Anti-Confederacy or Anti-Western
By Jack Kerwick
TownHall.com
A statue of Robert E. Lee is the last of four
statues commemorating the Confederacy that leftist
activists in New Orleans succeeded in bringing down
this past weekend.
All Confederate symbols are monuments to “white
supremacy,” the left assures us. This is the
justification for the campaign to erase them from
public view.
Pro-Confederate Southerners, however, have always
maintained that they have never been interested in
memorializing “supremacy” of any kind. Rather,
their symbols are expressions of a rich and storied
cultural history. Statues such as those of
Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee that were just
razed in the Big Easy are monuments to patriots and
heroes who were willing to forego all in order to
conserve that culture for future generations.
“Heritage, not Hate,” is how the pro-Confederate
South has been putting it for decades now.
And while the account standardly offered by
heritage-affirming Southerners is true as far as it
goes, the reality is that it does not go nearly far
enough.
The truth is that the attack on Southern cultural
symbols is an attack on Americansymbols.
Let’s be clear: Though the movement to eradicate all
open, public commemorations of Southerners who
fought for the Confederacy is anti-Confederacy, it
is not, ultimately, an anti-Confederate movement.
And though it most certainly is anti-Southern, it is
not, ultimately, anti-Southern.
In the last resort, the movement to strip the public
consciousness of any and all affection for the
Confederate heroes that sought to secede from the
Union is an anti-American movement.
Southern secessionists repudiated the Union. They
never repudiatedAmerica. More specifically, they
repudiated the presumed authority of a central
government that, they were confident, had exceeded
anything permitted to it by the Constitution.
But those Southerners who sided with the Confederacy
never rejected America. Quite the contrary,
for they saw in themselves the spirit of their
ancestors come alive again: Just as such estimable
Southerners as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson,
Patrick Henry, James Madison, and many more
sacrificed all so that Americans could secede from
the oppressive government of England, so too did
their posterity below the Mason-Dixon line “mutually
pledge” to one another their “Lives,” “Fortunes,”
and “Sacred Honor” so that they could secede from an
oppressive federal government.
Those who fought for the Confederate States
of America, like the act of secession itself, are as
American as the proverbial apple pie.
Confederate soldiers are
American soldiers. From at least the time of the
late 19th century, beginning at the close of the
Spanish-American War (in which, as in all American
wars, Southerners fought with distinction),
Confederate veterans began receiving recognition
that they
were American veterans. A few decades
later, through an act of Congress, they were endowed
with the same status as Union soldiers. By the
1930s, they were eligible to receive pension
benefits from the United States government, and in
the 1950s, the spouses and children of Confederate
veterans became just as eligible to receive these
benefits as their Union counterparts.
The demonization of Confederate veterans is nothing
more or less than the demonization of American
veterans.
The Confederates were American patriots. Never
has there been a group of Americans that so embodied
the Spirit of ’76, the love for liberty exemplified
by the country’s Founders. That there
were some Southern secessionists that had an
interest invested in preserving slavery is certain.
That they constituted, in the words of one
Confederate soldier whose letters were recovered, “a
very small minority” is equally certain.
Indeed, the vast majority of Confederate warriors,
like the majority of Southerners, did not own
slaves.
In fact, a number of eminent Confederate generals,
like, for example, General Lee, did not own slaves.
Lee had inherited seven or so slaves, but he freed
them long before the War Between the States erupted.
Not only, though, did neither Lee nor most of his
compatriots in Dixie care to defend slavery; they
didn’t even want to secede. Yet they viewed
secession as a “necessity,” as Jefferson Davis
characterized it in his inaugural address to the
newly formed confederacy, the only means available
for escaping the compact that the Northern states,
via the central government, had violated. Lee,
for one, remarked that unless the individual states
retained their sovereignty, their Constitutional
rights, “free government” itself would be no more
and the American government would become “aggressive
abroad and despotic at home.”
It is nothing short of a national disgrace that
American patriots have permitted the most arrogant
of activist-ideologues to wage a cultural-cleansing
campaign against the South. Mainstream
“conservative” talking heads and scribblers have
said little to nothing. Doubtless, their
neglect of this issue has something to do with their
belief that it is only Southerners who the left
seeks to demoralize and culturally-destroy.
But as I have tried showing, they couldn’t be more
wrong. The left knows this, even if Yankee
“conservative” commentators choose to ignore it.
The attack on Southern heritage is an attack on
American heritage. Lee, Davis, and other
gallant men that hailed from the South and who
fought in the Confederacy are easy targets at the
present moment precisely because both Southern and
Northern “conservatives” have failed miserably in
making this point.
Actually, even I—a white, Christian, heterosexual
man in his mid-40s who was born, raised, and
continues to reside in New Jersey—understates the
nature of the left’s campaign. The latter is
indeed an assault upon American heritage, but
America—or “AmeriKKKa,” as the enemies of all things
Confederacy have been calling it for 50 years—is
despised by the left precisely and only insofar as
they view it as the emblem par excellence of all
that they despise in Western civilization itself.
The campaign against the “white supremacy” of the
Confederacy is a campaign, ultimately, against the
“white supremacy” of Western civilization. It
is a war against the West. Attacks against
statues of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis are no
more attacks against Southerners than are attacks
against statues of Christopher Columbus exclusive
attacks against Italians.
From the standpoint of the left, the history of the
whole Western world is a history of “racism,” “white
supremacy,” “sexism,” “colonialism,” “imperialism,”
“homophobia,” “xenophobia,” “Islamophobia,” and any
and every other “ism” or “phobia” in the leftist’s
litany of cardinal moral offenses.
The militant left’s assault on the Confederacy is
one battle in a much larger war against the West.
From within its frame of reference, the only
difference between Southern Confederates and the
rest of the West is that the Confederate heroes are
currently more vulnerable prey. The logic of the
left’s vision is inexorable: All historical figures
of European ancestry who the cultural cleansers deem
insufficiently “progressive” must be, as best
possible, scrubbed from public memory.
Both Northern and Southern patriots alike had better
realize this.