Monday, August 28, 2017

Why the Confederate Statues Have to Come Down

We need to remove all the Confederate statues from public places in the United States. A statue of a person in a public place in our culture is there to honor that person. It is not there just to commemorate history. The people depicted in these statues, people like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, Pierre Beauregard, Jeb Stuart and Nathan Forrest were enemies of the United States. What is more, they were traitors. Every one of them took an oath as an officer in the United States Army or as a federal elected official to preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States. Every one of them then went on to repudiate and break that oath by waging war against the United States of America. In this war some 620,000 young men were killed. That is more than have fallen in all the other wars in this nation's history combined.

Some say to remove the statues from public parks and squares is an attempt to erase history. Not at all. The statues can go to Civil War and American History museums. The photographs of them can and should appear in textbooks. But we do not commemorate history in this country by erecting statues of our enemies. If so, where are the statues of King George III or General Cornwallis? Where are the public statues of Kaiser Wilhelm, or of Mussolini, Tojo and Hitler, or of Osama bin Laden?

No, we do not bestow honor in this country upon enemies who have sought to harm and destroy it, who have killed our citizens and attempted to conquer our land and destroy our republic. The very idea is an affront to the sacrifice of those who have risked their lives and too often made the ultimate sacrifice to defend it. It is time to drop this pretense. The communities that are removing these statues are doing the right thing. The Confederate statues have to go. 

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