By ann summers
The protests against those protesting Confederate statuary removal are justified to eradicate the “… systematic propaganda campaign to advance the racial cause of the Confederacy”, despite Trump’s apparent and continued sympathy for it using false equivalence.
Perhaps Trump got confused as he does because supporting “heritage” of lost-cause neoconfederates really cannot be easily segregated(sic) from the “heritage” of white supremacist neo-Nazis. It’s that Drumpf Denier/Birther thing, perhaps.
Trump cannot identify the “many sides” of the argument, which regardless, was about subjugation of labor and subjugation of races regardless of historical period. Trump’s OK with both, at least in private conversation, as we’ve discovered from inside WH sources. We knew this from him and his father’s real estate history.
Thus these “both sides” together constitute a single side that cannot ever be sustained by a US president… mainly because of WWII, but it is about the Union’s Constitution and perhaps the failure of US Reconstruction(s).
We are as Reverend Barber has said, on to a Third Reconstruction. Sadly, it must be fulfilled in 2017 as a response to the worst forms of bigotry at the highest levels.
This was the pivot—Trump finally rid himself of any remnant reverie that he would at some intangible moment in time turn toward an embrace of his better angels. Trump’s intemperate defense of murderous ideologies left no doubt that any lingering hints of grace have long since left his being. That became undeniable at Trump Tower as he took up the cause of a pure and known evil that, both here and abroad, has taken millions of innocent lives in the name of supremacy.
Icons serve a didactic purpose, and the US confederacy monuments to failed treason serve to historicize both their failure and their claims against the victor. This explains the Confederate memorialization during Jim Crow as a measure of local-state hegemony. Restriping the lane lines.
It is about the necessary site-specificity for historical events memorialized, not generic monuments meant more as ideological billboards selling abstractions. That is the “battle-flag” problem itself in terms of historical meaning and use, as if the South’s “lost cause” was ever not racist.
Given the connection some Confederate fetishists have for the white supremacy message they feel allows them to parade with or as Nazis/neo-Nazis, they should understand the need as Germans do, to place such historical negatives in proper places or perhaps even no places at all. Permits be damned.
OTOH, Donald John Trump celebrating German draft-dodging pimps of the preceding centuries might have some interesting costumes to parade, because heritage. Even with a German-American Bund, reviving it as a historical cosplay reenactment might have little interest, even in the upper Midwest. Because why, Mr. Trump? It was explicitly antisemitic, even in its US form.
This is why you, Mr. Trump, can’t be so stupid in your public comments even if you reveal what you really think in private, as now so many are willing to share. Nazis with permits are still Nazis. And we Americans are the anti-fascists, regardless of our ages. Some living history is better left dead.
Monument to the 20th Maine Infantry on Little Round Top at Gettysburg
not exactly Jefferson Davis in the AZ territory
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