Trump Defends Confederate Monuments: "This Was a Gesture of Healing"

[guillaumeb]

From the article:

President Trump spoke to conservative outlet Sinclair Broadcasting Group on Thursday about Confederate monuments that have been torn down during the George Floyd protests....

“I think we have a history, we have a very, in fact I was just going to make a statement on that today unrelated to yours, we have a very very important heritage and history, and whether things are good or bad, you learn from it.

“And you know the expression is, you make the same mistake again if you forget your history. And I think it’s a very important thing, it’s a very important part of our history.”
“Seeing that, seeing what’s done, and you know in some cases I agree, they were Confederate soldiers, generals, but they were done after the war in order to heal,” Trump claimed.

To read more:

https://www.politicususa.com/2020/06/19/trump-defends-confederate-monuments-this-was-a-gesture-of-healing.html

Some in the US are still fighting a war that was lost 150 years ago. This is not healing, it is repeatedly reopening a wound by calling it heritage.

[ProfessorGAC]

1. Even If True...

...it was a stupid idea. And, now it's a 155 year old stupid idea.
Oh, and it didn't work.
So, its a failed stupid idea that's 155 years old!

[guillaumeb]

3. Who, except a white supremacist, would defend something

that was based on slavery?

[ProfessorGAC]

7. Nobody

But, as a "healing" plan it failed arrantly. So, the statues aren't just those of traitorous losers. They're a double symbol of failure.
What's nostalgic or importantly historic about that?

[guillaumeb]

8. And I have been reading about these statues.

Most were commissioned and built many years after the US civil war. Honoring people who defended slavery.

[NoRoadUntravelled]

13. Many of them were erected during the Jim Crow era.

A cruel reminder for those who descended from slaves of the evil that could be visited upon a people by the dominant culture.
I don't know that such a thing had a name back then but it was psychological warfare perpetrated on Black Americans by those who lost the Civil War.

[guillaumeb]

21. And a reminder, perhaps, that some would never see non-whites as equals.

And most of those people voted for Trump.

[misanthrope]

24. "I don't know that such a thing had a name back then-"

Concepts of psychology date back for millennia, to the ancient Greeks. Formal, experimental studies began in the latter 19th century.

White supremacists were fully aware of what they were doing by erecting those statues.

[Nevilledog]

16. And healing to who?

Ex-slaves and/or their descendants?

Members or family members of the defeated Confederacy?

That's a stupid ass justification.

[ProfessorGAC]

18. Same Page!

A big part of, I suppose, why it was such a stupid idea.

[yardwork]

20. Well, it wasn't a gesture of healing.

If you read the words said during the ceremonies establishing these monuments, it's clear that they were celebrations of white supremacy and efforts to continue oppressing black people.

These monuments were erected at a time when African Americans were getting a few rights via constitutional amendments. These statues were erected by wealthy white people who didn't want to share any power.

[Beartracks]

2. Hey, let's honor Hitler with a statue to heal the wounds of WWII!

You don't have to honor racist treason weasels with statues and monuments in order to not forget your history, especially that part of the history where they were racist treason weasels.

======

[guillaumeb]

4. Trump obviously learns nothing from his own history.

Who could believe that he learned anything from US history?

[roamer65]

5. FUCK TRUMP.

[guillaumeb]

6. Direct. To the point. Unambiguous. eom

[stillcool]

9. He needs to stfu..

go do his rally, be with his people, and leave the United States alone.

[NoRoadUntravelled]

10. What else would we expect from someone who honored Navajo Code Talkers, heroes of WWII,

in front of a portrait of Andrew Jackson?
Trump wanted his Tulsa hate-rally to be held on Juneteenth. That date was scheduled deliberately and not out of ignorance on the part of his handlers. I see the hand of Stephen Miller in there.
As far as Civil War heroes, he seems to revel vicariously in the evil deeds done by those who came before him and wishes, he could do the same. As evidenced by his professed love for Kim Jung Un, the loving way he looks at Putin, and the consent he gave to China's Xi when asked whether it would be a good idea to put Muslims in Concentration Camps in China, according to Bolton.
He has his own heroes in the likes of those who live a life in such a way that they glorify cruelty, degradation and inhumanity.

[Solly Mack]

11. Those statues put up well after the Civil War had

nothing to do with healing.

