[cout]

I had a similar internal response when I read that sentence. I could easily interpret it as claiming that people are pulling down Confederate statues because they are a little sick of them rather than because of what the statues represent.

[jariel]

Try to grasp that 'what they represent' is maybe not what you think they do.

The Washington Monument was built by slaves, in the name of a man who owned slaves, in a nation full of slaves. Does it represent slavery? Or that era?

Even though the Civil war was to a great extent fought over slavery - it was fundamentally states vs. states. If it were really about slavery, it very well have been 'sub groups' vs. 'sub groups' all over the US. There were economic jealousies as well.

The statues are symbols of the ancestors of those who were living there, heroes to one side - and that's mostly it.

They are arguably problematically offensive to some, but it's unlikely they are 'symbols of racism' in the sense that this is what White Southerners are inspired by.

If rednecks were driving by, aspiring for the days when they 'put those blacks back in their place' - I would say raze them all to the ground. But that's not remotely it.

What Southerners see in those monuments is just more or less what regular Americans seen in the Washington monument. That's it. Pride, while glossing over the uglier stuff.

[santoshalper]

I agree that the vast majority of people who display the confederate flag or want to protect confederate monuments are not specifically inspired by overt racism or support for slavery. I know this because I grew up in the South and many of my friends and family members held warm feelings for the confederacy. These people were not monsters and they certainly did not believe themselves to be racists, though many of them held a number of racists beliefs individually.

That said, I think there is a clear and obvious difference between the Washington monument, which was built by slaves during a time of slavery, and the Confederate flag - a symbol of a movement which was fundamentally about slavery. Confederates betrayed and killed hundreds of thousands of their countrymen for the purpose of protecting slavery.

Do you believe that the US Civil War wasn't really about slavery? I encourage you to read the declarations of succession from states like South Carolina (https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp). The idea that the Civil War was not really about slavery, but about "states rights" is revisionist history designed to make the Confederacy seem more sympathetic. The US Civil War was 100.0% about the right to keep slaves and the Confederate States' willingness to murder their countrymen to do so.

[jariel]

Yes, I agree the civil war was mostly about slavery from a geopolitical perspective - but it was not mostly about slavery for those involved.

Soldiers in the South were not going to kill the Yankees so that the 5% richest among them could keep slaves.

Have a look here [1]. This is a google image search for 'Confederate Recruiting Posters'.

There are dozens of images there and zero of them even mentions slavery. Not one.

This is a 'a war about slavery' and yet 'slavery' is not even mentioned as part of the motivation to get soldiers to actually fight?

Once one 'nation' is fighting with another, the call to duty is tribal: it's 'the south' (i.e. 'us' ) vs. 'the north' (i.e. 'them')

Finally - the 'Confederacy was about slavery' but the 'early US was not' is not a very strong argument if in factual reality both the early US and the Confederate were 'political movements ultimately based on slavery'.

I accept there is a difference, but I'm wary that the implied difference is meaningful at all: both Washington's America, and the Confederacy were states fundamentally dependent on slavery.

In that vein, it's reasonable to contemplate the Washington monument in a similar vein to how statues of the South are contextualized.

It's more than a little hypocritical to hold one monument in perhaps the highest moral regard, the literal 'centre point' of the nation ... while the others are broadly condemned.

From an outsiders perspective (I'm not American, but lived there for many years) - it's really obvious.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=confederate+recruiting+poste...