When talking about Confederate monuments, Donald Trump and his Alt-Right and Nazi supporters use the words “history” and “culture” as if they are synonymous. They are not. A few days ago, in his tepid defense of the Confederate States of America, Trump said: “You’re changing history. You’re changing culture.” Today, in his full-throated defense of oppression, he tweeted: “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.”

The point of tearing down Confederate monuments is not to change history. History can’t be changed anyway. Marty McFly is not hopping into a DeLorean to go back and woo Robert E. Lee before he falls in love with Stonewall Jackson.

The point of tearing down the monuments is ABSOLUTELY to change the culture. The culture of the Confederacy survived Appomattox. It survived Reconstruction. It survived integration. The culture of white supremacy has survived and thrived and, just currently, runs the government of the United States of America.

If you doubt, for a second, that the culture enshrined by these monuments is not the enemy, then just look at the kinds of people who are coming out to defend them. I was largely agnostic about the removal of Confederate monuments until I started listening to the people who want them to remain. I don’t think I’m the only one.

The fact that Nazis and Nazi sympathizers so quickly equate people like Lee and Jefferson Davis with people like George Washington actually proves that it is right to attack their culture, if for no other reason that to stop them from appropriating our history.

You see, unlike the Alt-Right and the president, I’m able to distinguish between different groups of white people. They do not “all look the same” to me. Only the white supremacists seem to think that whiteness itself is some kind of fundamental human condition. It’s not hard for me to see the difference between “Confederate” revolutionaries (white men who fought to preserve the institution of slavery, even if they were too broke to actually own any slaves), and “American” revolutionaries (white slavers who fought against monarchy, established republican government, and engaged in ethnic cleansing).

BOTH groups are assholes, but only the latter group left something behind worth celebrating in stone. Americans left behind a culture where, eventually, one of the very people they themselves would have enslaved would be able to hold the same office as the slavers. The Confederates left behind a culture that is, still, based on racial animus and hatred. Both legacies are complex, but they are not at all equivalent.

It bemuses me that there are so many white people who want to claim the Confederacy as part of and equal to “white culture,” when there is so much other white culture they could glom onto. ‘Cause I’ll tell you one thing, I don’t care how many people like his music, you ain’t gonna see no statue to R. Kelly going up in Chicago.

Why these white people want to equate some of their best men with some of their worst is inexplicable, UNTIL YOU REMEMBER that the racial oppression supported by Confederate war heroes IS A FEATURE, not a bug.

Yesterday, Trump’s personal lawyer John Dowd forwarded a total hit job on George Washington to conservative journalists. And yet, you don’t see many conservatives mounting a defense of George freaking Washington from these ignorant attacks. So it falls to me, a black man who would have be enslaved by the man, to defend his good name.

Dowd’s forward included this graphic and I’m willing to deal with it, point-by-point, since Washington’s own white descendants are too afraid of pissing off the Nazis in their families:

* “Both owned slaves”

Yes. And that’s why Abraham Lincoln gets the title of “best American President.” Holding slaves is a demerit on one’s historical record. It’s not a “natural” thing that everybody did so we should look past it.

* “Both rebelled against the ruling government.”

Speaking of Lincoln, it’s instructive to note that Washington rebelled against a monarch he wasn’t allowed to vote for who was head of a government he wasn’t allowed to participate in. Bobby Lee rebelled against a democratically elected president of the United States. Washington rebelled against monarchy, Lee rebelled against democracy. If you can’t see the difference, you don’t really believe in anything Washington was fighting for.

* “Both men’s battle tactics are still taught at West Point.”

So this is where Dowd’s message starts to make the turn from defending Lee as a nebulous “leader” into defending him as a great “war hero.” That’s important because Washington has a ton of stuff he did off the battlefield (and off the plantation) that are deserving of praise. You can’t draw a false equivalency between Washington and Lee if you look at their life’s work, because Washington outpaces Lee in every possible way. So you have to reduce Washington to a mere general.

As a general, Washington was kind of average. But I’m always amazed by how many Southerners, and Americans in general, don’t seem to know that Gettysburg was an all-time historical military blunder that was entirely Lee’s fault and cost the South the only chance it had at winning the Civil War. Lee attacked a fortified position, uphill, THREE DUMB ASS TIMES, on the military theory that his Southern white boys were just going to be somehow preternaturally better at overcoming human frailty. Lee famously told what soldiers survived Picket’s last, disastrous charge: “All this has been my fault — it is I that have lost this fight.”

Washington, on the other hand, studiously avoided the kind of crushing, all-out defeat that would have ended the American Revolution on the battlefield before the political war could be turned to his favor. If you needed a general to fight your one, asymmetrical war, to start your country until the French decided to help you or not, you’d take Washington over Lee any day.

* “Both saved America”

… Wut? Like, one guy founded America, the other fought against it. How can you be an “American” and believe this line to be true?

* “Both were great men, great Americans, and great commanders”

As I think we’ve established, both were flawed men, only one is known for being an American, and Lee is a “great commander” only to the extent you think getting your ass kicked in Pennsylvania when you didn’t even have to fight there is “great.”

* “Neither man is any different than Napoleon, Shaka Zulu, Alexander the Great, Ramses II, etc.”

Napoleon = Emperor of the French.

Shaka = King of Zululand

Alexander III = King of Macedon

Ramses II = Pharaoh of Egypt

Robert E. Lee = Army of Northern Virginia.

George Washington = “[O]vergrown military establishments, which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty.”

Oh, I see a difference.

* “You cannot be against General Lee and be for George Washington, there is literally no difference between the two men.”

In fact, being against people like Robert Lee and for people like George Washington is the very foundation of our nation.

There will always be pathetic oppressors willing to raise arms to protect their privileges. And there will always be heroes who fight for freedom against that oppression.

Freedom must win the day. Our culture, our shared, American culture, must be with the freedom fighters, not with the white supremacists who would fight to place people in bondage.

If a statue to Robert E. Lee, of all people, represents your culture, then it has to come down. For you, and your culture, are the enemy of everything this country stands for.

Trump ‘Sad’ Over Removal of ‘Our Beautiful Statues’ [New York Times]