It was about rewriting history. It was about perpetuating lies. It was about erasing the truth of slavery and propping up white supremacy.

Trump is full of shit as always.

[struggle4progress]

12. Costs of the Confederacy

By Brian Palmer and Seth Freed Wessler
SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE | December 2018

... far from simply being markers of historic events and people, as proponents argue, these memorials were created and funded by Jim Crow governments to pay homage to a slave-owning society and to serve as blunt assertions of dominance over African-Americans.

... contrary to the claim that today’s objections to the monuments are merely the product of contemporary political correctness, they were actively opposed at the time, often by African-Americans, as instruments of white power.

... Confederate monuments aren’t just heirlooms, the artifacts of a bygone era. Instead, American taxpayers are still heavily investing in these tributes today. We have found that, over the past ten years, taxpayers have directed at least $40 million to Confederate monuments — statues, homes, parks, museums, libraries and cemeteries — and to Confederate heritage organizations ...

The public funding of Confederate iconography is also troubling because of its deployment by white nationalists, who have rallied to support monuments in New Orleans, Richmond and Memphis. The deadly protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, where a neo-Nazi rammed his car into counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer, was staged to oppose the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue. In 2015, before Dylann Roof opened fire on a Bible study group at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine African-Americans, he spent a day touring places associated with the subjugation of black people, including former plantations and a Confederate museum ...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/costs-confederacy-special-report-180970731/

[NoRoadUntravelled]

15. Really good post! Thanks for this.

Lots of good information.

[struggle4progress]

14. Defenders of the memorials are trying to forget the past.

By Keisha N. Blain
June 19, 2020 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

... These symbols serve one primary purpose — to honor figures of the past who upheld an undemocratic vision of America. They were created by white supremacists. And they function as a balm for white supremacists who long to return to a period when Americans regarded black people as property ...

Every symbol of the Confederacy — flags, monuments and statues and the names of Confederate soldiers on military bases — upholds white supremacy. Roof knew this. So did participants of the Unite the Right rally. They grasped these symbols not because they misunderstood American history. They held on to these symbols precisely because they do understand the history ...

At the end of the Civil War, those who chose to remember Davis and his “lost cause” pushed for the creation of memorials. But on a national level, few Americans then wanted to commemorate those who lost the fight to maintain slavery. It was not until decades later that something else emerged that prompted the country to pine for Confederate monuments and other symbols: black political progress. The widespread growth of Confederate monuments and statues — and the practice of naming military bases after soldiers who had fought against the U.S. Army — coincided with periods of political transformation in the United States.

During the Jim Crow era, as African Americans asserted their political authority and demanded an expansion of citizenship rights, white supremacists responded with acts of violence and intimidation. The creation of Confederate statues, the reappearance of Confederate flags and the Confederate naming of Army installations worked in tandem with the growth of the Ku Klux Klan to send a clear message that black people would never be accepted as full citizens of the United States ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/06/19/destroying-confederate-monuments-isnt-erasing-history-its-learning-it/

[NoRoadUntravelled]

17. And another! Awesome.

[guillaumeb]

22. 2 excellent additions.

They would be excellent as separate posts.

I see 2 goals on the part of the statue supporters.

1) To rewrite history.

2) To remind non-whites that a certain percentage of US citizens do not, and will never, see nonwhites as equal.

[Midnightwalk]

19. Venting a bit

First off statues have nothing whatsoever to do with history. They are symbols disguised as bad art. Have you ever heard of Julius Caesar? Ever seen a statue of him? How about Genghis Kahn? I couldn't identify most of the historic figures I've learned about. We don't need action figures to remember or learn from history.

History needs to be better taught or we will make the same mistakes again. Not some white washed version Trump is peddling. The confederates thought black people were inferior and fought a war against their country to keep them subjugated as slaves.

The statues were put up as symbols for the segregationists after the war.

They remain symbols of the belief that black people are inferior. They are offensive to anyone who doesn't believe that.

But you know all that. Trump will never know or care about any of that because he believes in the symbols.

[guillaumeb]

23. History is always written by the winners.

While the US south may have lost the actual civil war, the systems of racism were merely modified.

Actual slavery was replaced by prison slavery.

Any attempt at reparations were always opposed. The only reparations after the war were in the form of payments to former slave-owners that were intended to compensate them for the loss of their property. That property was, of course, their slaves.