This is what you think the monuments in question represent?
What do you think they represent?
Do you have no idea what we mean by the Cult of the Lost Cause? Or the UDC?
A fringe ideology at best, not shared by any majority. You're always going to have conspiracy theorists. Not getting the relevance. Care to expound?
AGAIN?
Sigh. If only people would read the first time.
Okay once again, who is the UDC and what's their role in this?
Now that's mainly about the schoolbooks but they were also the driving force behind suddenly throwing up all these monuments to glorify the Confederacy -- the vast majority of them having been erected in the first two decades of the 20th century. Look them up, see the pattern.
The thrust of the statue craze, as well as the schoolbooks, was to
redefine what the Civil War was about, absolving the Confederacy for its reprehensible human rights values and pretending they never existed by (a) selling the whole campaign as a "noble" fight for "states rights" (despite every seceding state's written declaration that it was about slavery and racism); (b) selling the actual history of slavery as a "beneficial" institution that the enslaved "enjoyed", not at all the mass-scale abuse it was; and (c) getting this story told to the public via those schoolbooks and those statues. To the latter end they made sure said statues and monuments were prominently placed in central areas like city halls, courthouses, town squares, etc. That's why those municipalities are today removing them from
public property. Obviously they didn't have TV or internet in 1910, but they could put up structures where the maximum number of people would see them and be indoctrinated with this revised history. They did this prolifically throughout the United States specifically to retell this story in their own terms (how many Civil War battles do you know that happened in Montana?)
And if you doubt their motives consider that the same UDC affixed a plaque on a building at 205 West Madison Street in Pulaski Tennessee (in 1917) memorializing that building as the birthplace of the original Ku Klux Klan, feeling that the "Birth of a Nation" film of two years earlier hadn't given Pulaski its "due", and also commissioned a sculptor to carve a huge relief carving on Stone Mountain Georgia, birthplace of the revived Klan, glorifying Confederate generals (that sculptor was a Klan member, Gutzon Borglum, who then went on to carve Mount Rushmore).
"Birth of a Nation" of course was another product of the same Lost Cause propaganda, as was "The Clansman", the 1905 book-then-theater play on which it was based, as were the dressings of "Gone With the Wind" later. The same period of the absolute nadir of race relations in this country when Jim Crow dictated life in the South and elsewhere, when major league baseball entered its "gentlemen's agreement" to ban blacks from baseball starting in 1894 (notice they never say Jackie Robinson was the "first" black MLB player, because he wasn't), when lynchings were rampant social events sporting postcards and burnt body parts as souvenirs, when race riots spilled blood nationwide in response especially the "Red Summer" of 1919 and the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921 when an entire black neighborhood was wiped out including firebombing from the air, when the locally-Southern Ku Klux Klan was re-started (1915) and grew to a membership of millions from coast to coast --- ALL of these related aftereffects of this massive propaganda campaign.
THAT is what these statue/monument removals are about. Again, the first one to go in New Orleans was a marker commemorating how a vigilante white supremacist group called the White League effected a coup in the city government after a biracial council was duly elected. That monument (an obelisk with a plaque) stood at the foot of Canal Street, literally the busiest spot the city has to this day, for decades reminding the black population who was really in charge.
THAT is why municipalities are removing propaganda transmitters. Because they recognize them for what they are and what their purpose is. It's put well here:
And if you remember, this re-examination began when the state of South Carolina --- also the site of the beginning of the Civil War and the site of the first talk of secession as far back as 1828 with the Nullification Crisis --- took the Stars and Bars flag down from its statehouse, as a charged symbol of that same revisionistic mentality. That was the state's statement in response to one of its own citizens, Dylann Roof, trying to start a "race war" because he had bought into all that shit.
Further reading: Lost Cause of the Confederacy
or not.
