A few days ago, council workers in New Orleans tied ropes to a 6-metre bronze statue of General Robert E Lee, the best known of the Confederate generals, and lifted him off his pedestal with a crane. Some spectators jeered, others cheered at the removal of what they saw as the symbol of the dark historical underbelly of the American South: the slavery, the secession, and the war to protect the right of one human being to own another.