Opinion: Are confederate monuments a threat to America?

Earlier this month, the city of New Orleans removed four Confederate monuments – a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, a monument to the battle of Liberty Place and Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard.

According to the city’s mayor, Mitch Landrieu, a Democrat, the statues were brutal reminders of slavery and symbols of oppression of black people.

“These monuments celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy,” said Landrieu in a May 19 speech. “Ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, ignoring the terror that it actually stood for.”

Many opponents are unhappy with the removal of the historical monuments, claiming they are a desecration of the city’s history, and an Orwellian attempt to erase history. Detractors fear that Landrieu and his allies will not stop with just the four monuments removed a few weeks ago.

“I ask you, Mitch, should the Pyramids in Egypt be destroyed since they were built entirely from slave labor?” wrote Frank B. Stewart Jr., a white New Orleans native in a two-page advertisement in The Advocate. The Roman Coliseum “was built by slaves, who lived horrible lives under Roman oppression, but it still stands today and we learn so much from seeing it.”

Malcolm Suber, an adjunct professor of political science at Southern University at New Orleans and chief organizer of Take ‘Em Down NOLA, the primary anti-statue group that is aligned with Mayor Landrieu, wants all monuments, street signs and school names associated with white supremacists to be taken down.

Suber, an avowed Marxist-Leninist, wants the removal of not just the Confederate monuments, but renaming every street name, school, park or monument that his group finds offensive, including statues to Andrew Jackson in the French Quarter and the statue of city founder Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville on Decatur Street, also in the French Quarter.

According to the City of New Orleans Monuments Removal Ordinance dated December 1, 2015, the monuments had to be removed because they “…honor, praise, or foster ideologies which are in conflict with the requirements of equal protection for citizens as provided by the constitution and laws of the United States, the state, or the laws of the city and suggests the supremacy of one ethnic, religious, or racial group over another.”

This is a dangerous game that Landrieu, Democrats and leftists are playing. They want to erase the history of the South and the Confederacy by removing historical statues that they find offensive.

Already, Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh is considering removal of some of her city’s Confederate monuments. Baltimore liberals like Pugh want to dismantle a statue of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney, a Democrat former slave owner who wrote the disastrous 1857 Dred Scott v. Stanford decision, which found that no black person, whether free or slave, was a U.S. citizen, but merely property of slave owners. Of the nine justices on Supreme Court at the time, the seven who voted for slavery were Democrats, but the two dissenting justices were Republications (Justices John McLean and Benjamin R. Curtis).

Historically, the Democrat Party has defended slavery, started the Civil War, opposed Reconstruction, founded the Ku Klux Klan, imposed segregation and fought against civil rights acts, according to Carol Swain, a Vanderbilt University professor.

But the proponents of removing Confederate monuments – both in New Orleans and Baltimore – have no intention at stopping with Confederate soldiers and pesky U.S. Supreme Court Justices.

They have an agenda, and they have George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson (Roger Taney had been Jackson’s Attorney General), James Madison, and others, in their cross hairs.

Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. George Washington owned slaves too. Even Andrew Jackson was guilty of owning slaves. Here’s the logical conclusion from the New Orleans Removal Ordinance: If Lee must go because he was guilty of owning slaves, so too must Andrew Jackson’s statue in Jackson Square in the French Quarter.

Where does it end?

Next, the left will propose dynamiting Mount Rushmore National Memorial in the Black Hills of South Dakota, eliminating white slave owners like U.S. presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson because our cultural Marxists comrades find the Founding Fathers offensive and not worthy of 21-st century “social justice” values.

Let’s replace Robert E. Lee with Spike Lee.

But wait, let’s not stop there. There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of “offensive” Confederate monuments and street names nationwide to erase.

Not only will Confederates and U.S. presidents be targeted, but women too. Consider Joan of Arc.

“Joanie on the Pony,” a heroine of the Hundred Years War, will soon be in the crosshairs of the boneheaded Bolsheviks, who find the 15^th century white woman a threat to “diversity.”

White Christian warriors like Joan of Arc, whose golden statue sits in the heart of the New Orleans French Quarter, will soon be threatened by the intolerant left.

Why stop with Joanie? Why shouldn’t we replace the equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson with a monument to Baroness Micaela Pontalba, the Spanish female entrepreneur who built the two apartment buildings that flank the Presbytere and Cabildo on Jackson Square? Old Hickory has had his run; it’s time for some good old 21 st century diversity.

By the way, the French Quarter sounds too “racist” to me; let’s change that too, to the Latin Quarter. We want to be inclusive and embrace all Latin people that immigrated to Louisiana, Italians, Spaniards, Mexicans and others. Right?

But wait. What about our African brothers?

We need more monuments for them too. Let’s glorify America’s great black unifiers. We should consider future multicultural monuments to: Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan, Jessie Jackson and Maxine Waters.

Don’t these cultural warriors deserve a place on Mount Rushmore, Lee Circle, or the Mall in Washington, D.C.?

Why stop there. Seattle has a monument to Vladimir Lenin, one of the most brutal communist killers of the 20st century.

Shouldn’t New Orleans glorify murders like Lenin?

While we’re musing about murderous Marxists, why not glorify Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the infamous atheist assassin who killed thousands of Cuban Christians for the Castro criminals.

Perhaps we should glorify Che on the streets on New Orleans instead of poor old Robert E. Lee, that evil slave-owning white guy who rebelled against Yankee imperialism.

Today, we live in confusing times; when good is perceived as evil, and evil is proclaimed as good.

Politicians – looking for their next hand out – deceive voters by tricking them into believing century-old monuments are a threat to their existence and the social harmony of the community. But most of us know that the divide-and-concur strategy in nothing more than lies and deception. It’s a distraction from the real problems that plague cities like New Orleans, including crime, lack of good-paying jobs, terrible public schools and decaying infrastructure.

After 150 years, the Confederacy’s enduring power continues to divide people over race and history in modern day New Orleans.

But removing what some consider to be offensive monuments and statues is easy to do; fixing potholes in the streets of New Orleans and reducing the homicide rate are not so easy to accomplish.

Mitch, got any clever solutions on those two fronts?