{"id":11366,"date":"2018-08-27T15:22:28","date_gmt":"2018-08-27T22:22:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=11366"},"modified":"2018-08-27T15:22:28","modified_gmt":"2018-08-27T22:22:28","slug":"the-ideology-of-statue-smashing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-ideology-of-statue-smashing\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ideology of Statue Smashing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness<\/p>\n<p>Statue smashing is back in the news.<\/p>\n<p>One night last week, University of North Carolina students pulled down \u201cSilent Sam,\u201d a bronze monument to students and faculty of the university who fought as Confederate soldiers in the Civil War.<\/p>\n<p>The bronze figure is portrayed as static, quiet and without ammunition for his gun\u2014and facing northward\u2014apparently a postwar \u201csilent sentinel\u201d impotent, but still defiant.<\/p>\n<p>The Confederate states fought the Civil War to preserve slavery, if not expand it. One can certainly object to the state showcasing an icon that can be seen as inseparable from that evil institution. Yet not all Confederate soldiers thought slavery was their own cause. In North Carolina, about 5 percent of the population, or a quarter of family households, held slaves. The vast majority of the population did not. No doubt some of the non-slaveholding citizenry opposed the idea of indentured servitude. Yet somehow, they squared the circle of fighting for a bad cause by redefining it as protecting their ancestral homeland.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/amgreatness.com\/2018\/08\/26\/the-ideology-of-statue-smashing\/\">Read the full article here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness Statue smashing is back in the news. One night last week, University of North Carolina students pulled down \u201cSilent Sam,\u201d a bronze monument to students and faculty of the university who fought as Confederate soldiers in the Civil War. The bronze figure is portrayed as static, quiet and without [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1132,1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2Xk","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11718,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/waging-war-against-the-dead\/","url_meta":{"origin":11366,"position":0},"title":"Waging War Against the Dead","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 14, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness The 21st century is in danger of becoming an era of statue smashing and historical erasure. Not since the iconoclasts of the Byzantine Empire or the epidemic of statue destruction during the French Revolution has the world seen anything like the current war on\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Civil War&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Civil War","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/civil-war\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10598,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-strange-case-of-confederate-cool\/","url_meta":{"origin":11366,"position":1},"title":"The Strange Case of Confederate Cool","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 26, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Leftists love Johnnie Reb in movies and songs. But statues? Not so much. How exactly did the Left romanticize the Lost Cause Confederacy, and by extension its secession and efforts to preserve slavery? To use a shopworn phrase, \u201cIt\u2019s complicated.\u201d Good Ol\u2019 Rebels Well\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;The South&quot;","block_context":{"text":"The South","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-south\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10586,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/10586-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":11366,"position":2},"title":"09\/15\/2017 From An Angry Reader:\u2026","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 15, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"09\/15\/2017 From An Angry Reader: Angry Reader Sam Davidson Victor, I enjoy reading your articles in the National Review. I never understood why this country has statues that honor people that took up arms against the United States. I do not think there are any statues honoring Lord Cornwallis, General\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Angry Reader&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Angry Reader","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/angry-reader\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10505,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/our-war-against-memory\/","url_meta":{"origin":11366,"position":3},"title":"Our War against Memory","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 22, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review \u00a0 The new abolitio memoriae \u00a0 Back to the Future Romans emperors were often a bad lot \u2014 but usually confirmed as such only in retrospect. Monsters such as Nero, of the first-century A.D. Julio-Claudian dynasty, or the later psychopaths Commodus and Caracalla, were\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Civil War&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Civil War","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/civil-war\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12424,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/on-name-changing-and-statue-toppling\/","url_meta":{"origin":11366,"position":4},"title":"On Name Changing and Statue Toppling","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 12, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review General David Petraeus wrote an impassioned article in the\u00a0Atlantic\u00a0this week about the need to change the names of military bases that for over a century have been named after Confederate generals and to recalibrate iconic remembrances such as statues commemorating Robert E. Lee at\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5133,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/shermans-war\/","url_meta":{"origin":11366,"position":5},"title":"Sherman&#8217;s War","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 9, 1999","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson American Heritage The General's March through Georgia is usually remembered as a ruthless campaign of indiscriminate terror, waged against helpless civilians rather than southern soldiers. But Victor Davis Hanson argues that it was brillant, effective, and, above all, humble. By the fall of 1846 no army\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;1999&quot;","block_context":{"text":"1999","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/1999\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11366"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11366"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11367,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11366\/revisions\/11367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}