Nations at peace with themselves tear down statues and fight over history far less than nations suffering an internal or external crisis.
One of the strange knock-on effects of the recent events in Charlottesville in the American state of Virginia is that the American liberal-left has decided to pause from re-inventing the Cold War with the Soviet Union and has instead resurrected the American Civil War.
One could easily say that such things are symptomatic of a left that refuses to examine its own policies which have not only failed at the ballot box but have deeply divided America along sectarian lines.For over a year, Russia was the enemy of the self-identified patriotic liberal left. It was Russians who were meddling in US elections, it was Russians who deprived Hillary Clinton of her 'anointed' election victory and everywhere in the world, it was Russians who were the proverbial bad guys whether they were fighting terrorism in Syria or building internal bridges across the Kerch Strait.
Now though, there is a new enemy which in terms of time is an old enemy: that enemy is fellow Americans.
Just as modern Russia is not the Soviet Union neither technically nor ideologically, the states which once comprised the Confederate States of America are in the United States and have been since 1865. Nor are all of the so-called and at times self-defined alt-right from the American deep south, they are from every state in the US.
