Thread by @EveKeneinan

At Charlottesville in 2017, there were FOUR groups:

1 People protesting the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee and the renaming the park from the Robert E. Lee Park
2 People in favor of this
3 The “Unite the Right” alt-right, neo-nazi rally
4 Antifa

It is ABSOLUTELY CLEAR that Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” refers to members of groups 1 and 2, and not at all to groups 3 and 4.

He explicitly says he doesn’t mean the Unite the Right group and the Antifa thugs.

I’m not a racist, but I am opposed to Stalineque virtue-signalling erasure of history.

Why?

It’s evil. It harms everyone of every race, because it harms everyone.

To disconnect a people from its history—good and bad—harms that people.

I can understand why some Americans would find monuments and memorials to the Confederacy upsetting, but the issue is complex. Slavery lay at the root the divide, but history is NEVER THAT SIMPLE.

American chattel slavery was a blight upon the nation, but everything comes with a cost.

One historian wrote that the British Empire, when it abolished slavery, committed “econocide”—that is, economic suicide.

If the abolition of slavery cost the British their world-spanning Empire, perhaps that was worth the cost. I think the British did the right thing—and at a high cost to themselves, as they often have done.

But we should note the cost.

The American Civil War led to—finally!—the abolition of American race-based chattel slavery. Very few people would deny that this was a GREAT GOOD. I wouldn’t. As a Christian, I’m all for the abolition of slavery—not something the world’s second largest faith can say.

The American abolition of slavery was, I repeat, a GREAT GOOD. But at what cost?

One could argue, and I do think, that the aftermath of the Civil War led to a vast expansion of the power of the Federal Government vis a vis the States of the Union, which was and is still bad.