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Conservatives Should Feel No Investment in Confederate Monuments
National Review ^ | June 19th 2020 | RICH LOWRY

Posted on 06/20/2020 2:51:52 PM PDT by Ennis85

In the wave of cancellations sweeping America, Confederate statues have been particularly hard hit.

They have been graffitied, assaulted, and torn down, while authorities rush to remove them.

For his part, President Donald Trump has been a steadfast defender of the statues and other forms of recognition of the Confederacy. He has come out in favor of preserving the names of military bases named after Confederate generals and pointedly said that we should build on our heritage rather than tear it down.

Conservatives tend to think the same way. They reflexively oppose politically correct campaigns to destroy anything giving offense.

They fear where the slippery slope of woke iconoclasm will lead — first it’s Jefferson Davis, ultimately George Washington.

They value tradition and worry we are trashing part of our history.

This impulse, though, is a mistake. Confederate statues and symbols deserve to be reevaluated, and often mothballed.

n the wave of cancellations sweeping America, Confederate statues have been particularly hard hit.

They have been graffitied, assaulted, and torn down, while authorities rush to remove them.

For his part, President Donald Trump has been a steadfast defender of the statues and other forms of recognition of the Confederacy. He has come out in favor of preserving the names of military bases named after Confederate generals and pointedly said that we should build on our heritage rather than tear it down.

Conservatives tend to think the same way. They reflexively oppose politically correct campaigns to destroy anything giving offense.

They fear where the slippery slope of woke iconoclasm will lead — first it’s Jefferson Davis, ultimately George Washington.

They value tradition and worry we are trashing part of our history.

This impulse, though, is a mistake. Confederate statues and symbols deserve to be reevaluated, and often mothballed.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: blacklivesmatter; civilunrest; civilwar; cluelessauthor; confederates; culturalrevolution; defeatedarmy; itsnotaboutthewar; lowry; richlowry; southlost; statues; thefourolds
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"The statues are an unnecessary affront to black citizens, who shouldn’t have to see defenders of chattel slavery put on a pedestal, literally."

As are statues of Jefferson Davis and George Washington who he's mentioned to many black people, why the investment in those and not other slave owners?

1 posted on 06/20/2020 2:51:52 PM PDT by Ennis85
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To: Ennis85

Another virtue-signalling book-burner.

Yawn.


2 posted on 06/20/2020 2:53:58 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum (Who could have guessed the Communist Revolution would arrive disguised as the common cold?)
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To: Ennis85

they’ doing this to erase Democrat history, and Democrat guilt


3 posted on 06/20/2020 2:54:07 PM PDT by Steely Tom ([Seth Rich] == [the Democrats' John Dean])
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To: Ennis85

They fear where the slippery slope of woke iconoclasm will lead — first it’s Jefferson Davis, ultimately George Washington.


A statue of George Washington was torn down in Portland.

The Berkeley Unified School District has begun the process of deleting the names of George Washington School and Thomas Jefferson School.

This article is out of date already with the idea that they are only after Confederate monuments.


4 posted on 06/20/2020 2:54:52 PM PDT by Dilbert San Diego
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To: Ennis85

Elihu Yale, after whom the university was named, was a slave-trader.

Shouldn’t Yale be renamed Malcom 10 university? Or something?


5 posted on 06/20/2020 2:55:18 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum (Who could have guessed the Communist Revolution would arrive disguised as the common cold?)
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To: Ennis85

It seems National Review has outlasted its usefulness.


6 posted on 06/20/2020 2:56:00 PM PDT by Demian
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To: Ennis85

Essentially, Lowry advises everyone to just wave the white flag, get some knee pads, and start shining the shoes of riotious blacks. No thank you.


