I cannot believe the number of idiot Americans and conservative pundits trying to use the Confederate monument issue to try to equate that with Jefferson and Washington being slave owners, as though somehow that should justify leaving them in place otherwise everyone is a hypocrite.
Are you f**king kidding me?!?!
Let’s get a few facts straight:
1. Although absolutely reprehensible that Washington and Jefferson (and other founding fathers) owned and exploited human beings for economic gain, they were instrumental in creating a UNITED country, flawed as they, and it, was.
2. The Confederacy sought to CONTINUE to exercise the right to brutally kidnap and separate human beings from their country of origin and their families to continue that oppression and economic exploitation long after it became obvious to many that it was morally reprehensible to continue. They were ISIS-style terrorists who sought to oppress and control a population of disenfranchised human beings and bend them to their will and to do so, they were willing to DESTROY the United States and split it into two separate countries. They wanted the “freedom” to mass-murder, human traffic, and oppress.
3. In pursuing this goal, they became traitors to the ideals that were meant to bind us as a nation and committed an act of treason by attempting to break away, form their own military, and create their own flag.
4. They lost. Let me repeat that. They lost. The biggest mistake that the winning side in this battle of moral wills made was to not punish and make an example of the losing side. Instead we allowed a terrible revisionist history to be created by the losing side, and those “leaders” who wrote romantic tales of their “heroism and courage” helped to create what is now known as the Lost Cause Of The Confederacy which haunts the public discourse to this day.
5. The symbols of their failure should NOT treated as some romantic reminders of that terribly flawed and dishonest revisionist history, but should be treated with scorn and NEVER allowed to be equated in any form or fashion as somehow appropriate or OK. They are symbols of traitors to the country and its ideals, and symbols of terrorism. Period.
Don’t ever let anyone say anything different. Ever.