A statue of Robert E. Lee is the last of four statues commemorating the Confederacy that leftist activists in New Orleans succeeded in bringing down this past weekend.<\/p>\n
All Confederate symbols are monuments to \u201cwhite supremacy,\u201d the left assures us.\u00a0 This is the justification for the campaign to erase them from public view.<\/p>\n
Pro-Confederate Southerners, however, have always maintained that they have never been interested in memorializing \u201csupremacy\u201d of any kind.\u00a0 Rather, their symbols are expressions of a rich and storied cultural history.\u00a0 Statues such as those of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee that were just razed in the Big Easy are monuments to patriots and heroes who were willing to forego all in order to conserve that culture for future generations.<\/p>\n
\u201cHeritage, not Hate,\u201d is how the pro-Confederate South has been putting it for decades now.<\/p>\n
And while the account standardly offered by heritage-affirming Southerners is true as far as it goes, the reality is that it does not go nearly far enough.<\/p>\n
The truth is that the attack on Southern<\/em> cultural symbols is an attack on American <\/em>symbols.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s be clear: Though the movement to eradicate all open, public commemorations of Southerners who fought for the Confederacy is anti-Confederacy<\/em>, it is not, ultimately, an anti-Confederate movement.\u00a0 And though it most certainly is anti-Southern, it is not, ultimately, anti-Southern<\/em>.<\/p>\n In the last resort, the movement to strip the public consciousness of any and all affection for the Confederate heroes that sought to secede from the Union is an anti-American<\/em> movement.<\/p>\n Southern secessionists repudiated the Union.\u00a0 <\/em>They never repudiated America. <\/em>\u00a0More specifically, they repudiated the presumed authority of a central government that, they were confident, had exceeded anything permitted to it by the Constitution.<\/p>\n But those Southerners who sided with the Confederacy never rejected America.\u00a0 Quite the contrary, for they saw in themselves the spirit of their ancestors come alive again: Just as such estimable Southerners as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, James Madison, and many more sacrificed all so that Americans could secede from the oppressive government of England, so too did their posterity below the Mason-Dixon line \u201cmutually pledge\u201d to one another their \u201cLives,\u201d \u201cFortunes,\u201d and \u201cSacred Honor\u201d so that they<\/em> could secede from an oppressive federal<\/em> government.<\/p>\n Those who fought for the Confederate States of America, <\/em>like the act of secession itself, are as American as the proverbial apple pie.\u00a0 Confederate soldiers are American soldiers<\/a>. From at least the time of the late 19th<\/sup> century, beginning at the close of the Spanish-American War (in which, as in all American wars, Southerners fought with distinction), Confederate veterans began receiving recognition that they were American veterans<\/a>.\u00a0 A few decades later, through an act of Congress, they were endowed with the same status as Union soldiers. By the 1930\u2019s, they were eligible to receive pension benefits from the United States government, and in the 1950s, the spouses and children of Confederate veterans became just as eligible to receive these benefits as their Union counterparts.<\/p>\n The demonization of Confederate veterans is nothing more or less than the demonization of American veterans.<\/p>\n The Confederates were American patriots.\u00a0 Never has there been a group of Americans that so embodied the Spirit of \u201976, the love for liberty exemplified by the country\u2019s Founders.\u00a0\u00a0 That there were some<\/em> Southern secessionists that had an interest invested in preserving slavery is certain.\u00a0 That they constituted, in the words of one Confederate soldier whose letters were recovered, \u201ca very small minority\u201d is equally certain.\u00a0 Indeed, the vast majority of Confederate warriors, like the majority of Southerners, did not own slaves.<\/p>\n In fact, a number of eminent Confederate generals<\/em>, like, for example, General Lee, did not own slaves.\u00a0 Lee had inherited seven or so slaves, but he freed them long before the War Between the States erupted.<\/p>\n Not only, though, did neither Lee nor most of his compatriots in Dixie care to defend slavery; they didn\u2019t even want to secede. \u00a0Yet they viewed secession as a \u201cnecessity,\u201d as Jefferson Davis characterized it in his inaugural address to the newly formed confederacy, the only means available for escaping the compact that the Northern states, via the central government, had violated.\u00a0 Lee, for one, remarked that unless the individual states retained their sovereignty, their Constitutional rights, \u201cfree government\u201d itself would be no more and the American government would become \u201caggressive abroad and despotic at home.\u201d<\/p>\n It is nothing short of a national disgrace that American patriots have permitted the most arrogant of activist-ideologues to wage a cultural-cleansing campaign against the South.\u00a0 Mainstream \u201cconservative\u201d talking heads and scribblers have said little to nothing.\u00a0 Doubtless, their neglect of this issue has something to do with their belief that it is only Southerners who the left seeks to demoralize and culturally-destroy.<\/p>\n But as I have tried showing, they couldn\u2019t be more wrong.\u00a0 The left knows this, even if Yankee \u201cconservative\u201d commentators choose to ignore it.\u00a0 The attack on Southern heritage is an attack on American heritage.\u00a0 Lee, Davis, and other gallant men that hailed from the South and who fought in the Confederacy are easy targets at the present moment precisely because both Southern and Northern \u201cconservatives\u201d have failed miserably in making this point.<\/p>\n Actually, even I\u2014a white, Christian, heterosexual man in his mid-40s who was born, raised, and continues to reside in New Jersey\u2014understates the nature of the left\u2019s campaign.\u00a0 The latter is indeed an assault upon American heritage, but America\u2014or \u201cAmeriKKKa,\u201d as the enemies of all things Confederacy have been calling it for 50 years\u2014is despised by the left precisely and only insofar as they view it as the emblem par excellence of all that they despise in Western civilization itself.<\/p>\n The campaign against the \u201cwhite supremacy\u201d of the Confederacy is a campaign, ultimately, against the \u201cwhite supremacy\u201d of Western civilization.\u00a0 It is a war against the West.\u00a0 Attacks against statues of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis are no more attacks against Southerners than are attacks against statues of Christopher Columbus exclusive attacks against Italians.<\/p>\n From the standpoint of the left, the history of the whole Western world is a history of \u201cracism,\u201d \u201cwhite supremacy,\u201d \u201csexism,\u201d \u201ccolonialism,\u201d \u201cimperialism,\u201d \u201chomophobia,\u201d \u201cxenophobia,\u201d \u201cIslamophobia,\u201d and any and every other \u201cism\u201d or \u201cphobia\u201d in the leftist\u2019s litany of cardinal moral offenses.<\/p>\n The militant left\u2019s assault on the Confederacy is one battle in a much larger war against the West.\u00a0 From within its frame of reference, the only difference between Southern Confederates and the rest of the West is that the Confederate heroes are currently more vulnerable prey. The logic of the left\u2019s vision is inexorable: All historical figures of European ancestry who the cultural cleansers deem insufficiently \u201cprogressive\u201d must be, as best possible, scrubbed from public memory.<\/p>\n Both Northern and Southern patriots alike had better realize this.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A statue of Robert E. Lee is the last of four statues commemorating the Confederacy that leftist activists in New Orleans succeeded in bringing down this past weekend. All Confederate symbols are monuments to \u201cwhite supremacy,\u201d the left assures us.\u00a0 This is the justification for the campaign to erase them from public view. Pro-Confederate Southerners,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n