Confederate ‘de-Nazification’ is doomed

If the Confederacy was fundamentally racist as well as an act of treason against the United States, the thinking goes, it may make sense to apply the policy toward relics of Nazism to statues of Robert E. Lee and other Confederate war memorials as well. The argument for such an attitude toward the Confederacy is strengthened by the fact that many of these markers were erected in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as part of a wave of “Lost Cause” nostalgia that was motivated more by efforts to reinforce the racism and “Jim Crow” legal system of the South than by a desire to remember the 258,000 men who died fighting for that cause.

In the aftermath of Floyd’s death, the notion that “Black Lives Matter” — a phrase that is, at one and the same time, an anodyne sentiment embraced by the overwhelming majority of the public as well as a deeply controversial and radical leftist movement — has gripped the country. The need to address the role racism plays in society has had a tremendous impact on the way Americans view their history. That’s why the notion that the Confederacy was somehow akin to Nazi Germany, a cause that was not merely misguided but fundamentally evil, has, perhaps for the first time since the war was fought, become mainstream opinion throughout the U.S.

In Germany and Austria, any sites that might be considered places of pilgrimage for contemporary neo-Nazis, fascists, and anti-Semites have either been destroyed or converted to a use that renders them unsuitable for commemoration of any sort. The authorities have been uncompromising.

An example of this is the problem of what to do with Adolf Hitler’s birthplace in the Austrian town of Braunau am Inn. The house where the future Nazi dictator and mass murderer was born on April 20, 1889, still stands. While it became a place of veneration during Nazi rule, it remained in private hands until 2016.

Since the collapse of the Hitler regime, and the occupation of the town by American troops in 1945, authorities have gone back and forth over what to do with the place.

A memorial to the victims of Nazism was placed in front of the house in 1989, which Austrian authorities hoped would be a disincentive to “Hitler tourism.” But the building has been used for a number of different purposes in the last 75 years: city library, technical college, and a daycare center for the disabled.

At one point in 2014, the Austrian government decided to make it a “House of Responsibility” that would serve as a museum dedicated to Hitler’s crimes. But even that seemingly sensible proposal was ultimately discarded as, in a sense, paying too much homage to the significance of the place.

In 2016, the government adopted a proposal to demolish the building and replace it with one that would have no connection whatsoever with Hitler. Last month, after years of discussion, it was announced that the new building would be remodeled and made into a police station.

This is typical of how any sites associated with the Nazis are treated in Germany and Austria. In Germany especially, Holocaust memorials and museums have proliferated in recent years as part of a conclusive reckoning with the Nazi past. There are numerous memorials dedicated to the victims of Hitler and his accomplices. Many of the concentration camps and death factories employed by the Nazis to achieve their goal of extermination of the Jewish people have been preserved so as to ensure that the memory of their crimes would not be forgotten.

But the places associated with the Nazi cult itself have either been demolished or reconverted to normal use.

For example, Landsberg Prison in Bavaria was a Hitler shrine because it was there while he was imprisoned after the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch that he wrote Mein Kampf. But after the war, the U.S. Army operated it as a prison and place of execution for Nazis convicted of war crimes. Today, like the proposed Hitler birthplace police station, it has reverted to just being an ordinary German prison. The same is true for other Hitlerian landmarks such as the 1936 Olympic stadium in Berlin and the Nazi Party rallying grounds in Nuremberg, both of which have been converted to, after upgrades, conventional sports stadiums.

The motivation for this erasure has little or nothing to do with outraged Jewish sensibilities or the influence of the revived Jewish communities that have sprung up in either country. Instead, such decisions have been almost entirely the doing of government authorities who are primarily interested in suppressing right-wing extremism and depriving such groups of rallying points around which they can build support or get publicity.

In a country that must also deal with the legacy of the Soviet-dominated East German communist dictatorship, Germans understand that it isn’t possible to erase every vestige of its past.

As American opinion about the Confederacy shifts, the German-Austrian approach gains steam. All Confederate memorials would be placed in museums or storehouses, removing them from the public eye and seemingly taking a troublesome issue off the national agenda.

But if Americans are to treat the Confederacy as if it was the moral equivalent of Hitler’s Germany, they couldn’t stop there.

All Southern sites associated with the “moonlight and magnolia” nostalgia for the Old South, specifically the many pre-Civil War plantations, that are tourist attractions would have to be closed or repurposed to focus solely on the crime of slavery. While many of them do acknowledge the tragedy of human bondage, their popularity is based more on interest in perpetuating the Gone With the Wind image of the Old South, not a desire to bear witness to the suffering of slaves.

Nor could Civil War battlefield sites escape the attention of revisionists.

Scores of battlefields have been preserved as part of America’s historical heritage. But they are dotted with the same sorts of memorials to soldiers on both sides of the conflict that are being torn down in public squares. By comparison, there are many military cemeteries dedicated to the approximately 4.3 million German soldiers who died in World War II. But the sort of memorials to the heroism and dedication of the losing Confederate troops and their leaders that were erected on the battlefields and in cemeteries in the South do not exist in Germany or Austria.

Those Confederate memorials testify to the fact that for most of the 155 years since the surrender at Appomattox, Americans have not considered Confederates the moral equivalent of Nazis.

