via University of North Carolina Students Topple Confederate Monument | HuffPost

Another Confederate statue literally bites the dust! In the period after Reconstruction and during the advent of the Civil Rights Movement, Confederate statues were put in place to commemorate those who-although they did fight bravely, let’s give them that- fought and died to preserve the system of slavery, whereby they could continue to own and oppress people of another race. Those were the “States’ Rights” they seceded the Union for.

Their patriotism to the United States was purely conditional; they would be loyal to the nation only if it did what the South told it to do, that is to allow their slave system to continue.

The “Silent Sam” statue torn down by the UNC kids, just like the Robert E. Lee statues in Charlottesville  and New Orleans,  were part of the propaganda of the “lost cause,” whereby the federal government withdrew its forces, which sustained the pro-Reconstruction state governments, in order to suppress the rising Labor agitation due to the expansion of industrial capitalism. The “Lost Cause” propagandists told of the myth of Southerners valiantly defending their “way of life” (sustained by slave labor) against Northern aggression. Once we remember what the “cause” was about, we can move forward in facing the reality of the terribleness of slavery and of the wrongness of racism.