I have been pokey in writing the response to Hyman’s commentary regarding the removal of Confederate statues, but the events of this last weekend shed new light on this issue. It almost seems beyond arguing how corrosive an effect these statues have on our nation now. Having said that, here’s my attempt to address Hyman’s pre-Charlottesville arguments.
The thesis of his commentary is there is a “fashionable” trend to remove of “Civil War monuments” (i.e. statues celebrating Confederate leaders/soldiers, although he intentionally phrases his remarks to make it seem like there is a move afoot to turn the Bloody Angle into a Chuck E. Cheese). This, Hyman argues, is to “ignore history.” Sure, that history has ugly aspects, but removing the statues will not change that. Rather, we should learn from our past.
Hyman’s claims are wrongheaded in any number of ways, not least of which is that he claims that by removing statues to Confederate leaders, there is an attempt to destroy or change history. But that’s simply false. No one is suggesting the name of Robert E. Lee or any other Confederate be stricken from history. Quite the contrary. The claim is that these statues themselves pervert history by holding up traitors as being worthy of communal respect and admiration as those who built the nation rather than ripping it apart.
If one wanted any tangible proof that these statues serve as fetish objects for those who loathe greatest ideals of our nation, one need look no further than this past weekend in Charlotte, Virginia. The precipitating event of the neo-Nazi rally that ended up taking the life of an innocent woman was the proposed removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. (Even the flyer advertising the rally featured silhouettes of statuary.)These were not people who wished to see the statue retained in order to foster a better understanding of our national history; they wished to see the statue remain because of what the statue said in the here and now: white supremacy is a valid and valiant cause worthy of respect.
Say what you will about these hateful bigots, but at least they understood their visual rhetoric. They read this statue and others like it for the speech acts that they are—acts in which communities have held up leaders of a treasonous and failed cause as civic heroes worthy of emulation. Heroic statuary is a mode of epideictic rhetoric—speech that is intended to extol the virtues of public figures for the betterment of the polis. The Nazis in Charlottesville wanted this message to continue to be spoken every time anyone glanced at these statues, since they served as tangible expressions of their dark world view.
Hyman falls into the logical fallacy of false equivalency in attempting to liken the removal of these statues to the destruction of religious statuary in Afghanistan by the Taliban or Soviet-era altering of photographs of out-of-favor political figures to literally erase them from history.
[By the way, it’s telling that Hyman butchers the history of the statues in question, the Buddhas of Bamiyan. He claims they were destroyed because the Taliban “didn’t want these reminders of Hindu history.” But, of course, the statues of the Buddha were made by . . . you know . . . Buddhists.]
Hyman’s analogies fail because they claim a similarity that not only doesn’t exist, but in fact is the reverse of the actual situation.
Both the destruction of the statues and the erasure of political enemies were attempts to rewrite history to make people more comfortable. The destruction of Buddhist statuary was done to create the comforting illusion that no other forms of belief existed in the land held by the Taliban. Literally erasing political foes from film in the Stalinist regime made history more palatable by pretending that shifts in alliances and ideologies never happened.
Both attempted to call attention away from problematic and uncomfortable aspects of history and present the illusion of a homogenous and eternal truth for consumption in the present. Put more simply, they were acts that attempted to deny the existence of history itself.
And it is not the removal of the Confederate statues that is analogous to this; rather, it is their existence in the first place. By literally putting on pedestals those who rebelled against their countrymen for the purposes of defending the enslavement of fellow human beings, the creators of the statues and their current defenders whitewash the uncomfortable aspects of history. It propagates the comforting myth that these men were simply brave Americans, every bit as worth of celebration as Washington, Lincoln, the marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima, or Martin Luther King, Jr.
These statues lie. They claim that bravery in any cause is equal. They imbue with faux respectability a cause that, seen for what it was, represented the greatest threat to American ideals ever propagated upon our nation.
A more apt analogy would be to imagine placing a statue honoring Benedict Arnold in Lafayette Park. Or perhaps a statue of Rommel next to the Brandenberg Gate. These are almost unthinkable. Yet, across a swath of our nation, we have statues that honor those who sought to destroy our nation for the sake of saving slavery.
To acknowledge the perverseness of this is not to denigrate their personal bravery or any other noble qualities they might have had. Rather, it merely states that any view of that period in our history that romanticizes the cause to which they devoted their nobility is every bit as misguided, misanthropic, and immoral as the views of those who destroyed statues or erased people from photographs because it provides them with a myopic comfort in the present.
Hyman’s right about one thing: we should learn from our past. But if we’ve learned nothing else, we should have learned that celebrating the cause of ending the American experiment and turning each other into property is not a cause worthy of celebration.
The removal of these statues from public places of honor is a test of whether we’ve learned that lesson.
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