Postwar efforts to effect a “radical reconstruction” of the South in which blacks would have equal rights, including help with economic survival as well as political power, were predicated on the notion of a transformation of the formerly rebellious states. The subjugation of the African American population was to end. Former Confederates found themselves not only forced to swear allegiance to the United States to get their civil rights restored but were also competing against former slaves for political power.

Radical reconstruction had its heyday under the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, who had vanquished Lee during the war and whose monuments are now being toppled or defaced by woke mobs along with those to his Confederate opponents. Grant’s policies sought to prevent violence against freed blacks seeking to vote and compete economically with whites, but the only way to implement them was continued military occupation of the South. Unlike postwar Germans, who understood that they must pay a heavy price in repentance in order to rejoin the community of nations, Southern whites did not consider themselves morally obligated to repent for the sins of slavery and rebellion and were eager to retake control of their states.

There was strong support for Grant’s use of military force to suppress the Ku Klux Klan, whose activities amounted to open rebellion. But there was little appetite in the North, even among most Republican voters, for the sort of indefinite military occupation of the Southern states that would have made a genuine transformation of the former Confederacy possible. By 1876, when a deal was struck to remove the last federal troops from the South as part of a resolution to the deadlocked presidential election that year, reconstruction was dead. And with it died the last hope of changing the South.

In place of reconstruction, the South embraced the myth of the heroic “lost cause” and Jim Crow laws to reassert white supremacy. Over the course of the next century, that pernicious system remained in place as the Democratic Party remained a coalition of Northern liberals and Southern bigots even under progressives such as Franklin Roosevelt.

But the “lost cause” myth wasn’t just about justifying the continued subjugation of African Americans. It was also a way for citizens of a nation that had suffered a nearly suicidal civil war to reconcile with each other.

Efforts to claim that the Confederate cause was more about defending states’ rights or the homes of southerners against the depredations of an invading army fall flat. As many Confederate leaders confessed at the time, the point of the conflict was slavery and nothing else.

But if America was going to get beyond the bitter animosity of a bloody war, it required the victors to treat the losers with respect. The famous scene in which Gettysburg hero Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain ordered the Union forces to salute the defeated Confederates as they laid down their arms and surrendered their flags at Appomattox was, in the view of most Americans at the time and for many decades after that, both appropriate and necessary if the war was truly to end.

It was this spirit of mutual respect, along with racism, that made films such as Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind popular. The same belief that the divisions that created such a terrible conflict must be put in the past was also responsible for the popularity of Civil War commemorations, which peaked during the conflict’s centennial and have continued ever since, with reenactments becoming accepted pastimes.

Reenacting World War II, in which some portray Nazi units, is far more popular in the U.S. and Britain than it is in Germany, where wearing any uniform or insignia of the SS or other Nazi Party regalia is illegal. But it has never been as acceptable for people to pretend to be Wehrmacht soldiers as it has been to pay homage to the Army of Northern Virginia. It remains to be seen if Civil War reenactors are going to be canceled along with Confederate monuments. But until now, playing soldier by putting on the gray or butternut uniforms of the Confederacy was not considered as creepy and bizarre as pretending to be a Nazi.

Whatever one’s opinion about the staying power of the Black Lives Matter movement, it has helped fundamentally alter contemporary perceptions of the Confederacy. Confederate nostalgia, once considered normal for southerners to honor as part of their communal heritage, and without which classic books by mainstream authors such as William Faulkner and Shelby Foote are impossible to understand, may likely similarly be confined to the denizens of political fever swamps.

But even after George Floyd, any effort to erase this era of history the way Germany and Austria have consigned the Nazis to national oblivion is far too complicated to succeed easily.

One obvious obstacle is that rather than focus solely on Confederates, the iconoclasts quickly and perhaps inevitably moved on to other, more defensible statues. With woke mobs just as interested in tearing down images of explorers such as Christopher Columbus, founding fathers such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, progressives such as Theodore Roosevelt, as well as a host of other figures from the past (including those associated with the Union cause), a natural resistance to any attacks on monuments is growing.

As figures such as President Trump and Fox News host Tucker Carlson have pointed out to the cheers of many on the Right who would not otherwise sympathize with Confederate symbols, the BLM cause has become a culture war in which all of American history, not just the Confederacy, is being put on trial. With journalistic projects like the New York Times’s “1619 Project” providing the intellectual rationale for an all-out assault on America’s past, Confederate monuments are being given cover that they might not get were they the sole target of protesters.

But not even the post-George Floyd consensus on racism remotely resembles the widespread understanding in Europe that Nazis were and are beyond the pale. Had the South been purged of Confederate sympathizers in the way postwar Germany was de-Nazified, it might have been possible to erase the Confederacy except for markers to its horrors. But since a radical reconstruction policy was, however much it might have helped heal America’s wounds in the long run, always beyond the capacity of the federal government of the time to implement, that never happened.

Nor is it likely to be possible now even with the media opprobrium being directed at any symbols of the Old South. There might come a day when it will be as unthinkable for an American to show respect to any symbol of the Confederacy as it is for Germans and Austrians to pay homage to Hitler. But, due to a historical legacy that is still a long way from being erased and the more ambitious anti-American history agenda of the cancelers, the example of post-Nazi Germany and Austria is not one that the United States is likely to follow.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS.org and a columnist for the New York Post. Follow him on Twitter at @jonathans_tobin.