Robert F. Kennedy can be described as a nonconformist. His entire campaign is based on a refusal to conform to the norms. Kennedy is the enemy of conventional wisdom.
Kennedy was asked by host Tim Pool in a “Timcast IRL” on Friday about his thoughts on the removal of Confederate monuments and statues across the country. He said he “doesn’t think “it’s a good, healthy thing for any culture to erase history.”
He said: “I have an immediate visceral reaction to the attacks against those statues.” “There were Confederate heroes who did not have slaves, and I have a visceral response against destroying the past.” “t’s not right, I think we should celebrate our differences.”
He said, “We should be celebrating the good qualities in everyone. We would have to erase history if we wanted to find all the people in history who were virtuous.”
I agree with all Kennedy said, except that the “Confederate Heroes” didn’t have slaves. About 10% of Southern soldiers in the Civil War had slaves. This is largely due to the Southern Congress’ exemptions for slaveholders and slave overseers. South was most afraid of a slave uprising, and this is why, even in 1864-1865, when they desperately needed soldiers, some Southern Governors refused to release their state militias.
Kennedy was wrong to suggest that Southern soldiers who did not own slaves were absolved of sin. What was the Southern soldier fighting for?
American Civil War Museum:
It was not necessary to own slaves to support the Confederate vision of a nation based on slavery or to be afraid of destruction. The proslavery movement had implications for all white Southerners, as theorists proclaimed loudly and consistently that abolishing slavery would lead to a rape-and-murder cataclysm. Confederates rallied against “abolitionist armies” to protect their families because they expected this outcome.
You can justify the Southern rebellion in many ways. For example, the South fought off an “invasion.” The conclusion that cannot be avoided is that soldiers or white Southerners did not have to own slaves to support the cause of creating an entire slave nation right in the middle of the United States. Any amount of whitewashing cannot remove this stain.
Kennedy has a point, but he is also right. We’ll erase much of history if we judge the past on one criterion.
Kennedy stated that “values change over time and we must be able to live with our ancestors, who may not have agreed with us in every way and did things which are now considered immoral or wrong.” “Maybe we celebrated other qualities, and Robert E. Lee was a leader with extraordinary qualities.”
This is the real takeaway. People aren’t one-dimensional sticks that you can shape into whatever you want. They are complex beings and to reduce them down to their simplest elements, then pick and choose the parts that you wish to blame them for, is intellectually dishonest and anti-intellectual.
Kennedy continues to delight and surprise. He won’t win. He’s not going to win, but he will make the race more interesting as we move into summer.
