CONFEDERATE MONUMENTS

[HairOfTheDog]

*crickets*

I don't think the Bin Laden statue at Ground Zero is a fair analogy. There aren't Americans whose ancestors fought and died in the U.S., under the direction of Bin Laden, for a cause they believed in.

A better, but not perfect, analogy would be German districts erecting monuments of Nazi figures years after Germany was defeated and the Holocaust ended...... and leaving them up to this day.

It's easy for me to understand how Jews and decent people of all religious backgrounds in Germany would be seriously pained by that public glorification of oppression and death. It's easy to understand how Jews and others who oppose discrimination would see those statues and symbols as anything but charming and beautiful.

Germany did the opposite in reality, of course. It acknowledged the terrible wrongness of the Nazi cause and scrubbed the country of public Nazi monuments, swastikas, etc..., which in no way changed or erased history.

The Civil War most definitely was about slavery, no matter how some people try to deny or deflect that fact. Yeah, the rebel army was fighting for states' rights and economic freedom..........but southern states' rights to continue enslaving blacks and practicing slave labor was central to their cause. That's just fact and is clearly stated in the early Confederate manifestos of the time (I posted some references in the REBEL FLAG thread so won't do it again). It's not an accident that modern white supremists adopted the Confederate flag as a symbol for their cause.

Anyway, the controversy and debate over Confederate monuments and flags in the U.S. is not new. It's been going on for years and years, we're just hearing about it more now as the heat rises in this racially-charged political environment.