Posted on 06/22/2020 12:39:05 PM PDT by Borges
In recent weeks, participants in demonstrations against police violence in the United States have demanded the removal of monuments to Confederate leaders who waged an insurrection to defend slavery during the American Civil War of 1861-1865.
But the justifiable demand for the removal of monuments to these defenders of racial inequality has been unfairly accompanied by attacks against memorials to those who led the Civil War that ended slavery and the American Revolution, which, in upholding the principle of equality, for the first time placed a question mark on the institution of slavery.
Last Sunday, a statue of Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, was torn down in Portland, Oregon, followed four days later by a statue to George Washington, who led the forces which defeated the British during the American Revolution.
On Friday, protesters in San Francisco knocked over a statue of Ulysses S. Grant, who commanded the Union to victory in the Civil War and suppressed the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction.
Now a social media campaign has been launched to see the removal of the famous Emancipation Memorial statue in Washington, D.C., which depicts Abraham Lincoln standing above a kneeling slave who has been freed. The statue, erected in 1876, was in fact paid for by freed slaves. Frederick Douglass gave the oration at its dedication.
No one can object to the removal of monuments to the leaders of the Confederacy, who dedicated their lives to the rejection of the thesis that “all men are created equal.” These figures sought to “wring their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces,” in the words of Lincoln’s second inaugural address.
The monuments to the leaders of the seceded states were erected in a period of political reaction following the end of Reconstruction, with the aim of legitimizing the Confederacy as part of the “lost cause” school of historiography, which denied the revolutionary character of the American Civil War.
But the removal of monuments to the leaders of America’s revolutionary and civil wars has no justification. These men led great social struggles against the very forces of reaction that justified racial oppression as an incarnation of the fundamental inequality of human beings.
It is entirely possible that those who participated in the desecration of monuments to the leaders of the two American revolutions were not conscious of what they were doing. If that is the case, then the blame must be placed on those who incited these actions.
In the months preceding these events, the New York Times, speaking for dominant sections of the Democratic political establishment, launched an effort to discredit both the American Revolution and the Civil War.
In the New York Times’ 1619 Project, the American Revolution was presented as a war to defend slavery, and Abraham Lincoln was cast as a garden variety racist.
Historical clarification of some of the major historical figures involved is necessary.
homas Jefferson was the author of what is arguably the most famous revolutionary sentence in world history: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” That declaration has been inscribed on the banner of every fight for equality ever since 1776. When Jefferson formulated it, he was crystalizing a new way of thinking based on the principle of natural human equality. The rest of the preamble to the Declaration of Independence spells out in searing language the natural right of people to revolution.
The American Revolution delivered a powerful impulse in that direction that led to the French Revolution of 1789 and the greatest slave revolt in history, the Haitian Revolution of 1791, in which slaves liberated themselves and threw off French colonial domination.
George Washington was the commander of the Continental Army in the American Revolution (1775-1783), in which the 13 colonies asserted their independence from their British colonial masters. Washington, in a decision that electrified the world, left behind his military post and returned to private life, helping to institute in practice the separation of the civilian from military power in the republic.
Abraham Lincoln must rank as one of the greatest figures of modern history. The leader of the North, or the Union, in the Civil War, his historical purpose was revealed over the course of that war to be the destruction of what contemporaries called “the Slave Power.” Lincoln saw that struggle through to a victory in April of 1865, only days before he was martyred to the cause of human liberty. The world grieved at his death. This was so in both the North and South, and especially among the freed slaves. “The world only discovered him a hero after he had fallen a martyr,” Marx wrote.
Ulysses S. Grant was a hero of the Civil War whose stature was second only to that of Lincoln. Prior to his ascension to lead the entire military effort in 1864, the cause of the Union was hampered by generals who opposed the emancipatory impulse of the Civil War.
Grant and his trusted friend General William Tecumseh Sherman recognized that to defeat the South required a war for the destruction of slavery, root and branch. “I can’t spare this man. He fights,” Lincoln said of Grant. In the White House, Grant was overwhelmed by the force of capitalism unleashed by the Civil War, but he defended the freed slaves and suppressed the Ku Klux Klan. After he retired from the presidency in 1877, Grant toured Europe where throngs of workers attended his public events and speeches.
The attacks on the monuments to these men were pioneered by the increasingly frenzied attempt by the Democratic Party and the New York Times to racialize American history, to create a narrative in which the history of mankind is reduced to the history of racial struggle. This campaign has produced a pollution of democratic consciousness, which meshes entirely with the reactionary political interests driving it.
It is worth noting that the one institution seemingly immune from this purge is the Democratic Party, which served as the political wing of the Confederacy and, subsequently, the KKK.
This filthy historical legacy is matched only by the Democratic Party’s contemporary record in supporting wars that, as a matter of fact, primarily targeted nonwhites. Democrats supported the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and under Obama destroyed Libya and Syria. The New York Times was a leading champion and propagandist for all of these wars.
The New York Times and the Democratic Party seek to confuse and disorient the democratic sentiments of masses of people entering into political struggle against the capitalist system and its repressive forces within the state because they know that the growing multiracial, multinational and multiethnic movement of the working class will take place in direct opposition to their own politics.
