Why I Went to Charlottesville

There’s been a dangerous trend recently among a small minority of loud and institutionally powerful extremists in the United States to judge the past by the standards of the present and exact justice by destroying our record of it. Instead of revering what came before us, using it as a guidepost for modern man to understand himself and have a sense of direction and purpose, these people would prefer to set the trail ablaze and render themselves lost and aimless in the wilderness. People who don’t study history are attempting to destroy the objects that allow us to study it.

The American Civil War is a complicated event in our nation’s history that often gets reduced solely to the issue of slavery, with the Union (including its five slave states) representing the battle against slavery and the Confederacy (including its abolitionists) representing the defense of slavery. One needn’t get lost in the weeds about the issue of slavery to recognize, after studying any historian’s account of the war, that there were other reasons people on both sides fought one another.

If not for General Robert E. Lee the city of Charlottesville, VA arguably wouldn’t exist. It would have been torched to the ground by General William Sherman as part of his scorched earth total war methods, a tactic Lee refused to replicate against Northern cities. Everyone living in Charlottesville would have been burned alive or driven out, black and white, young and old, male and female. All of its buildings would have been reduced to ashes. This is the most important thing to remember regarding the question of why the city has a monument to Robert E. Lee in the center of a park which until recently was named after him. Many of the people living in Charlottesville descend from those who fought to defend their city in the bloodiest war ever to be fought on the Western hemisphere, under Lee’s leadership.

A mob of extremist ideologues have recently called for the removal of Lee’s statue because he owned slaves and fought for the Confederacy. At some point they’ll tear down the Lincoln Memorial because he was a white supremacist. They’ll take Grant off the $50 because he owned slaves. They’ll blow up Mount Rushmore. Once all the white males are done away with they’ll demolish monuments to MLK for being a heteronormative male misogynist Christian. They’ll get rid of the Statue of Liberty for her white features. Every symbol of the past will be destroyed, because history is painful and, like all other things, is a social construct that can be reassembled into something else.

The destruction of the symbols of our past for extremist ideological ends isn’t new. When I visited France a couple years ago I noticed how common it is to encounter statues in public areas, cathedrals, castles, and other gorgeous old buildings, where the depicted figures had their heads chopped off. They were symbolically beheaded by the violent angry mobs of the French Revolution, who of course delivered the same treatment to the living human beings of the aristocracy. It’s an ugly sight to see in what otherwise, in my opinion, is the most beautiful country in Europe.

In March of 2001, when the Taliban dynamited the Buddhas of Bamiyan statues in Afghanistan, which were built in the years 507 and 554, they were motivated by a similar extremism and self-righteousness. While the world mourned at the loss of one of its most treasured artifacts of the ancient world, the perpetrators prided themselves in carrying out what they viewed as their religious duty.

In Syria, the country of my maternal grandparents and ancestors before them, Wahhabi extremists in various rogue armies have been carrying out similar acts of destruction against the relics of its ancient pagan past.

In a piece published on CNN, Sturt Manning writes “ISIS, like so many iconoclastic extremist groups through history, seeks to destroy the record of the past. In the past week, video has circulated showing neatly dressed figures wielding rather new-looking sledgehammers and destroying archaeological objects in the Mosul Museum. The spectacle would be ridiculous and pathetic if it were not so tragic.”

What remains of the historic Temple of Bel, dating back to 32AD, after being blown up by ISIS in Palmyra, Syria. © Joseph Eid / AFP

The Unite The Right rally was presented by its organizer and head speakers as an event that was open to all, no matter your beliefs, to set differences aside and come together for the purpose of defending the Robert E. Lee monument from being removed. Under this premise, I gladly went.

The Experience Itself

The first thing I saw when I arrived in Charlottesville was a volunteer medic wrapping bandages around the bleeding head of a man on the ground who had just been attacked by armed “counter-protesters.” While pouring saline into his eyes, the medic asked him if he knew what day it was.

“August, 12th, 2017,” he screamed out in response.

He was tossed into an ambulance along with several other nearby injured demonstrators. It was noon, the time when the rally was scheduled to begin, and the police already ended it. Charlottesville, VA had been declared to be in a national state of emergency. A police helicopter was overhead.

A man with a bullhorn and a walkie-talkie told us to follow him over to McIntire Park, a short walk away. There were maybe about fifty to seventy of us being led out of the area where the event was supposed to take place, most of whom were young, well dressed, and clean-cut, except for the ones covered in blood or who had been recently maced. Amid that were a few unbathed ruffians with tattooed swastikas and National Socialist Movement banners, some of whom had twitching facial muscles, either from adrenaline leftover from fighting earlier in the day or crystal meth withdrawal.

As we slowly made our way over, college aged folk in passing cars periodically screamed obscenities, or silently drove by with their their phone cameras out. A few elderly locals sitting in front of their houses with rebel flags and shook our hands and exclaimed “hail Dixie!”

Just before arriving at the park, word went around that the National Guard had been called. There was a fear that we were being led to the park as a trap, to be arrested on site. Having arrived after the initial violence, I was more cool-headed and unshaken, but, having not slept much on the bus I took down from New York City, everything felt like a strange delirious dream.

