Monuments to Only One Side

The “contextualization” and removal of Confederate monuments is part of an ongoing process to change the narrative about the War for Southern Independence.

How so, you might ask, as most people do not get their history from monuments.

This is true, but monuments are tourist attractions and do have a lasting impact on the cultural legacy of a people and a place.

You see, to the Righteous Cause Mythologist, Confederate monuments represent defiance.

They must be removed to preserve their vision of what America “should be,” a nationalized, centralized, “United State” centered on a New England vision of the “American people.”

Charles Sumner was an active proponent of this message in the 1850s, and as Susan Mary Grant has pointed out in her book, North Over South, a Northern vision of what it meant to be an “American” became the most important legacy of the War.

Don’t let these modern Righteous Cause dopes fool you into believing that somehow the South really won the War.

That would have been news to anyone who lived through the War and Reconstruction, and even into the 20th century.

This is gaslighting of the highest order.

Virtually every major historian of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries pushed a narrative that the South was wrong in pursing secession and blamed slavery for the War. They respected Southern valor and heroism, but considered Lincoln and the Republicans to be on the “right side of history.”

Even Southerner Woodrow Wilson said as much.

And if the South invented racism and segregation, that would be news to blacks who were segregated in Northern rail cars in the 1840s.

Righteous Cause Mythologists need Confederate monuments removed because they are an obstacle to their power over the historical narrative, mainly that Southerners were nothing but racist traitors who deserved to be punished.

They had no honor, no valor, and are not worthy of respect.

Which is why tearing them downs leaves only one side to the story.

That is what these people want. Even some typically anti-Southern conservatives are finally starting to get it.

I discuss Monuments to Only One Side on Episode 802 of The Brion McClanahan Show.