A Confederate monument was torn down at UNC Chapel Hill this week, and many are angry about it. In this episode, I discuss the controversy surrounding the removal of the monument, and why I think it should stay in place.
00:01:17.600And I still don't think we can lump all Confederate monuments together.
00:01:20.600I think we have to take it on a case-by-case basis.
00:01:23.200And there are several problems with the precedent that we're setting here and that has been said over the last couple of years when it comes to these monuments, not the least of which is how unevenly the precedent is applied.
00:01:36.780There are many monuments in America that may be reasonably considered offensive because they commemorate bad people or they commemorate people who represented bad things or both in some cases.
00:01:50.460And the argument against Confederate monuments, I guess, is that they fought for a bad thing, which is slavery.
00:01:57.000Now, of course, everyone agrees in modern America that slavery is a bad thing.
00:02:02.520Not everyone agrees from a historical perspective that it's necessarily exactly accurate to say that the Confederates fought primarily for slavery.
00:02:12.000I'm not going to really get into that discussion.
00:02:13.720It's a different discussion about the real causes of the Civil War and everything.
00:02:18.240I think anyone who's done even a little bit of reading understands that it's certainly not – it's at least not quite as simple as that.
00:02:24.700Now, there are those who argue that it was straightforwardly a war over slavery.
00:02:29.380Others will point out that slavery was only turned into the reason for the war about midway through.
00:02:34.660It was a political decision made by Lincoln when he began to see that Europe may come to the aid of the South, and he saw that, and that's when the Emancipation Proclamation came.
00:02:44.400And the Emancipation Proclamation was a political document that had no actual effect and did nothing at all except politically because it was written specifically to free slaves in the states that Lincoln no longer had any control over while allowing states that he did control to keep their slaves.
00:03:03.660So, again, it was just a political document, and this idea that it was a war over slavery, something happened halfway through.
00:03:11.580Going into the war, Lincoln made it clear that he did not want to fight a war over slavery, and if he could keep the union together and keep slavery, he would do that.
00:03:19.720He also made it clear while he was running for president that he did not believe in equality for black and white people.
00:03:28.140He did not believe that black people were equal to white people, so he was a racist himself.
00:03:32.060Now, all of these things are, you know, these are all relevant, but let's put all that to the side.
00:03:36.920But what I don't think can be denied is that several of the men who've had their monuments torn down, especially Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, some others, these particular men, let's just talk about Jackson and Lee for a second, these were men of high moral character and great personal courage who did not themselves believe that they were fighting for slavery.
00:03:59.400Both men opposed slavery personally, as did plenty of other Southerners, though I think Lee's wife did own slaves, which is true.
00:04:08.660General Grant's wife also owned slaves.
00:04:10.740You saw that in the North as well, which is another reason, which is another complicating factor when you think about, well, did the people in the North, the Northern soldiers especially, did they think that they were marching down into the South to fight against slavery?
00:04:24.220And I think the answer in most cases is no, and we kind of can see that the answer is no, because some of their generals actually owned slaves.
00:04:33.900But the point is that they, you know, guys like Jackson Lee, they felt obliged to fight on the side of their home states.
00:04:45.120You can say that they were wrong about that, that they were mistaken, they made the wrong choice, they were blinded by loyalty to families and homes and whatever.
00:04:52.360But if you paint them all as slobbering racists, or if you suggest that Jackson and Lee were fighting because they really wanted to keep black people enslaved, well, then it's going to be clear that you've just never read a history book, because that's just not accurate.
00:05:07.580The interesting thing is that both Lee and Jackson were admired by the North and the South during the time of the Civil War.
00:05:18.760The men who marched down into Virginia to kill Confederates still had a greater respect for some of the Confederate officers than we do today, which is kind of interesting.
00:05:28.000I mean, these guys had a much greater reason to hate those men than we do, and yet they didn't hate them nearly as much.
00:05:35.580And I do think when you're looking at a guy like Robert E. Lee, you do have to look within the context of the time.
00:05:42.380This was a war hero, a man that was respected, as I said, across the country before the Civil War.
00:05:47.100The federal government comes to him and wants to put him in charge of the army.
00:05:51.260But from Lee's perspective, as a Virginia man, if he does that, even though he opposed secession and he was morally opposed to slavery, but if he were to take this job offer from the federal government, it means that he will be leading troops into his home state, into his home, taking up arms against his friends, neighbors, and even his own sons.
