The problem he isn't grappling with is that Washington and Lee weren't just alike in having slaves; or in fighting for a system that preserved slavery; or in being Virginians; or in being generals of armies. They're also alike in being secessionists, i.e., traitors from the perspective of the governments they fought against.Some of the skepticism about removing Confederate tributes is due to southern cultural pride but I suspect most of it outside the south springs from the understandable fear that lefties who come after Robert E. Lee today will come after George Washington tomorrow. A statue of Thomas Jefferson was toppled just a few days ago in Oregon, in fact. If the left insists on bundling the Founding Fathers together with the Confederate leadership and making racism, including slaveholding, the disqualifying factor in honoring influential Americans of the past then the public will feel it has no choice but to protect that entire bundle. We’re not giving up Washington and Jefferson, period. But if treason against the United States is the disqualifying factor then the Confederates can be unbundled and discarded.If these people can’t or won’t distinguish between a monument to someone *despite* their view of slavery and a monument to someone *because of* their view of slavery then the righteous cause of purging the country of tributes to degenerate traitors will derail.
This nation came out of a long tradition of beneficial treason, good treason, treason in the name of the best of the human condition. It was born of the tradition that fought King John at Runnymede and compelled from him the Great Charter of Liberties, Manga Carta Libertatum. It is out of the tradition that produced the Declaration of Arbroath in Scotland, in defiance of yet another tyrannical English king, which stated that "It is not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom — for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself." The Scottish national motto was Nemo Me Impune Lacessit, which means, "No One Touches Me With Impunity," or if you like, "No One Messes With Me Without Getting Hurt." That sentiment was also given in Scotland, as later in Alabama, in the words of John 20:17: Noli Me Tangere, usually translated "Touch Me Not," but also:Rooting out treason won't save America, because America as a project began in treason. What is important is to distinguish the good treasons from the bad ones. The good ones are the ones that advance the cause of natural right and human liberty; the bad ones are the ones that seek to violate natural rights, as the Marxists do but as the Confederates also did, or human liberty, as the Marxists think they don't but really do, and as the Confederates certainly did.
The values of this new nation are rooted in the principle of rebellion against authority. They are the values of a people who do what they think is right, and will hand you your heads if you try to force them to kneel to your judgment instead of their own. The Founders considered the philosophy of the Greeks. They considered the history of the Romans. They took stock of their reflections on the righteous judgment of God. Then they pledged their fortunes and their lives, and their sacred honor, and did what they had decided was right without fear.
Washington and Jefferson were on the right side, almost. Lee's side was wrong. Yet that still isn't the right view of Lee, and it could be that the right view can't be had at this hour. Lee fought for Virginia to keep it from being destroyed. Sheridan's burning of the Shenandoah Valley is a practical example of what Lee feared, which fears caused Lee to take up arms to protect his home. Perhaps Lee was wrong there too; if he had taken command of the Union forces, as offered, he might have been better able to protect Virginia from men like Sheridan and Sherman. He was, as he has often been charged, too Napoleonic in his understanding of war; Sherman and Sheridan fought the way the Russians fought Napoleon, only they got to lay waste to the land of their enemies rather than their own. Lee never thought to do likewise to Pennsylvania or points north, to his moral credit but his strategic loss.
The North won because it was willing to do things that are now formal war crimes, war crimes they repeated against the Lakota and Cheyenne -- indeed, the same men repeated them. They repeated them against the Apache and others. Once Washington is purged for his embrace of slavery, they'll come from Lincoln and Grant. They'll come for Sherman and Sheridan. They'll come for the whole roster of the late 19th century for its brutality against the Native Americans, and also against the labor unions. And then they'll come for the 20th century too.
This whole project is a sort of treason itself, as a matter of fact. It's a levying of war against America by destroying everything that ever was America. There will never be a rock strong enough to hold against this tide, because America is and always was made up of human beings -- and human beings do wrong, all of us do. No one has clean hands.
We have to learn to live with that. The ones who are setting themselves up as judges of their ancestors won't have clean hands either; they too will rule with fire and war, as indeed they have already begun to do where they have managed to gain a foothold. There is no future of natural right and flourishing human liberty on the other side of their victory, should they gain it. There is only the show we have seen so many times before.
