The Current Status of Confederate Statues in America: A Situation Report

Robert E. Lee statues and those of other Confederate soldiers are coming down across the south.

They are coming down at the instigation of Lefty agitators who argue that the statues honor the Confederate soldiers who fought to maintain slavery.

I do not want to get into the complexities of the civil war here. I am more curious about the Lefty argument to take the statues down even if we grant them that the war was fully about slavery.

They are certainly not making their pull the statues down demands from a libertarian perspective. Harvard Professor Jefferey Miron comes close in making that
libertarian perspective. Harvard Professor Jefferey Miron comes close in making that argument:

 Why should a city, state, or federal government put statues in public parks?  Doing so addresses no plausible market failure, while using taxpayers funds and, as demonstrated tragically over the past few weeks, generates controversy, polarization, and violence. Thus governments should take down all statues, regardless of their political implications.

This is not “erasing” history but instead leaving it where it belongs, in the hands of private actors and mechanisms.  Historians, textbook authors, universities, learned societies, the History Channel, and many other individuals and organizations can all present their own views of history and battle for the hearts and minds of the public.  Government statues are government putting its thumb on the scale, which is one step down the slippery slope of thought control.

He slips from pure libertarianism only by introducing the shaky concept of "market failure."

But it appears what Lefties are doing once again is attempting a sort of thought control.

They block conservatives from speaking, they "demand" the firing of conservative employees and now they argue for the taking down of imagery that they dislike. Like the imagery or not, their demands are continuing steps on the thought control road.

It is remarkable that they are doing so in the case of the statues. In their full-on attempt at total thought control, they have lost all creativity.

What could be easier to mock than statues of Confederate soldiers who LOST a war?

Indeed, Confederate General Stonewall Jackson was shot by one of his own soldiers and died just days later.

This was a bloody horrific F-Troop before living color television.

Has the Left lost all creativity?

Can the Left only move in the direction of thought control?

We are told that most of the Confederate statues were not erected in the aftermath of the Civil War but during the Jim Crow period as a way to intimidate blacks.

Well, gee, how did that intimidation work out?

If the Left was creative and not fully obsessed with thought control, they would leave the damn Confederate statues alone and buy small parcels of land in the South and put up their own statues.

How about one of Michael Jackson doing the moonwalk on Lee's coffin?

And maybe one of Tina Turner on Jackson's coffin?

The tear down the Confederate statue call of the Left is just plain confusing/

They want the statues torn down because of the slavery in the south and the Confederate support of that slavery.  But to be anti-slavery (a good thing) is about freeing men from control by other men.

There is nothing good about control, be it thought or physical. by others. And, yet, the teardown the Confederate statue effort is about control of imagery (thought). And, I point out again, quite wacky imagery since the Confederates lost the war. Who the hell puts up statues to losers?

Perhaps the Left can put up even another statue. A Confederate soldier shooting by accident Stonewall Jackson, with a tiny-fingered Trump holding a megaphone to the side shouting at them "Losers!'

It appears to me that the Left in calling for the removal of these statues is more in line with the tactics of Confederate generals than they understand.

We are told, for example, that Lee was a great military tactician but that he may have lost the war because of weak strategy.

Dan Zeiser writes:

Lee, second in his West Point class, an engineering officer, a career military officer, truly was a great general. As a tactician, he was head and shoulders above Grant... Good defensively, Lee was even better on the offensive. He was bold and decisive, a calculating gambler. Can anyone who has studied the battle of Chancellorsville deny it? Splitting his army on several occasions, he surprised his opponents and won the day. Lee was a master of the holding attack, a tactic George Marshall would later instill as the only tactic taught at the Army War College prior to World War II...

Lee’s major flaw, though, was as a strategist. In a word, he was not. His concern was northern Virginia and nothing else. Throughout the war, he resisted attempts by Jefferson Davis to draw forces from the Army of Northern Virginia to reinforce the western armies. Only once did it happen, when Longstreet went west and fought at Chattanooga, but not without Lee’s efforts to stop it. He also opposed attempts to make him commander-in-chief of Southern forces until it was too late for it to be of any benefit.

Additionally and most importantly, he failed to realize that the Confederacy’s best hope of survival was to hold out. Since the South had a lack of fighting men compared to the North, its best hope was to keep casualties to a minimum, to live to fight another day. Lee’s offensive tactics ensured the Army of Northern Virginia sustained greater casualties than it could afford. Had he fought defensively most of the time, Lee would have saved soldiers who could fight again, perhaps outlasting the North’s will to win.

The Left has made a great tactical move of its own by calling for the statues to be taken down. It is hard to argue in favor of Confederates but most people know at a gut-level something else is going on. It is a strategic blunder, of the enormity of Lee's blunders, to attempt this type of thought control. It builds resistance.

The election of the very flawed Donald Trump as president is an indication of the resistance to the cultural Marxist, social justice warrior, tactical thought control.

There will never be a full-out thought control win by the Left. It is an attempt to win against nature.

Slavery didn't survive, the Jim Crow laws didn't survive and neither will Lefty thought control.

 -RW