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The presence of statues of oppressors often incite or elicit violent reactions among those who feel victimized by those oppressors.  This is not a new social phenomenon:  it did not originate this year, or in the sixties when those well-read longhaired highbrows---jeansclad and barefoot hippies---demonstrated against several forms of oppression.

Roman Emperor Caligula (whose appellation means "little boots," and who wanted to trample all opposition and criticism beneath his "little boots") commanded the placement of his statue in the precincts of the Temple in Jerusalem, an oppressive intrusion that was vigorously opposed by the population of Judea---and, perhaps, many of their co-religionists through the Roman Empire.  Petronius, the Legate (or Deputy) of Syria, the province that included Judea, understood the social, political, and economic disruption that this would cause in the region---perhaps even threatening the transportation of "corn," (which we call "wheat") from the port of Alexandria to Ostia, the Roman port at the mouth of the Tiber River, from which it was transported to Rome to provide, so I have been told, one quarter of the city's food supply.  This transportation had been disrupted and delayed twice before:  by the Third Servile War, instigated by Sparticus; and by Cleopatra of Egypt, who attempted to wrest political control from the Roman Republic.  (This paragraph is extensive, because I love ancient history.)

Recently, following the collapse of the Soviet State and its procedures, statues of Karl Marx, Fred Engels, Vlad Lenin, and Joe Stalin (as well, so I am told, as several lesser leaders and luminaries of the Bolshevik Party) were toppled all over the former territory of the dissolved Soviet Union.  We applaud this because we do not like socialists, or commies, or liberals; but we shudder when we think that poorly paid workers and starving peasants were willing to follow the Bolshevik Party because it promised them a chance to overthrow the corporatists, the capitalists, the outside investors, the aristocracy, and the nobles who were not noble who had rested comfortably on profits from the labor of the victims of their tacit, or deliberate, oppression.  We like to forget that both Lenin and Marx took their inspiration from the Revolution of 1848, some of which was planned in the salons conducted by George Sand and Countess D'Agoult; and whose temporary success was recounted in Countess D'Agoult's primary history of the Revolution, published under her pen name, Daniel Stern.  We also like to forget that in our own King James Bible, the historian Saint Luke tells us that the early Christians practiced a primitive form of communism.

The statues of Confederate politicians and high ranking military officers are monuments to men who deliberately, and of free will, chose to make war against their fellow citizens, against the Union of States that their immediate ancestors had struggled--- against the British Empre and the oppressive measures of George III and his cabinet---to free; men who refused to accept the results of the election that brought a former railroad lawyer into the White House (do I hear the cacophonous sounds of a trumpet blaring); men who---with the likely exception of General George Pickett---applauded the assassination of that former railroad lawyer; men who made war and rebellion against the United States---in other words, treason----because thet were fighting for the ostensible "states' rights" which were, essentially, a falsified pluralization of the singular state right which they wished to preserve, against the stated intention for which Lincoln had been elected, the abolition of human, chattel slavery.  These leaders, in their embittered battle against the United States, brought thousands and thousands of soldiers of lower rank to their deaths.  I had the privilege, in 1995, of strolling through the Gettysburg Battlefield, and there experienced the palpable presence of the ultimate sacrifice made by those who fought and died there.  I suppose and suspect it is the same at other battlefields of the Civil War.  And yet the politicians and military officers who led them to, or caused, those deaths are memorialized by statues.  We have forgotten the enormous rage, after provocation, of the majority of the United States, which was expressed through the politices of the Reconstruction.  Some of the radical Republicans in Congress wanted to impose the harshest restrictions upon the states that had formented and conducted the rebellion; and many, in the victorious Union, thought that the politicians and militarists of the rebellion should have been sentenced to capital punishment for their actions.  Yet, through the misty, nostalgic view we now have of that era, we see those men as soft-spoken gentlemen, sipping their mint juleps on the front porches of antebellum plantation mansions, and enjoying cavalier poetry and the King James Bible, and the fragrance of magnolia and the hearty taste of a wellseasoned fried chicken . . . while, out of their line of sight in their plantations' adjoing fields, countless human beings suffered in oppressive heat and oppressive subjection to labor for the economic well being of a masters' class.  I am no fan of the British state, but it abolished slavery before the United States did; after the Revolution of 1848, mentioned supra, France also abolished it.  And the leadership of the confederate rebellion, who chose to fire on Fort Sumter, who caused a fracture in the United States that only bloodshed could repair . . . they are given monuments that, many believe, should be allowed to stand in glory although they represent men who made war against the United States in a selfish, backward, and oppressive ignominy.  We applauded the toppling of statutes to Karl Marx and Joe Stalin; what, please tell me, is the difference between them and, say, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and, maybe even, John Wilkes Boothe?  Perhaps those who wish to preserve, protect, and revere the statues of treasonous rebels---those who had attacked the wellbeing of the United States rather than relinquish a lifestyle that promoted the good of a few over the good of many---would have us raise statues so those protectors of the status quo, Judas Iscariot and Pontius Pilate.

Starward