[Magdalen] Ruckus at U. Virginia

[Cantor03 at aol.com]

There have been a spate of demonstrations about the removal
of Confederate War monuments in the USA, and this includes
that at the U. Virginia campus secondary to the removal of a
statue of Robert E. Lee, the supreme commander of the
Confederate Armies.  I gather that dozens, if not hundreds of  these
memorials are scattered across the USA South, and dating from
the immediate post Civil War period.  They feature either a
generic southern soldier, or one or more of the commanders of  the
Confederate Army.
 
Whatever opinions may be,  I wonder, however, how these
memorials came to be in the first place.  This is especially  true
of the depiction of the commanders such as Lee and Jackson.
I can still remember vividly flying out of Atlanta Hatfield Airport
right over the Stone Mountain, GA with its three confederate
figures (Lee, Jackson, and Davis, the latter President of the
Confederate States.  It was a kind of surprize.
 
It would seem to have been sensible to discourage these  memorials
from the outset and thus spare the country the pain of the move
to remove them.  Oddly, I think Spain may have chosen the
better route by memorializing the dead of both sides of the Spanish
Civil War in the same monuments:
 
_https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valle_de_los_Ca%C3%ADdos_ 
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valle_de_los_Caídos) 
 
 
 
DS.