There are many people involved in the taking down of these statues who do not understand the political implications of what they are doing. However, ignorance is not an excuse. Actions have an objective significance. Those who attack the American Revolution help contemporary reaction.
‘It was legal and would have remained legal in the USA but for the war.’
o why did the eleven states of the confederacy secede, and why did four of those eleven issue elaborate declarations of cause specifying the retention of slavery being threatened...? I mean, if it was legal and would have remained so absent the war, what were the secessionists afraid of...?
At least you got this part right. Most people think all 11 states issued these statements, but it was at most 4.
But I have three possible answers to your point.
1. Because they were somehow misled into believing that slavery was under a threat of being abolished if they remained.
2. Because claiming slavery as a cause for separation made separation legal on the grounds of breach of contract. (This idea was put forth by conservative columnist Paul Craig Roberts.)
3. To disguise their real reason for doing it because that would have provoked an overwhelming desire to stop them.
Which particular one would you like to focus on? I personally favor #3.
It could also be all of the above.
They just want to tear down monuments of white people.
You don't have a clue to what is really going on do you? Or maybe you are a just a pathetic sniveler who thinks if you cuck enough they will leave you alone.
Are you talking to me or the people who wrote this? Because they aren’t here.
1) Yes.
2) Then, oops, you missed it. Already pulled down and kicked to rubble by mob. People who read a statement honoring the officers at the ceremony are brutally beaten and sent to the emergency room. Can't get a job again "You aren't hiring that racist, are you?"--Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to employer.
SORRY! I thought it said honoring the police officers.
The people who wrote the article. I assume you didn’t mean for this to be your writing?
SORRY!! I thought it said honoring police officers. I take back the mistaken post.
Missed the word “murderers”. So sorry.
I did not.
Yep. Slavery simply was not threatened in the USA in 1860. Nobody waged a war to defend something that did not need defending. If anybody thought it did, the first thing Lincoln and the Northern dominated Congress offered was slavery effectively forever by express constitutional amendment.
Bingo. We Southerners have been saying this ever since Political Correctness first appeared in the early 90s. I know I’ve said it since then.....ie that they’d go after Washington and Jefferson and the Stars and Stripes next. You didn’t have to be Nostradamus to see where this was going.
“Conservatives” who were willing to appease the Leftist screech mobs by throwing Southerners and their history under the bus were only empowering the mob and embittering people who otherwise would have stood with them when the mob came for the historical figures and symbols they value. Idiots.
4 states issued declarations of causes. 3 of those 4 listed reasons (tariffs, unequal federal government expenditures, malicious refusal to provide border security) other than just that the Northern states had violated the compact by refusing to enforce the fugitive slave clause of the constitution. The Upper South seceded only after Lincoln chose war. They obviously were not seceding over slavery.
What is the first thing Lincoln and the Northern Dominated Congress offered? The Corwin Amendment which would have expressly protected slavery in the constitution. Given there were 15 states that still had slavery, and it takes 3/4s of the states to pass an amendment, it would have taken 45 states to vote in favor of overturning the Corwin Amendment. ie it could not be revoked without the consent of the states that still had slavery. Everybody understood this.
Yet, the original 7 seceding states turned down the offer of the Corwin Amendment as the price of their return. Obviously, protection of slavery was not their primary concern.
I’m convinced it was reason #2. Listing the Northern states’ violation of the Constitution was a pretext. It provided them a legal excuse to do what the wanted to do anyway - become independent, set their own trade policies and stop sending so much money North in tribute to others.
With lower tariffs, the British and French could afford more of their cash crops and they would also pay lower prices for manufactured goods than they were paying. They would also not see the additional money from those tariffs paying for infrastructure projects and corporate subsidies for others as had been the case up to 1860.
The vast majority of all wars in human history have been about money. Governments almost never admit that’s what they are fighting for but in the end its obvious they are. It was no different here. Plenty saw it.
” If it be not slavery, where lies the partition of the interests that has led at last to actual separation of the Southern from the Northern States? …Every year, for some years back, this or that Southern state had declared that it would submit to this extortion only while it had not the strength for resistance. With the election of Lincoln and an exclusive Northern party taking over the federal government, the time for withdrawal had arrived … The conflict is between semi-independent communities [in which] every feeling and interest [in the South] calls for political partition, and every pocket interest [in the North] calls for union. So the case stands, and under all the passion of the parties and the cries of battle lie the two chief moving causes of the struggle. Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this as of many other evils … the quarrel between North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel.” – Charles Dickens
So their cause was based on a lie? Good to know.
Now , why do you suppose that is...?
Expansion of it was.
Nobody waged a war to defend something that did not need defending.
The Southern leaders of the time would disagree with you.
If anybody thought it did, the first thing Lincoln and the Northern dominated Congress offered was slavery effectively forever by express constitutional amendment.
Said offer being made after the Southern states had seceded and after they adopted a constitution that protected slavery to an extent never dreamed of by Thomas Corwin.
Exactly right.
It's still gonna eat them. :)
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