- Joined
- Jan 12, 2016
- Location
- South Carolina
They're after UNION monuments now. Some of them anyway... how long before they find reasons to target the rest?
Americans Need to Know the Hard Truth About Union Monuments in the West
During the Civil War, Union soldiers in the West weren’t fighting to end slavery, but to annihilate and remove Native Americans.
www.theatlantic.com
Today, these sites look strikingly different. The Union soldier in Denver is gone, pulled down by protesters demonstrating against police brutality and racial inequality. Carson had a less violent end, carted off by the city in anticipation of another protest. Santa Fe’s two obelisks are now covered in plywood to cover up tags labeling them as racist memorials of genocide and the theft of Indigenous lands.
Those responsible for pulling down and tagging these monuments have not been identified, so we cannot know their motives, but some Americans might see these removals as part of a “slippery slope” that monument advocates warn against. After all, as Colorado’s governor, Jared Polis, put it, these statues are of “Union heroes of the Civil War who fought and lost their lives to end slavery.” But while many Union soldiers did fight for emancipation in the East, Union soldiers in the West fought for Native annihilation and removal. For this reason, these monuments in Denver and Santa Fe deserve to be examined with the same scrutiny as Confederate statues.