Confederate monuments are not needed to represent Southern pride

The argument

The argument concedes the premise most often advanced against removal, that the monuments stand for Southern pride, and then disputes that they are needed for it. During the Civil War, statues were put up to honor the Confederate soldiers and generals. That was their purpose, and it was tied to a specific conflict. Now that the Civil War is long over, the occasion for commemorating its combatants has passed, and the statues can be taken down without anything that still exists being lost. What they do still carry is connotation. These are figures who fought on a particular side of a particular war, and the monuments have negative connotations for that reason, connotations that attach to the Confederacy specifically rather than to the region, its people, or its culture. That distinction is the heart of the argument. Southern identity is not reducible to four years of secession. The South has many reasons to be proud of their culture: its music, its writing, its food, its churches, and the communities and people who built them. Any of these could be commemorated in public space, and monuments to them would represent the region to a far wider range of the people who actually live in it than statues of Confederate generals do. The choice is therefore not between Southern pride and no Southern pride. It is between one set of monuments and a better set. The southern ex-confederate states can have better monuments to exhibit, and removing the existing ones leaves the pride intact while removing what is objectionable about how it is currently expressed. Because Confederate monuments are not needed to represent Southern pride, and it is not necessary to celebrate confederates, proponents argue, they should be removed.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The statues are a representation of Southern history. The Southern ex-confederate doesn’t take pride in the idea of slavery or separation of the states. The statues are reverenced as historical figures. If they should be taken down because they have connotations, perhaps other monuments should be taken down too. Mount Rushmore was taken from the Sioux tribe without compensation. Not only that, but the heads were carved by a Ku Klux Klan sympathizer named Gutzon Borglum. Therefore, all controversial monuments should be taken down if that’s the issue. It is incorrect that only winners of wars are able to commemorate important historical figures. History tends to become incorrect if written only by the winners.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Confederate monuments currently honor the history of the southern ex-confederate states. No one honors the confederate side of the civil war anymore.