After World War II, just about every monument, symbol and statue dedicated to Nazis and Fascists were torn down and destroyed. No one erected statues to honor even the greatest of German generals, including the “Desert Fox,” Irwin Rommel, who was the master of North Africa during his command… and participated in an abortive putsch against Hitler that cost him his life. Every vestige of those hateful regimes was erased across Europe.
Today, it is a crime to trade Nazi memorabilia online in most of Europe, and as one unwary American tourist discovered, you can get arrested for a public “Seig Heil” in Germany. It wasn’t just that the Germans and their allies were the big losers in that Second Great War; they represented a hateful philosophy of Christian white supremacy – murdering millions of innocents labeled inferior under that notion – for which even the current German government remains deeply embarrassed.
Tolerance sprouted in post-WWII Germany like no other… to the point where in the eyes of most nations in the world, the leader of the free and democratic world today is no longer the rather openly intolerant President of the United States – a man who equates those who protest Nazis, the KKK and other white supremacists with those who protest those hateful groups. It is German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who cannot hide her powerful disdain for Donald Trump, his policies and his words.
The events surrounding the recent Nazi, KKK and other white supremacists march in Charlottesville, Virginia – and particularly the reactions of the U.S. President and so many bigots who long to return to an America of the 1950s (the hidden meaning of the slogans “Make America Great Again” and “America First”) when blacks and Jews “knew their place,” a time just before the explosion of the civil rights movement in the late 1950s and all through the 1960s – is nothing short of stunningly embarrassing.
Cities and institutions across America were and are taking steps to remove Confederate statues, monuments and symbols – tributes to a time when slavery was both legal and, to some, worth fighting a war to preserve – in an effort to ease racial tensions in a era where tolerance was subsiding and blacks were facing continued discrimination that just did not seem to fade away. It was precisely the removal of a statute of Southern Civil War General, Robert E Lee (who himself favored healing post-Civil War wounds and eschewed monuments to himself), in Charlottesville that gave rise to that white supremacist march – featuring well-armed, torch-bearing ranks chanting horrific racist and anti-Semitic slogans (some from WWII Nazis) – one in which lives were lost and many severely injured.
Yet, the alt-right were particularly inspired as Donald J Trump castigated those removing these symbols of the racist Confederacy – including that Robert E Lee statue – with several on-camera remarks and this August 17th tweet: “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.”
That Charlottesville statue of Lee, voted to be removed by the City Council, was really not a Civil War era icon. Huh? It, like most of the major Confederate statues and monuments, was commissioned long after the South had lost the war, for this particular work, 50 years after the war ended. Imagine Europeans constructing statues of Hitler or Mussolini in 1995!
The August 20th NPR.com notes: “As President Trump doubled down on his defense of Confederate statues and monuments this week, he overlooked an important fact noted by historians: The majority of the memorials seem to have been built with the intention not to honor fallen soldiers, but specifically to further ideals of white supremacy.
“More than 30 cities either have removed or are removing Confederate monuments, according to a list compiled by The New York Times, and the president said Thursday [8/17] that in the process, the history and culture of the country was being ‘ripped apart.
“Groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans defend the monuments, arguing they are an important part of history. One of the leaders of that group, Carl V. Jones, wrote a letter on Aug. 14 condemning the violence and ‘bigotry’ displayed in Charlottesville, but he also denounced ‘the hatred being leveled against our glorious ancestors by radical leftists who seek to erase our history.’…
“Yet many historians say the argument about preserving Southern history doesn't hold up when you consider the timing of when the ‘beautiful’ statues, as Trump called them, went up.
“‘Most of the people who were involved in erecting the monuments were not necessarily erecting a monument to the past,’ said Jane Dailey, an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago. ‘But were rather, erecting them toward a white supremacist future.’
“The most recent comprehensive study of Confederate statues and monuments across the country was published by the Southern Poverty Law Center last year. A look at this chart [measuring when most of the Confederate monuments were built] shows huge spikes in construction twice during the 20th century: in the early 1900s, and then again in the 1950s and 60s. Both were times of extreme civil rights tension.”
Simply put, the vast majority of those “historical” Confederate monuments were built well-after the Civil War by the losers and their descendants with the expressed purpose of rekindling the kind racism that gave rise to the Civil War in the first place. Some of those modern racists and anti-Semites embrace Nazi symbolism that their fathers and grandfathers died fighting to erase in World War II. If you even have some sympathy for those “legitimately” trying to preserve such monuments, do you still feel that there is even the slightest reason to retain those post-Civil War replicas of racism now?
I’m Peter Dekom, and flushing the system of all attempts to rekindle the racism and anti-Semitism so many died to crush should be just a start.
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