Some of the Usual Suspects, though fewer of them than I might have expected, are down with the short-fingered vulgarian’s both-siderism. Still, even the loathsome Franklin Graham, a vicious character who in points of Christian compassion and intellectual rigor makes his old man look like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, has apparently backed away from his initial endorsement of DJT’s meltdown earlier in the week. Mitt Romney, of all people, has been more forthright in his censure than any prominent Republican officeholder that I’m aware of.

Over on social media, Ross Lunsford takes considerable exception to any mention of the Confederacy and the Third Reich in the same breath, apparently conflating comparison and equivalence (I had made the point, as I have in these fora, that monuments to the prominent figures of the latter government are not thick on the ground in the Federal Republic of Germany). It has occurred to me that his case might be marginally stronger were it not for the fact that so many of these defenders of Confederate heritage arrive at the party arrayed in, well, swastikas.

Anyway, when Boss Tweet lost his shit a few days ago, he had recourse to his favorite medium, and began suggesting that the removal of these beautiful civic adornment must inevitably lead to the effigies of Washington and Jefferson being pulled down, since these were also slaveowners, and so there‘s absolutely no difference between Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson Davis, amirite?

Well actually no, you garish blot on the polity, you are not. Let’s ask someone who was a lot closer to both the Confederates’ and the Founders’ generations. I yield the floor to Alexander H. Stephens, Vice President of the CSA, who advanced the notion that the two groups held views philosophical views very much at odds with one another when it came to chattel slavery. Here is Stephens addressing a gathering in Savannah in March 1861, in an oration today known as the “Cornerstone Speech”:

The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the ‘rock upon which the old Union would split.’ He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away.

He goes on to draw a distinction between that woolly-minded generation and his own:

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.

As I mentioned earlier, I would rather that the objectionable monuments be removed, so to say, by due process rather than pulled own by excited crowds. While the CSA and the Third Reich were not equivalent—they merely each embodied (the latter, obviously, on the scale of modern mass industrial production) a profound human evil—the historical memory of each should properly be despised rather than celebrated. The “heritage” these statues glorify is an odious one, and its message is well understood today by the descendants of both the slaveholders and their slaves. Lunsford maintains that they honor the common soldier who fought to defend his country; I responded that the common soldiers of the Waffen SS should in that case also be abundantly memorialized, since they took the field, once the fortunes of war were running the other way, in defense of the Vaterland against the onslaught of the invading Red Army. “That’s different,” he huffed.

I’d as soon this chronic moral infection of the Republic’s hadn’t broken out yet again on my watch, and regard with some foreboding the damage the present episode might do before the fever abates, but perhaps we will rid ourselves of some of the pus as the sickness rages.

cordially,

I remember. Although I’ve known people who would disagree to the point, I daresay, of insisting that no German combatant from that conflict deserves a grave marker, there are inevitably military cemeteries full of Wehrmacht dead throughout the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, and I haven’t a problem with this myself. Reagan’s visit was, I think, merely tone-deaf (although profoundly so) rather than indicative of actual Nazi sympathies (I wouldn’t extend Trump the benefit of the doubt on this point any farther than I could spit a rat, as Douglas Adams once put it). Recall that Ross insists that the statues of Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Nathan Bedford Forrest, et cetera are to be understood as—well, I’ll let him speak for himself: “If I have any sympathy it is for the common soldier, who was lucky to own livestock, much less a slave, and who felt himself to be defending his country against invaders. And it is he who is represented by the monuments.” So, see, it only looks like a statue of Bloody Bill Anderson, but it’s really a celebration of the brave irregulars who fought for their country.

cordially,