Confederate Heroes Should Have Never Had Statues To Begin With

     I am a student of WWII, maybe a bit of a WWII nerd, and I know something of the Nazis. The Nazis affected my outlook on life so much that I doubted the existence of God for several years because their deeds in history were so barbaric. So I say, with hesitation but bolstered with an urgency to stand up for what's right. it is my understanding that most of the protesters in Charlottesville were protesting the removal of a confederate memorial.  This is not a Nazi monument and in most pictures  I see confederate flags not swastikas.  These people did have a permit to protest and although many of them no doubt have offensive and disturbing ideas about race,  they had a permit to protest as they did and even had the ACLU defending them in court to get the permit.  Can you get any more liberal than the ACLU?   The violence was started by counter protesters that DID NOT have a permit and they provoked the right wingers with violence.   Hopefully I don't have  to say this didn't justify running over those poor people and killing the one young lady.  The President is blaming BOTH sides for the unfortunate events of this past week. He's only stating a fact of the matter, and as blunt and bombastic as he is with the media, I think he's right.

     As for the monuments themselves ?  i have always been a little puzzled by Confederate statues.  Didn't they lose the war ?  Why did the US allow confederate statues after such a horribly bloody war ?  I think the north was anxious to get past the war and move on, so they decided not to step in to stop any aggrandizement of the Confederate  heroes  lest they provoke the south.  I can understand it, but in a way they dragged the whole thing out and it might have been wiser to not allow anything other than memorials to the war dead.  This would have allowed for a place of honor for all those families that surely were grieving.  I think looking back it would have been better to have never allowed them to be erected  at all under the auspice they were leaders of a traitorous rebellion against the country.  Of course the south would have gotten huffy over the restriction  but they would have gotten over it.  General Lee himself is known to have been opposed to any statue or tribute to him and expressed a preference that the nation move past the painful Civil War.  Today we have to deal with the issue and understand there are a lot of people who still feel strongly about their southern heritage and see the Confederacy as a stand against an oppressive federal government.  The process needs to be sensitive so that we can, in consensus, finally get the Civil War behind us and move forward together as a united country.