Battleground: The statue of Confederate soldier General Robert E Lee in a Charlottesville park which the council voted to remove sparking protests and violent racial clashes. Photo/AP
Battleground: The statue of Confederate soldier General Robert E Lee in a Charlottesville park which the council voted to remove sparking protests and violent racial clashes. Photo/AP
MANY contend that the United States -- irrespective of how many wars they've been involved in since -- has never stopped fighting its own deadly Civil War of 1861-65.
With the secession of 11 southern states, it was initially less a cause about slavery as such than Abraham Lincoln's steely insistence on the "preservation of the Union". But abolition of slavery became the defining issue.
The war ostensibly ended when a tired and dispirited General Robert E Lee rode into Appomattox to surrender to the Union's General Ulysses S Grant. Mind you, General Lee wasn't as tired and dispirited as the nearly 700,000 soldiers pushing up daisies over great swathes of the reunited Union, a combined total that still outnumbers the sum martial American fatalities of all its wars since.
It is a fairly staggering stat, given that this includes two world wars and the Korean and Vietnam wars, with all their more lethal killing appurtenances.
This was a serious amount of killing. Double or treble this for the numbers of wounded, many of whom had permanent, debilitating injuries, plus many tens of thousands of civilian casualties. No wonder it left a permanent cleft in the American psyche, and disturbingly defined the depth of commitment by supremacist whites of the southern states to preserve their "way of life".
The post-bellum policy of reconstruction was intended to rebuild the shattered south, but it wasn't so much reconstruction as merely reconfiguration. While blacks now had nominal freedom, the supremacist mentality just metamorphosed into different methods of maintaining what was still, to all intents and purposes, slavery.
Many blacks actually ended up worse off -- employers now had no obligation to house, clothe or feed them, however meagrely, while their pittance wages weren't nearly enough to provide necessities in the now supposedly "free" world. Sounds a familiar story even all these years later.
While blacks slowly graduated into wider society, the infamous so-called Jim Crow segregation laws of the 1880s meant mostly it was on a strictly racially segregated basis, much of which endured right up until the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Segregation laws applied not only in major areas such as marriage, education, housing, public transport, and the military, but humiliatingly in such prosaic amenities as segregated cinemas, eateries, public toilets, drinking fountains and even telephone booths.
These were the poisoned waters that spawned the horrors that percolated into popular culture as Mississippi Burning, the canvas on which Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird was drawn, the breeding ground for the lynchings, the "strange fruit" hanging from the poplar trees; black bodies swinging in the southern breeze.
Are we surprised that, just a few generations on, custodians of these sentiments cluster, march and spew vitriol on southern streets?
There's a verse in a great Leonard Cohen song, Everybody Knows:
"Everybody knows the deal is rotten "Old Black Joe's still pickin' cotton "For your ribbons and bows "Everybody knows."
The "Old Black Joe" Cohen is referring to is the title character in a song by Stephen Foster of Oh! Susanna fame. But for Cohen, Old Joe's toil in the plantation still symbolises the reality for many "people of colour" in the contemporary south.
Given that many of his most famous songs had southern themes, Foster ironically never lived in the south, and only ever visited it once.
But one of the statues now sought to be expunged is of the much-revered Foster. The trouble is that, even though Foster wrote with much humanity, at his feet is depicted a banjo-playing slave character from one of his songs.
The bronzed General Lees and "Stonewall" Jacksons are being toppled from their pedestals. Old White Stephen might even have to go the same way, with a banjo on his knee.
And many statues from the heydays of British imperialism must be shivering in their metallic or marble boots from here to Timbuktu.
