the left and extremists from the right battled each other in the streets in Charlottesville […]

You’ll forgive me for questioning the worth of his credentials, given that his Pulitzer participation prize doesn’t preclude him from apparently missing the point that the conflict was less between typical Rightists and Leftists and rather between actual fucking Nazis and the people who oppose them. That so many “both sides” apologists (including the fucking President) try to pretend the two camps are on equal moral footing is, itself, a damning rebuke of their priorities.

Throughout his piece, Herman makes the argument that the monuments aren’t really about celebrating the Confederacy, but rather the honor and bravery of the Southern soldiers who fought for it. He even states that “they are monuments to timeless virtues, not to individuals”. Funny, I didn’t know that virtue had the face of Robert E. Lee, or Jefferson Davis, or anyone else who fought to tear the Founding Fathers’ country apart in a bid to continue kidnapping and enslaving human beings. Sure, they didn’t turn tail the moment they faced Union forces on the field, and they may have believed they were fighting for a righteous cause, but when you consider that this cause boiled down to the right to own and dehumanize other people, all that talk about “virtues” really doesn’t mean much.

To use a depressingly apt and timely comparison, I’m sure many Germans in the 1930s and ’40s also fought bravely and honorably (by their definition, anyway) to defend their home and way of life, but that doesn’t make the Third Reich any less evil and worthy of eternal condemnation. And yet, you don’t see a lot of Germans today clamoring to put up monuments to Hitler or Goebbels under pretense of “preserving their heritage”, nor do they vilify counter-protestors who shout down and ridicule pro-Nazi marchers. Unlike some Americans, they seem to realize that some parts of history are unequivocally abominable and serve only as a cautionary tale.

But Herman’s desperate defense of these statues momentarily takes a backseat when he unrolls this marvel of a paragraph:

This is in fact the best argument that those who want these statues gone can make: that the “reconciliation” between North and South was done on the backs of blacks, and that the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow were the price America paid to have peace in the aftermath of civil war. From a historical point of view, it’s almost convincing, even though what American blacks suffered under segregation was nothing compared to what liberalism has inflicted on them since the 1950s, as it destroyed their families, their schools, and their young men and women’s lives through drugs and guns and the gangster-rap culture “lifestyle,” which is really a death style.

The only valid reason why National Review might have chosen to publish this is that they wanted to give the guy enough rope to hang himself with. (Again: my earlier point about conservative “intellectuals”.) Is there anything that can be said to further illustrate the distorted history and breathtaking racism on display here?

He goes on.

We must remove these statues, is how the argument goes, as a form of symbolic reparation to African Americans who suffered not only slavery but its Jim Crow aftermath. The monuments […] were too often erected for the wrong reasons, not to close the books on a bitter war but to open a new chapter in a segregationist South.

But again, this argument runs up against the monuments themselves. They’re not to leaders of the Ku Klux Klan or the architects of segregation or to George Wallace or Lester Maddox. They are monuments to Southern heroes whom the segregationists could cling to as unexceptionable symbols of Southern courage and heroism.

One key question that doesn’t seem to occur to him: If these Confederate heroes were such good, noble men, why do monuments bearing their likeness cause such harm? Why is it that many Black people – and decent people of any skin color – take offense to statues that supposedly embody the human qualities of “honor, dedication, and valor”?

In the end, Herman’s entire defense of these monuments rests on the idea that they represent the best of humanity and not the morally bankrupt individuals whose names and likeness they actually bear. Take that flimsy pretense away, and all you’re left with is a bunch of traitors and secessionists who triggered a war that killed at least 850,000 of their own countrymen because of the Confederacy’s “great truth” that “the negro is not equal to the white man” and “that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition”.

The facts are really very simple. The South seceded because of slavery. The formation of the Confederate States of America inherently involved treason against the United States government, thus making the secessionists traitors. They fought a doomed war, lost badly, and their descendants have been trying to save face ever since by pretending that the obvious, well-documented and at-the-time-proudly proclaimed reasons behind it all don’t actually exist. It’s an embarrassing shitshow through and through. There’s nothing there to be proud of. Plenty to learn from, yes, but the lesson should be one of humility and sober reflection, not of glorifying the secessionist traitors who, above all else, fought to protect the institution of slavery in America.

Herman’s egregious defense is just another shade of the desperately mendacious “Lost Cause” myth – that the South’s struggle was one of brave heroes, rather than of stubborn racists. They don’t deserve commemorative statues; they deserve a spot in history museums and textbooks, all with the proper context explaining the foolishness and hopelessness of their actions, the massive damage they caused after refusing to obey their rightful president’s order to stop enslaving people, and the just penalties they endured once they inevitably lost.

Following that, Herman goes on to launch more uninspired attacks against liberals: Black Lives Matter and Antifa are all violent goons, they hate America and its history and freedom itself, something about Communists and the “totalitarian Left” – it becomes hard to read from the constant eye-rolling it induces. Which again goes to show that modern conservatism has few intellectuals worth reading, if this is the sort of crap that makes it into its more esteemed publications.

(via @Popehat)