In Jacksonville, Florida’s Springfield Park, a statue called “Tribute to the Women of the Confederacy” has stood for 108 years. But no more: on Wednesday morning, the statue was uprooted and carted away on the order of Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan, who justified her action by proclaiming that “symbols matter.” Yes, they do. And that’s why she should have left the statue where it was.
USA Today reported that Deegan “said the monument was a divisive presence that had no place in a city park.” She added: “Symbols matter. They tell the world what we stand for and what we aspire to be. By removing the Confederate monument from Springfield Park, we signal a belief in our shared humanity. That we are all created equal. The same flesh and bones. The same blood running through our veins. The same heart and soul." Glad that’s cleared up! If anyone in Jacksonville or its environs actually believed that we don’t have a shared humanity and are created equal, with the same flesh and bones and the same blood running through our veins, and taking down this statue would help teach them this lesson, then that’s terrific.
Deegan has denounced the statue before, saying in August: “I think it’s very, very hard to have unity in a city… if somebody has a monument up to basically a time when you weren’t even considered a person. That would be very, very difficult for you and your family to walk by that every day in your neighborhood.” All right. Yet Deegan’s war against the “Tribute to the Women of the Confederacy” has not been unopposed. Florida state Rep. Dean Black (R-Jacksonville) said that Deegan’s removal of the statue was a “stunning abuse of power,” as well as “another in a long line of woke Democrats’ obsession with cancel culture and tearing down history.”
No one wants to be put in the position of appearing to defend the Confederacy, so that’s about as articulate as the opposition to Deegan is likely to get. No one seems to have time to ponder the fact that, while the statue has been in place since 1915, it didn’t become so objectionable as to have to be removed forthwith until the summer of 2020, when — in the midst of the George Floyd riots — it suddenly became of the utmost importance to remove Confederate memorials everywhere. Overnight, it turned out that old statues that were part of landscape of many a city and town, and to which few paid any specific attention, had become an immediate cause of the white supremacism that was supposedly convulsing the nation.
Yet in all the excitement over Confederate statues in Jacksonville and elsewhere, no one is asking why they were erected in the first place. Donna Deegan would likely toss off the question with a reference to “systemic racism.” They would claim that statues such as “Tribute to the Women of the Confederacy” because Jacksonville leaders were racist, admired slavery, and wished the Confederacy had won the Civil War. Thus taking down such statues strikes a blow for racial justice and harmony.
That is, however, arrant nonsense. There are monuments to Confederates in the United States today, almost all constructed in the twentieth century, because of a desire to strengthen national unity, the same national unity Abraham Lincoln appealed for in his Second Inaugural Address, when he said: “With malice toward none with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds.” Those who built and approved of those memorials were not interested in restoring or approving of slavery. They were trying to bind up the nation’s wounds, by generously acknowledging that even among the losing side, without denying the abhorrent aspects of its agenda, there were people who were courageous and even noble.
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Nowadays we know better: we know that if someone approved of something we know to be evil, he must have been evil through and through. No distinctions can be made, no gradations, no nuance. People are either wholly good (the woke, the trans, the gay) or wholly evil (MAGA Republicans). And so in the ongoing efforts to make Americans ashamed of our own history and heritage, we must be made to feel ashamed also for efforts to bind up the nation’s wounds and achieve a national unity with those who are now deemed to have been wholly evil.
The agenda here is just the opposite of national unity. It is designed to make Americans implacable and unrelenting in pursuit of the far-Left’s idea of ideological purity. That will mean the destruction of “MAGA Republicans” as surely as it means the destruction of Confederate statues in Jacksonville and elsewhere, and on the basis of the same Manichaean assumptions. This is more than a matter of just tearing down a few statues and renaming a few military bases. In tearing down the statues, the cultural revolutionaries are tearing down what they were meant to cement: national unity.
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