Confederate Monuments

The winners of the Civil War are still writing
the history of the defeated South

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Any debate about ethical and religious questions is bound to fail.
Those questions are beyond the requirements of democracy.
Democracy is a form of government, not a government platform.
Government programs impose the ruling-class views on those who reject them.
This is highly undemocratic.

As long as the prevailing notion among the liberal left is that national correctness forces us to recognize that all Confederate Monuments are racist, we are doomed to let the winners of the Civil War continue to write the history of the defeated South and disfigure it.

President Lincoln did not go to war because he wanted to end slavery, but because he wanted to institute another form of slavery that rejected the constitutional rights of the Southern State to secede, and forced them to remain in the Union. Today the notion of forced marriage has become outdated. But the notion of forced Union does not seem to pose any problems.

As far as Lincoln was concerned, the Union had become for him as sacred as the sacrament of marriage in the Catholic Church. He never claimed that the Union was sacred and untouchable, but he acted as if it was. His Civil War transformed all the states, not only the southern ones, into colonies of the federal government.

With the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War, the thirteen colonies became free and independent states. With the Civil War, all the states became colonies of the federal government. This sums up the history of the United States to this day.

It seems that Fate has trapped America in her colonial past. The only thing that has changed is that the colonizing power has become the federal government.

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After this preamble, I can discuss the Confederate Monuments.

Those monuments were erected in the fifty years that followed the Civil War. The South was defeated and forced to re-integrate the Union. At the same time, slavery was ended. What should have been a great relief for the former slaves, was going to become a new nightmare.

Historians estimate that 25% of the freed slaves were unprepared and unable to cope with the new reality of freedom. Jobless, homeless and hated, they were unable to survive. That’s about one million of them. I would call this genocide by lack of concern.

The defeated South could do nothing against the North, so it turned its hatred towards the former slaves. The abuses that followed were sometimes worth than slavery itself. The North watched passively and did nothing. The descendants of the former slaves seem to ignore this point today. They absolve the racist North and put all the blame on the South.

But, as can be expected when things are not so simple, even Black American consciousness was unable to recognize the real purpose of the Confederate Monuments. They saw in them symbols of racism. Today many liberal Americans are misled by that erratic view. Allow me to explain.

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Let’s go back to the original intent of those who commandeered those war monuments. They made sure that all those monuments were oriented toward the North. This was their way of identifying the aggressor and their response to it. They said silently what they could not have said loudly, namely that the Civil War was an act of aggression that was unjustified and even unconstitutional.

This explanation is also based on the southern claim that the Civil War was not about slavery but about state rights. The southern states claimed that they had the same right to declare their independence and leave the Union as the thirteen colonies that declared their independence from British rule and became sovereign states. The main difference between those two cases is that in the first case the colonies won the war, but in the second case, the south lost the war. This means that, in both cases, the rule of war prevailed over the rule of freedom.

In conclusion, I can say that the confederate war monuments are an act against the North, not against former slaves. This does not mean that the South did not act against former slaves, but that we have here two fronts that are distinct and should not be confused.

President Lincoln is now considered the greatest President, because he saved the Union. This is how the winners write history. But even the losers are entitled to their version of history. They can see in Lincoln a great villain, an undemocratic aggressor; an enemy of liberty and a denier of constitutional state rights. As far as I am concerned, this debate is still open. It has never been discussed. It is never too late to do the right thing now.

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To be continued with a word on Lincoln’s refusal to consult the Supreme Court about the constitutionality of secession. Was he afraid the Court would rule against him?