7 posted on 06/20/2020 2:56:04 PM PDT by euram
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To: Ennis85

How about Senator Byrd... virtue signalling hypocrites and while we’re at it where’s the disgusting outrage of our liberals add farrakhan’s anti-Semitism oh this is Saul so stupid and so stalinist


8 posted on 06/20/2020 2:57:08 PM PDT by Recovering Ex-hippie (n)
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To: Ennis85
Appeasement does not work with those folks.
9 posted on 06/20/2020 2:57:09 PM PDT by eclectic (Liberalism is a mental disorder)
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To: Ennis85

Never Trumper Globalist appease and run strategy .
These losers need to go away .
When the French left show more courage and strength about defending history then you are a Dead
cause .


10 posted on 06/20/2020 2:57:10 PM PDT by ncalburt (Gop DC Globalists)
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To: Ennis85

National Review 2024: “The Conservative case for dynamiting Mount Rushmore”


11 posted on 06/20/2020 2:57:51 PM PDT by Shadow44
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To: Ennis85

NR (deliberately) misses the point again.

These thugs have no right to take down ANY of our cherished monuments and memorabilia. It’s not about 150-year-old Civil War. it’s about taking down America. DON’T LET THEM!!!


12 posted on 06/20/2020 2:58:07 PM PDT by Jim W N (MAGA by restoring the Gospel of the Grace of Christ and our Free Constitutional Republic!)
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To: Ennis85

I’m no expert on the civil war but I’ve studied enough to know that the people that fought on both sides forged the nation that we live in today. There’s was a true sacrifice, not the faux woke sacrifice of today. We remember the heroes of the Confederacy not because they fought to retain their peculiar institution but because without them we cannot understand the full measure of the horror of the Civil War or slavery.


13 posted on 06/20/2020 2:59:08 PM PDT by turfmann
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To: Ennis85

First they came for the Confederate Statues....

I warned about this years ago, even though I am no fan of the Confederacy.


14 posted on 06/20/2020 2:59:20 PM PDT by dfwgator (Endut! Hoch Hech!)
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To: Demian

Gave N.R up years ago


15 posted on 06/20/2020 3:00:11 PM PDT by manc ( If they want so called marriage equality then they should support polygamy too.)
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To: Ennis85

Conservatives have an investment in history, because that’s where our truth lies. It may be good, it may be bad, but it’s real.

Most of the so-called “Confederate” monuments are pretty innocuous commemorations of the Southern dead (remember, the Civil War was fought entirely in the South), and even the later ones from the 1920s result from the fact that, during Reconstruction, families were not even allowed to commemorate their dead. The lost cause? Yes, but they admit it was lost, and even if they were racists, the monuments are mostly innocuous.

Build on this moment. The reason President Eisenhower in 1951 permitted the VA to provide markers for members of the CSA is that he wanted reconciliation.

Nobody - black or white - gains a thing by having a monument taken down. And of course, the net has widened, so virtually anybody who ever lived prior to 1980 or so is guilty of some infraction and must be erased. Naturally, including the founders of our country...the most evil place in the world, apparently, where black and non-white people have the highest standard of living in the world.

But it is imperative on all of us that we maintain our collective real history, good or bad, and I think this is the job of conservatives.


16 posted on 06/20/2020 3:00:18 PM PDT by livius
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To: Ennis85

Lowry is embarrassingly out of touch. They ARE destroying Washington, Jefferson, and Francis Scott Key today.

Some sports team or arena announced no more National Anthem before games.

This is WAR. They are working hard to provoke Trump (and patriots everywhere) because they know they are on safe territory in Democrat cities and states.


17 posted on 06/20/2020 3:00:40 PM PDT by ProtectOurFreedom
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To: Ennis85

That’s the street-fighting mentality that the National Review is famous for...(snark)


18 posted on 06/20/2020 3:00:46 PM PDT by BookmanTheJanitor
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To: Ennis85

“Conservatives Should Feel No Investment in Confederate Monuments...”

But we do little Richie.


19 posted on 06/20/2020 3:00:53 PM PDT by Bonemaker (invictus maneo)
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To: E. Pluribus Unum

Brown University is named after a family, some of whom were also slave traders.


20 posted on 06/20/2020 3:00:59 PM PDT by Joe 6-pack (Qui me amat, amat et canem meum.)
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