Those who wish to systematically dismantle Southern, and ultimately American, heritage scored another victory on Aug. 28 in the state of Virginia. At the behest of the Democrat-controlled state legislature, workers removed the statues of Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, Gov. William “Extra Billy” Smith, and Dr. Hunter H. McGuire, all of whom served the Confederacy during the Civil War, from Capitol Square in Richmond.
This is a familiar story for those who care about our country’s history. Over the last decade, statues of Confederates, and some of Founding Fathers, have been removed all across the country. Virginia, the Civil War mecca, the focal point of some of the most consequential and dramatic events of that conflict, has been hit the worst. The twin tumors of Richmond and the D.C. suburbs have seen to the utter devastation of the Old Dominion’s Civil War heritage.
Leftists’ jihad against history — whether carried out by government decree or at the hands of enraged George Floyd-era rioters — has virtually stripped bare Richmond’s Monument Avenue, once home to monuments dedicated to Gen. Robert E. Lee, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and other major Confederate leaders. The only statue still remaining on the no longer aptly named Monument Avenue is one to tennis player Arthur Ashe.
Despite all the promises by the state government that the statues will be moved to appropriate museums and battlefields, we’ve seen what they do to them once they’re out of the public eye.
To add insult to injury, earlier this year Democrat Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed a bill that removes tax exemptions from Confederate heritage organizations, most notably the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
The removal of Confederate statues isn’t about “correcting the historical record” or “removing the stain of racism.” The activists who call for the removal of Confederate statues quickly move on to those of the founders once their demands are initially met. They’re hostile to all of American history, not just that of the Confederacy.
They’re not rushing to replace Confederate statues with ones of Winfield Scott or George Thomas, Virginians who served the Union during the war. Because the complete devastation of history, not the accurate representation of it, is the point. They don’t really care who was on which side of the Civil War, or how complicated views on slavery were in the antebellum South. Or in the North, for that matter. Because far-left activists see them as all evil, white oppressors. One side just happens to be easier to attack with the modern political kiss of death: the accusation of racism. But they plan on coming for all of American history eventually; you can see that in how they’ve gone after Founding Fathers who owned slaves, because leftists fundamentally hate America, its history, and its particular people.
It’s about power, and it’s about breaking down classical American identity to make way for a new one — one built on identity politics and Marxist grievances. Leftists want to wipe out the culture and heritage of the only real American and reliably conservative part of the country left: the South (and the Mountain West too, hence the grievance politics around American Indians). They’ve largely succeeded, both through replacement with immigrants and through the same tactic of “historical revision,” on the West Coast and the Northeast.
Southern states tend to be more religious and more conservative in general than the rest of the country. The South stands as the bastion of the Republican Party, that is, the bulwark against the left’s designs to fundamentally transform this country. Therefore, to the left, the South is evil, the embodiment of the nation’s sins, both past and present. Southerners are routinely portrayed and dismissed as backward, superstitious racists who must be reeducated about “real” American history.
If you wish to see the perfect illustration of how the left sees American history, look no further than the fate of the equestrian statue of Stonewall Jackson from Charlottesville, Virginia. Removed in 2021, the statue was handed over to a California nonprofit organization that promised to utilize the statue for “transformation, not further veneration.” They kept that promise all too well. “Artist” Kara Walker “butchered,” as described approvingly by the exhibit’s curator, the statue into a twisted pile of junk that looks more like debris from a bombing run than anything a normal person would describe as art.
To them, it’s not something to be held up with anything approaching reverence, but something to be mutilated and molded into something intentionally grotesque to deride the past and humiliate anyone who still reveres history. For the left, it’s not about taking something distasteful and creating meaningful or beautiful new art from it; it’s about the destruction of the old piece of art. That in itself is the political message when they tear down statues: We have the power and the will to destroy this piece of history, and you can’t do anything about it. If allowed to go unchecked, the left will tear down all of American history and twist it into something unrecognizable.
They’ve already done it in schools: twisting an inspiring story about a people carving a new civilization out of untamed wilderness into one of racism, exploitation, and environmental degradation. Now the real, concrete symbols of our history must go, lest they remind anyone that national reconciliation, even after so much bloodshed, is possible when people share a common culture and religion or that America has heroes worth venerating.
“Monuments, as I’ve always said, they’re symbols,” Democrat State Sen. Mike Jones said of the removal on Aug. 28. “They point to something beyond themselves. Is this what the Commonwealth is about? Is this where we want to direct people to? And it’s not. We have the moniker, the mantra, ‘Virginia is for Lovers.’ Well, hey, let’s prove that in how we legislate and also how we look.”
Though “Virginia Is For Lovers” may look good on the state’s tourism ads, the official state motto, “Sic Semper Tyrannis,” has a far more pertinent meaning to our current political atmosphere. It’s Latin for “Thus always to tyrants,” and it’s a motto the state of Virginia has failed to live up to as it has been slowly but surely taken over by rabid leftists.
Monuments are indeed symbols. They indicate which individuals and which values from our past we as a particular people hold worthy of public honor. The left doesn’t try to replace the statues, but instead merely tears them down, because leftists don’t see any previous Americans or the values that they stood for as worthy of public honor. They hate and wish to destroy America’s heritage and identity, and Southern heritage and identity in particular, as a means of destroying America itself.
