Pull them all down

The names of Confederate leaders should appear on nothing, no streets, no schools, no statues, no military bases, no ships, no buildings, and no monuments, apart from their own headstones in the cemeteries where they are buried.

Taking advantage of the topic of the moment and the August congressional recess, MSNBC is putting in a good amount of time on the issue, explaining how widespread these memorials to the Confederacy are and how they were put up during waves of exceptional terrorism by the Klan in the South and across America.

It is a disgrace to the country that the South and its racism were influential enough all over America that even after all the states outside the South together fought a war to prevent the formation of a slave empire in North America and ended slavery in our country, the triumphant North accepted the simultaneous rise of Jim Crow, widespread segregation, and public institutional reverence all across the South for the Confederacy, its leaders, its war, and its cause.

It is time to put an end to any hint of public reverence for enemies of our country who would have destroyed the Union to maintain forever the enslavement of black Africans and the racist ideology that sustained it.

Meanwhile, MSNBC is by no means ignoring that the racists celebrate not only the Confederacy and its ideology but the European evils against which America and others fought the greatest war of the 20th Century, the Nazi ideology and regime of Adolph Hitler.

What the alt.right and their ideological kin stand for and celebrate is not America but two of our country's most deadly historic enemies.

This is the Breitbart take.

Founding Fathers in Peril

And here is the word from the leader of the pack, Pat Buchanan.

If We Erase Our History, Who Are We?

Pat Buchanan defends his heroes of the Confederacy and the loons at Charlottesville who revere them by implicating the entire history of the US, the age of colonialism and imperialism, and as much of Western Civilization and its history as he can in the deepest and most shameless racism.

It is not the history of the West as the story of liberty, as the rise of Enlightenment, as the birth and flourishing of scientific and industrial civilization, as the rise and spread of democracy and equality.

It is the history of the West as told in past years by Gobineau, by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, by Oswald Spengler, by Adolph Hitler, by the American Nazi party, and by the American Ku Klux Klan.

It is the history of the West as told, nowadays, by the disgraceful and shameful racist slugs whose influence on it has been its ugliest stain and its most bitter enemies, including people whose own racism is of the bitterly and deeply anti-white kind.

We might call its mildest version the Howard Zinn/The Guardian version of history.

Of course, the movement to tear down the monuments of the Confederacy and reject racism and its celebrants is not an attempt to erase history but partly to outlive it and live it down.

It is a refusal to revere those enemies of our country and the promise of universalist social and political egalitarianism, the leaders of the Confederacy and of Nazi Germany.

It is a refusal to revere figures from the past of this country whose agendas and values are simply not our own, expressly and officially for those alien values and rejected agendas.

As for the Founders, that's a mixed heritage and we'll figure out how to remember it and how and how far to revere it, and black and Indian and Asian and other nonwhite or not quite entirely white Americans will play a role in working out how.

The truth is, after all, that the America of today is not the America of 1860, 1789, or 1620, and the differences are all to the good.

And that, of things political pertaining specifically to race and identity, the most valuable things in the American past were and are the promises of equality and inclusion captured in the Declaration and saved from ruin by the Union victory over the Confederacy.

Just as Barack Obama said.