On Erasing History
Amidst the uproar of recent weeks, I have revisited much of what I learned about the American Civil War, and explored new sources and voices, with particular attention to the popular movement to remove and/or relocate various monuments to the Confederacy and its leaders. Great fortune has afforded me opportunity to explore numerous Civil War battlefields in my, now solidly middle-aged, life, among them Antietam, Gettysburg, Manassas, and, several times, Vicksburg (which my Boy Scout troop visited annually). I also grew up in a city (New Orleans, my home again) replete with tributes to various figures from the Confederacy - statues, monuments, street & school names amongst them, even the notorious Confederate Memorial Hall Museum. Growing up in NOLA served a steady diet of Lost Cause symbolism and mythology. Until I started really learning about the Civil War, in high school, I saw these symbols as simply part and parcel of Southern & Louisiana history. I was taught, to be candid, a load of horse hockey regarding the war, its causes & consequences. These monuments and tributes contributed to this miseducation.
I have recently heard or read more times than I care to count objections to removing these monuments and symbols of the form "you can't just erase history." To be utterly candid, this is intellectual bullshit. No one who supports removing these symbols seeks to "erase history," but, rather, to unravel the false historical narrative they have helped to weave. FIrst, society does not record history by erecting statues and monuments, but, principally, by the written word. I can attest that the absence of the odious status of Robert E. Lee on St. Charles Ave has not in the slightest affected the the man's place in the historical record. Second, the extent to which these statuary tributes have contributed to collective memory has been distinctly disingenuous - as hagiography rather than history, to lionize heroes of the Confederacy and sanitize their images, to intimidate free people of color and "remind them of their place" in Southern society during the Jim Crow South and the Civil Rights Movement (the periods during which most of them were installed). Third, they were, overwhelmingly, commissioned by such partisan groups as the United Daughters of the Confederacy and Sons of Confederate Veterans, in nothing resembling a democratic or inclusive process, certainly not in consultation with Southern (or Northern) African-Americans. These statues represent not history, but, rather, one or another group's attempt to interpret and revise history, in the interest of perpetuating white supremacy and black subordination, subjugation, and submission.
If you object to removing or contextualizing these statues, fine - we can have a reasonable debate about that. But, please, abandon the intellectually dishonest argument that their removal "erases history."
I've also seen numerous posts and memes comparing statues of Confederate leaders with the Holocaust memorials at such places as Dachau, Treblinka, Birkenau, imploring people not to remove statues of Lee, Stonewall, et al., lest we "forget"...it's a patently false and intellectually lazy analogy, as Germany doesn't have any statues of Hitler, Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, and no one in America has been trying to remove the actual memorials at Civil War battlefields, which are plentiful, somber, and effective in helping us never forget about the horrible conflict our country waged over whether it was okay to own another human being.