COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN SPUTNIK
Mt Rushmore, Beware!
Could Monument Toppling Become US National Sport?
Absolutely, and already there has been some talk of doing
something about Stone Mountain, Georgia, a vast monument carved into a mountain
just like Mount Rushmore. It features in huge bas relief key Confederate
figures.
As for Rushmore, Jefferson was a scoundrel, almost totally.
There’s a huge number of reasons for objecting to him, but
people remain influenced by his graceful written words, written
self-consciously as an image-building fantasy and legacy yet reflecting
virtually nothing he actually did when he had power. He broke every rule he
ever set for good government and fairness.
Washington was a lifelong slave-holder and a businessman of
quite sharp practices. He did things like buy up the script paid to poor
revolutionary soldiers, when they badly needed funds, at a severe discount,
making a handsome profit.
He was not generous in any business dealings, and all that
phony stuff about not being paid while serving in the war was just that, phony.
He had a cost-plus contract and submitted a truly huge bill – over $400,000 at
that early time - to Congress after the war for everything right down to so
many bottles of wine consumed at Valley Forge.
Yes, the same Valley Forge of legends about soldiers
suffering winter terribly and being hungry. Well, old aristocrat Washington saw
to it that his own needs were handsomely supplied.
When Washington first took military command, removing the
arrangements of the Boston Patriots who actually got the conflict going, he
instituted flogging and hanging to what became the Continental Army – he was a
great admirer of British Army methods – and wrote letters home about the scum
and rabble he found and had to deal with.
Roosevelt was a super-imperialist, a genuine brute in some
cases, as well as a world-record slaughterer of wild animals. He'd go
"hunting" and leave literally mountains of carcasses piled up. His
hunting resembled that of Buffalo Bill, yet people regard him as a great
defender of nature.
Lincoln is the only truly noble figure on Mount Rushmore,
but even he is widely misunderstood. He did not fight to free slaves. He fought
to make the central government dominant over the states, something contentious
with many Americans to this day.
He also wasn’t just a humble country lawyer as is always
featured but a very successful lawyer who worked for corporations like the
Illinois Central and became well-enough off to build a handsome new two-story
brick home in Springfield, Illinois, and become a notable politician.
By the way, none of these figures were great defenders of
minority rights. They all were prejudiced if you interpret that word as some of
the extreme people talking about Charlottesville do. Even Lincoln regarded
blacks as somewhat less-promising material as citizens.
As was a figure such as dedicated slaveholder Andrew Jackson
whose image graces the twenty-dollar bill. Jackson also was responsible for the
Trail of Tears which saw thousands of long-settled native Americans, including
many farmers, torn from their homes in the Southeast and sent to the then
barren Oklahoma territory. Great numbers died, including women and children, in
the course of that long forced-march.
Also, as late as the 1950s, we had President Harry Truman,
who was a Southerner, always using the word “nigger” for black people. People
then barely took note. Should his monuments and library be torn down?
Still, despite those truths, how idiotic it would be to tear
it down Mount Rushmore. Better to teach visitors the facts.
And it really is no less idiotic to tear down a statue to a humble
Confederate soldier.
The Civil War was America’s greatest experience with war,
the deaths exceeding American losses in WWII eighty years later by about 100%,
and that’s despite all the advance in weapons.
The Civil War also supplied the model for how generals would
fight WWI, a terrible mistake but a historical fact nevertheless.
All monuments represent teaching opportunities. Destroying
legitimate historical monuments is nothing less than the work of historical Luddites.
The whole business going on in America today over
Charlottesville is a chaotic confusion with almost no coherent meaning. All
sides tell incomplete stories, and all sides have prejudices.
But most important of all is that while Americans wail and
gnash their teeth over a situation they do not even understand, they ignore far
more terrible things their truly brutal country does.
It is busy killing and spreading horror in half a dozen
lands, and the soldiers coming back from that filthy work will be treated well.
And that truly bloody symbol, the Stars and Stripes, will be
saluted and honored daily despite its stripes representing the blood of
millions of innocents killed abroad in colonial wars and interference in the
lives of others, everywhere from Korea and Vietnam to Iraq and Libya.