Thirteen years ago, Brag Bowling was worried about green paint balls that had been splattered on a statue of Stonewall Jackson and the words “Death to Nazis” spray-painted on one of Robert E. Lee. Both memorials stand in the middle of roundabouts on Monument Avenue in the Virginia city of Richmond, once the capital of the Confederacy.

Bowling, who was the leader of Virginia’s Sons of Confederate Veterans organization, said the vandalism should be classified as a hate crime. “These monuments are the city’s biggest tourist attraction,” he added.

Bowling, who retired from the organization’s leadership, opposes removing or modifying Confederate monuments along the Richmond thoroughfare.

In a conversation with The Times this week, he said the violence in nearby Charlottesville prompted him to withdraw his request to hold a demonstration on Monument Avenue to preserve its memorials.

Here’s the interview, lightly edited for clarity:

What is the importance of Confederate imagery and monuments to you and to others who are concerned about this history?

Well, all of them are [important], but in particular the Robert E. Lee monument on Monument Avenue. I view him as a great man, as maybe the greatest general in American history. I also view him as the person after the war who did the most to bring the country together.

With proposals to remove his statue in Richmond and in other places, what does that mean to you?

It reminds me of what is happening in the Middle East, and I don’t think there is some grand chorus of people demanding the statue to be torn down.

It bothers me that you’ll see once the Confederate statues are gone, you’ll see the Founding Fathers gone. This is a way of erasing history and taking over, making it like a whole new country.

There is a difference between what happened with the Civil War and the Founding Fathers owning slaves, which was an established norm in the United States at that time. There are a lot of people saying that it is not fair to equate those two things. And nobody is calling for removing Founding Fathers.

Oh, sure they are. You haven’t been paying attention. It hasn’t been revved up like the Confederate statues, but they are out there.

Was Sons of Confederate Veterans involved in the marching in Charlottesville or any of the planned protests?

Not that I know of. The SCV has rules opposing people like that.

Opposing white supremacy, neo-Nazis and hate speech?

Yeah, things like that — you can get kicked out of the SCV.

It seems to me that a lot of people are pointing at one thing when really they mean another. Is this an argument about white supremacy and this term that has been coined — the “alt-right” — and isn’t that different from groups like yours that would like to see these monuments preserved very publicly and not in a museum?

It is a huge difference. Liberal leaders in places like Charlottesville and Richmond are bringing this subject, monument removal, right to the forefront. Levar Stoney, our mayor, founded a committee, which he says is made up of civic leaders and Civil War scholars. His idea is don’t tear down these monuments, but they need to be reinterpreted — put a little plaque out in front of each one.

I’m a traditionalist that likes Monument Avenue to remain the way it is, the way it has been for 100 years. None of us were even asked to be on the committee. His opinion of what each one of those monuments represents is probably 100 degrees different than the way I would look at it.

It’s best not to kick a beehive. There are literally millions of people that don’t want Monument Avenue touched, and he is kicking a beehive, because what he has done is very divisive.

President Trump’s response triggered a lot of outrage, and based on what you are saying, your organization would condemn participating in any sort of rally like this.

Oh, yeah, those people are the trash of the world, on all sides.

What does that mean, “on all sides”? The counter-protesters that showed up?

The counter-protesters and the Klan people and the white supremacists, they are all — I look at them in the same way. These counter-protesters, a lot of them came with baseball bats and the media is trying to make them look like they were just innocent bystanders, and the white racists took them down. Trump said what it was — that none of them are good, and he is right.

So you feel like he said the right thing andthat there are nice people that were participating?

The nice people were people like me [and] were there solely for protesting tearing down the monument — normal citizens. It wasn’t just the racist whites or the racist blacks or the antifa or those guys; there were people also there that were protesting normally the way you’re supposed to. The other people didn’t come to protest these monuments being torn down. They came to knock heads.

So what is next?

I had scheduled a rally at the Robert E. Lee monument to protest the tearing down of monuments close to a month ago. I applied for a permit, and last Saturday Charlottesville happened, and I had to withdraw the permit request. It’s too dangerous. I don’t want anybody getting hurt.

What would you propose? It seems like this is a moment where the country is very deeply divided. It sort of feels like a tinderbox, and a lot of other issues are getting conflated within this moment. How do you propose people can come together again and move past this?

I have not seen a division like this — probably not since 1860. There is not much that I can do about that. But I do know what I believe in, and I do not want these monuments to be touched, and I believe they were great people, and I hate this. I saw that on TV in Charlottesville and I was going, “What in the heck is going on? Look at these nuts!”

Listen to the full interview at latimes.com/politics.

christina.bellantoni @latimes.com

Twitter: @cbellantoni

Special correspondent Vera Castaneda contributed to this report.