So they’re tearing down Confederate statues
all over the US south. I am not conflicted about this issue: “good riddance!” I
say. “The sooner the better. What took
them so long?” What were they doing there in the first place? Why use public
funds and spaces to celebrate vanquished scoundrels? Who dedicated their lives
to discredited causes?
Robert
E. Lee’s chief contribution to history was as the principal defender of the
slave-holding state. Whatever his qualities as a man he lent his skills and
considerable military talents to upholding an evil institution, which, but for
his efforts, might have ended sooner. He might have served the other side,
might have fought to free men and women from bondage, but instead actively
tried to prevent it. Why is there a statue to him?
We
needn’t melt them all down into ball bearings or whatever (which I’m rarely in
favour of). If it means so much to the white sons and daughters of Dixie, they
could always borrow a page from the good citizens of Budapest, who took down
all their communist-era statues and stuck them in a designated tourist trap. I
do believe there is value in such places. I have wandered Budapest’s statue
park and wallowed in the bad taste of another era. It is a strangely moving
experience. To stand amongst these overwhelmingly boorish monuments is to taste
another time, when human hopes and dreams were smothered under such concrete
mounds. There’s no mistaking it for glorification: the sheer tackiness of it
(the lady in the booth, when she sees you coming, puts on a tape of Soviet
anthems) seems to emblemize the tragic pathos of the era.
Why
though do I have the strange feeling that a Confederate statue park would treat
its inmates rather more romantically?
“Those
who are concerned about the erasure of history will be thrilled to learn of the
existence of books.” [1]
Statues, you see, aren’t used to teach history. They are used to glorify,
romanticize, idealize, and fetishize it. Some folks really seem to think Robert
E. Lee will be erased from memory if we take his statue down. Maybe they don’t
have library cards. Or internet. But Robert E. Lee is not going to be
forgotten. He just won’t be immortalized in marble (or iron or whatever they
use). Why should he be, if his cause was
unjust?
There
are not many things in history that we can agree upon, but surely the abolition
of slavery should be one of them. How can you claim the abolition of slavery
was a good thing if you pray to the statue of a man who tried his damndest to
prevent it?
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