00:06:13.560So, for him, it's a choice between the federal government or his family and his home and his country.
00:06:22.720Now, what we have to understand is that back in those days, especially in the South, you consider, when you talked about your country, when a guy said, my country, what he meant most of the time was his state.
00:06:35.800In the early days of the United States, people, especially in the South, identified much more with their state than they did with the country.
00:06:45.160They saw the country as this collection of states, but they looked at their state as their actual home and their country and what they were most loyal to.
00:06:54.740We don't look at it like that now, but it's kind of hard to say they were wrong for seeing it that way.
00:06:59.760I would argue that they were actually much more in the spirit of what was intended when the country was founded, where it was never really intended that people would necessarily identify with the federal government or have any great loyalty to it.
00:07:14.860People were more loyal to their actual homes because they were tied to their homes.
00:07:31.600And that's what guys like, so someone like Robert E. Lee, he had to make that choice between, in his mind, it was between his home and the federal government.
00:07:44.220And then he proceeded to fight with great brilliance and dignity, always outnumbered, always outmanned, always outgunned, and yet winning battle after battle with courage and tenacity.
00:08:34.680And it really just depends on the situation.
00:08:39.060But I do think we need to try to develop a little bit of a more nuanced and mature and historically accurate perspective on that period in our history, which I think many of us simply don't have.
00:08:54.740Be that as it may, the argument is that all of these monuments must come down because the monuments represent slavery.
00:09:04.420Whether or not the individuals who actually fought for the South meant to or wanted to personally fight for slavery, and many of them had no such intention.
00:09:45.120I think we can agree, or should agree, that they don't deserve monuments either.
00:09:51.760We would all be kind of upset if animal rights activists erected a monument to Adolf Hitler on the basis that Adolf Hitler was himself a proponent of animal rights, which he was, or environmentalism or whatever.
00:10:06.140So it seems that the precedent is that only decent people who fought for decent things can have statues.
00:10:22.300It has been open season on the indecent and offensive monuments only so long as those are monuments to 19th century white guys from the American South.
00:10:36.620If we're going to do this thing, if we're really going to start purging the offensive monuments on the basis that I've just mentioned here, then I think we have to do it all.
00:10:47.300It doesn't make sense to focus especially and only on these Confederate monuments.
00:10:52.700If we do it so selectively, then the selective nature of this purging will lead people, myself included, to suspect that there is a specifically left-wing ideological motivation behind this outcry against statues.
00:11:09.580And it actually has very little to do with slavery or racism or anything.
00:11:17.740If it's not ideological, if our modern sensibilities simply will not tolerate statues that commemorate problematic figures of any sort,
00:11:28.320then I think it doesn't make any sense that the outrage has not extended beyond Confederate soldiers.
00:11:34.420You know, many people in the South feel that this is an attack on their heritage and their history.
00:11:43.560If it's not that, if it's not an attack on their heritage and their history, if it's really just a movement against evils like racism and slavery,
00:11:52.160then all of the statues associated with evil should come down.
00:11:56.280If these are the only ones that come down, then I think people from the South that are upset about this because they feel like their heritage and history is being attacked,
00:14:58.780But I don't see how that minor political achievement outweighs the fact that Harvey Milk was a pederast who preyed upon drug-addicted boys.
00:15:12.360There's a quote from one of his friends that is instructive, because even his friends, even the people that knew him, don't deny this fact.
00:15:23.340One of his friends said that he had a penchant for young waifs with drug abuse problems.
00:15:56.340He contributed nothing of value to society.
00:15:58.560He left misery and suicide in his wake.
00:16:01.420He preyed upon drug addicts and runaways, and he used their helplessness and their vulnerability as a means to satisfy his own sexual desires.
00:16:20.740That doesn't make him a martyr just because I'm sorry that he was killed.
00:16:24.840That doesn't change anything about it.
00:16:26.380Just because a guy's killed doesn't make him a martyr, doesn't make him a hero, doesn't make him a saint.
00:16:29.860You're not automatically canonized just because you were killed.
00:16:32.340It doesn't change the fact that he was a pederast who preyed upon 15-year-old boys who were runaways and drug addicts and were confused and lonely.