Good for Mayor Landrieu

Good for Mayor Landrieu May 22, 2017

Here’s part of the transcript:

The historic record is clear: the Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and P.G.T. Beauregard statues were not erected just to honor these men, but as part of the movement which became known as The Cult of the Lost Cause. This ‘cult’ had one goal — through monuments and through other means — to rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity.

First erected over 166 years after the founding of our city and 19 years after the end of the Civil War, the monuments that we took down were meant to rebrand the history of our city and the ideals of a defeated Confederacy.

It is self-evident that these men did not fight for the United States of America, They fought against it. They may have been warriors, but in this cause they were not patriots.

These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.

After the Civil War, these statues were a part of that terrorism as much as a burning cross on someone’s lawn; they were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city.

Should you have further doubt about the true goals of the Confederacy, in the very weeks before the war broke out, the Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, made it clear that the Confederate cause was about maintaining slavery and white supremacy.

He said in his now famous ‘Cornerstone speech’ that the Confederacy’s “cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

And lest you think these idle words, be aware that a black congressmen who suggested the Trump should be impeached was told by brave and anonymous partisans of the Leader of the GOP, “You’ll Be hanging From a tree, f*cking n*gger”.

We don’t have statues of Hitler dotting the US to remind us of WWII. The reason is that the grammar of statuary is to pay honor and homage and we do not honor that racist murderer. We should not honor men who committed treason and killed their countrymen in order to preserve their power to own men, women, and children either. Nor should we keep standing monuments whose chief purpose was to remind freed slaves that they were helots and a subject population who remained slaves in all but name under Jim Crow. Tear it all down. And apply some well-placed cannon shells to Stone Mountain too.


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