Symbols of Hate

It is really hard to convey to my friends in Lithuania why these Confederate statues spark so much outrage.  Aren't they a part of history, one of my friends asked?  So too were the Soviet statues but I don't see very many of them around anymore.  Still, they find this wanton vandalism a little hard to accept.

We seem to be having a watershed moment, in which not only the United States but countries all over the world are coming to terms with their painful past.  This occurred in the late 1980s in the Soviet Union when Mikhail Gorbachev unwittingly opened up a Pandora's box of emotions that led to the dissolution of this socialist behemoth.  Lithuania was literally the mouse that roared when it tore down a statue of Lenin in the center of Vilnius, after the Soviets had been forced to leave the newly independent country.

A similar event took place in New York City almost 250 years ago when the United States declared its independence from Great Britain in 1776.  The Statue of King George III was toppled by George Washington's soldiers and local residents.  The fledgling union would fight a bitter war for the next 6 years but ultimately won its freedom. 

Unfortunately, not all the American states knew what that meant.  The Northern states adopted a free market economy in which every American was a wage earner.  The Southern states kept colonialism in tact by keeping slavery to maintain their vast cotton, tobacco, indigo and rice plantations.  When the European countries abolished slavery from 1833 onward, the Southern states intensified the practice.  They had no intention of giving up this peculiar institution that was the life blood of their economy.

At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, one of the most curious European observers was Karl Marx.  He was a major proponent of a free market economy and a big fan of Abraham Lincoln.  He even wrote to Lincoln in 1864, and received a response through Ambassador Charles Adams.

This was the age before the wealthy American industrialist.  Most Americans still had a fighting chance of success in an ever-growing economy, except in the South.  This laggard aristocratic region covered in Spanish moss, which seemed to grow between the ears of its Southern plantation owners, was much like Tsarist Russia.  When asked what the South was like by a foreign journalist, William Faulkner recommended he read Anna Karenina.  In fact you could read almost any Russian novel of that era and get a pretty good picture of what life was like in the Southern states of America, albeit not quite on as grand a scale.

It wasn't until 1936 that a Southern writer managed to capture all the romance and majesty of this antebellum world in Gone with the Wind.  It was immediately made into a movie that became universally beloved for its charming characters.  This book and movie celebrated the Lost Cause, one that lives on to this day.

Memorials had already been cropping up all over the South before 1936 but the success of Gone with the Wind led to another wave of memorials commemorating this antebellum society.  The odd part is that the statues didn't portray the figures of the Antebellum South but rather the soldiers who tried to protect it during the Civil War.  The most recurring figure is General Robert E. Lee, who ironically requested that no statue be made of him.  He wished deeply for reconciliation between the North and South.

General Lee had served loyally in the US military ever since the Mexican War, and was saddened to have to make a choice after war broke out in April 1861 when South Carolina attacked the federal-held Fort Sumter.  He chose Virginia because that was his home, and when asked to command the Confederate Army he accepted. He was also there to sign the surrender of the Confederate States to General Ulysses S. Grant of the US Army at Appomattox in April 1861, a war that lasted four years almost to the day.

So why all those memorials if revered figures like General Lee didn't want them himself?  It's a complicated story.  Some were just memorials, erected by cities to honor those who died in the Civil War.  Many list the names of the dead, like this one in Walton County, Florida, where I grew up.  Others take on a more sinister purpose.  They were not erected right after the Civil War, but rather in the early 20th century with the institution of race laws that separated Whites from Blacks, thanks to a notorious ruling by the US Supreme Court in 1896 that upheld segregation laws throughout the United States.  These statues, which often paid tribute to Confederate military leaders, towered over the city like that of General Lee in New Orleans.  It was finally taken down in 2017 by the city council.

I like to think White Americans have finally woken up the harsh realities many Black Americans face in their cities and neighborhoods.  Systematic racism is real.  It is not some figment of the imagination, and nothing more explicitly defines it than these Confederate statues we see being toppled across the country.   These symbols of hate extend to the Stars and Bars, which the governor of Mississippi finally ordered removed from the state flag.  That's pretty amazing for a state that personifies the Antebellum South like no other.  They still pay homage to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, at his home in Beauvoir, Mississippi.

I think this is something anyone can identify with, especially the good people of Lithuania who know what it is like to live under a bully nation that refused to accept a country's right to self-determination.  That is what it has been like for Black Americans before and after slavery, and why they want these monuments and other "symbols of hate" removed from the cities they live in, so that they no longer have to confront them each day.