In the park, there were other demonstrators recovering from earlier attacks, patching up injuries, and cleaning up mace. By everyone’s account, the armed counter-protesters initiated all of the violence. The police failed to separate the two sides from one another, despite weaponry being brought to the event, and the expected chaos broke out. Everyone considered this to be the result the city of Charlottesville wanted, and given the transparant political bias of its government officials against the demonstrators I’m inclined to believe the same.

Nothing was going on in the park and there was no reason being there, so my friends and I quickly made our way out, passing the shuttle vans that showed up to get people out of the park and take them to places unknown. My friends accompanying me were all U.S. military veterans, and one of them who worked in Communications noticed a military surveillance tower in the middle of the park we were led to.

We walked back to our hotel alongside some of the aforementioned neo-Nazi degenerates carrying swastika banners and wearing t-shirts with Hitler on them. Counter-protesters holding signs about love and tolerance showed up to wave them in all of our faces. As much as such sentimentalism makes me cringe, I wanted to tell them, “yeah, I agree with you. But what does that have to do with the Lee statue you want removed?” That would have been ridiculous, of course. Clearly these people playing dress-up as cartoon Nazis didn’t show up for the Lee statue, regardless of any rhetoric about “uniting the right.” We split off from them when we saw a crowd of armed, stinky, slovenly counter-protesters, avoiding unnecessary conflicts that may have broken out shortly thereafter.

The police helicopter from earlier was still above us. My friend made a comment about how it’s been up in the air for a long time, and seems like it would need to refuel soon.

When we arrived at our hotel, we heard about a man crashing his car into a group of counter-protesters and killing a girl. Additionally, a police helicopter had apparently crashed. The national news was repeating images of the horrific scene with the driver mowing into a crowded street, and of the combat earlier in the day near Lee Park that we had fortunately arrived too late to experience firsthand. The event was described as a “white supremacist gathering,” and there was no mention at all about violence initiated by the counter-protesters or how many among the injured were on the side of the demonstrators. What we saw on television was far uglier than what we could see out of our window, enough so that the President came on and addressed it.

I went out to eat and have a beer with my friends, and then decided to make my way back to New York City early. The day had clearly resulted in utter disaster, and I had no interest in sticking around any longer.

The Takeaway

Despite the event being shut down before it could even begin, three people dying and twenty people hospitalized, the general consensus among the head speakers was that it was a “massive success” because of how many people showed up and how much exposure it got. They viewed the National Guard’s response and the declaration of a State of Emergency as a validation that they represented a “real threat to the system.”

Many of these speakers were white nationalists, and out of convenience made no effort to correct the media’s portrayal of the event as being first and foremost about white identity. Prominent attendees among the demonstrators such as Andrew Duncomb, a black Southerner who has been active in defending the removal of Confederate monuments, and Michael Malice, a Jewish libertarian and political author, would paint a different picture, if only there was a desire for that picture to be painted.

The fans of these opportunists who considered the day a success were likewise accepting of that framing that the event was basically an anime convention for white nationalists, who might as well have met in any other park, with or without any statues on the verge of removal. For many, the primary purpose in being there was to promote their ideological aims, pet issues, e-celebrity status, or podcast paywall subscriptions.

I think the event was indeed a massive success for those who declared it as such. I also think it was a massive success for the violent communist groups who showed up to shut down the demonstration and who initiated the violence. It was, however, a massive failure for those of us who attended because we actually wanted the Robert E. Lee statue to remain in place. Maybe that was the point, and maybe the whole thing was a trap.

Since Charlottesville, efforts around the country to remove or destroy statues have gone into overdrive. There’s now a petition for the removal of Confederate monuments in my hometown of Dallas, TX. A Confederate statue in Durham, NC was demolished by an angry mob on Thursday, and then kicked while it was down, despite being a broken inanimate object that can’t feel pain, just to demonstrate the level of stupidity and dishonor that these people have. VICE published an article calling for Mount Rushmore to be blown up. A plaque commemorating Jefferson Davis at a state highway west of Phoenix was tarred and feathered, and a nearby memorial to Confederate soldiers with the words “a nation that forgets its past has no future” fittingly engraved on it was spraypainted. And just to demonstrate that they’re equally hostile to both sides of the Civil War, a bust of Abraham Lincoln in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago was set on fire and defaced.

There were obviously many problems with the rally but for purposes of brevity I’ll say quite simply that the “big tent” approach to activism is clearly a mistake, and that many of the tactics of the alt-right are designed for the purpose of pissing off leftists or gaining attention/money rather than achieving real ends. In a similar way that communists showed up to anti-war demonstrations I organized or participated in and turned the whole thing into an opportunity to indoctrinate people into the virtues of communism, these white nationalists were a parasitic element that, in this case, succeeded in devouring its host entirely. There is no reason to trust any of these people, and since I am not myself a white nationalist there is no reason to include them in anything I do.

Is the destruction of American historical monuments really worth the deaths and injuries that occurred in Charlottesville? Is the chance to superficially showboat about white identity and trigger leftists really worth that cost?