Absurd! Such important historical people. Does Germany and Austria have Hitler statues?
Putting the cause of the Confederacy on the same shelf as the cause of the Nazis is intellectually dishonest and historically inaccurate, in my opinion. There are some very important nuances that tend to be overlooked these days. Here are just a few of them:
- The Confederacy wanted to keep things as they were. They were racist because everyone before them had been racist. They were part of a system that always had been racist. Slavery was part of their way of living. The Nazis were different, as they wanted to implement a much more racist system than the one that was in place (yes, they treated the Jews as a race, not a religion).
- The Confederacy wasn't in favor of exterminating a race. They were defenders of the racial superiority that was already in place (slavery). The ideology of the Nazis was to actually exterminate an entire race.
- The Confederacy wanted to separate themselves from a Union that wanted to force their rules onto them, while the Nazis were imperialistic and wanted to impose their rules on other nations.
Both causes were inherently based on immoral assumptions about race, but put in their historical context, I think it's pretty fair to say that the Confederacy was a less scandalous cause than Nazism was.
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I think the most recent events in Charlottesville were absolutely horrible. Willingly driving a car into a group of people because you hate their world view is absurdly evil. Using violence to suppress people from seeing the world in a different (and non-violent) way as you do, should always be condemned in the strongest possible terms.
I'm not sure if pulling down these old statues that remind us of the people that fought and died for a long lost cause that ultimately surrendered itself is the right way to cope with this history, though. I'm all for framing these monuments with some historically accurate texts or putting them in museums so they don't have to be in public places where people don't want them, but don't go out and destroy these old monuments. Instinctively, that just doesn't seem like the right thing to do, in my opinion.