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I don't really get calling Confederates traitors. I get that they are the baddies in the whole civil war thing, but traitors? I assume that they had the right to secede and the war was inevitable anyway.

Isn't the 4th of July literally a holiday in the US? That's totally a treason to the British empire.

It's my biased european perspective though.

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If it's helpful, many of the confederate statues were actually put up many years after the end of the civil war explicitly to intimidate black people/minorities and to continue to establish that white supremacy is still something to be celebrated via statues. In this context the celebration of the 4th of july establishes the independence of the united states against an empire, while the statures are made to enforce white supremacy. [0].

[0] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/confederate-statues/

In many cases they were active duty military officers who broke their oaths of service (e.g. Robert E. Lee), which tends to be mentioned a lot in the rationale for using that term.

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