Still Treason in Defense of Slavery

These motherfuckers never quit.  That's why we need to shut them down at every opportunity.

Evan Hurst at Wonkette:

In the wee hours of Monday morning in New Orleans, workers wearing flak jackets and military-style helmets, with balaclavas over their faces to protect their identity, removed the first of four monuments to the Confederacy that the city council voted to get rid of in 2015. The military-grade armor, supplemented by snipers on nearby rooftops, was deemed a necessary precaution for the workers after death threats were made toward contractors. Just to be on the safe side, even the name of the company on the sides of the trucks hauling the monument away was covered up with cardboard, because some people really, really love the losing side in the U.S. Civil War — which, as you know, was only about tariffs and states’ rights.

The big ugly obelisk taken down Monday commemorated the “Battle of Liberty Place,” a failed 1874 coup by white supremacists during Reconstruction, and included this cheery inscription remembering — with lots of heritage but no hate at all — what a terrific time for white supremacy that was:

SNIP

Plenty of people in New Orleans are perfectly happy to see the Confederate monuments go; for a nice thinky-piece on the real historical significance of taking down these tributes to white supremacy, see this Times-Picayune op-ed arguing that the monuments themselves were a despicable revision of history in pretending the Civil War was a noble fight for freedom and self-determination — for a bunch of slaveholders. Says columnist Jarvis DeBerry,

Apparently, the crime of rewriting history is far worse than the crime of being a warmongering, secessionist white supremacist. The crime of rewriting history, to hear the monument-huggers tell it, is offensive in a way that slaveholding is not and treason is not and the decision to elevate and honor slave-holding traitors is not.

But the real revisionism, he says, was embodied by the monuments themselves, erected after Reconstruction to help advance the lie of the Noble Lost Cause, depicting the integrated city government as “usurpers” and lionizing the brave racist insurrectionists who tried to murder as many as possible.

Erik Loomis at LGM:

I know people will say, and not just neo-Confederates, that these are history and shouldn’t be torn down. But let’s be clear. New Orleans is a black city and was a black city in the 1890s. These monuments, among them some of the most imposing Confederate monuments erected, were placed there an overt symbol of post-Reconstruction white power. They were intended to intimidate African-Americans into submission. They are an insult to every African-American in New Orleans. We need to remember history, but we are not obligated to leave the public monuments of our racist ancestors there because of some vague appreciation of the past. These things are living, breathing symbols of white supremacy and they need to go. That this is happening in 2017 is all the more important.

Blantantly stolen from Juanita Jean: