Removing Confederate Monuments and Renaming Confederate-Named Military Bases

[laughing dog]

Your hysterical rhetoric was
"Let the mob burn down the entire United States, starting with Wendy's. Let the mob be judge, jury and executioner in your brave new world. Let the mob do whatever it fucking wants to public and private property, because it represents the clear majority and you have personally been fucking complicit your entire life, and now you can assuage your impotence and ineptitude by approving the actions of crazed young people destroying public property with abandon. " Please pay attention to what you actually write.

I can see what I wrote, laughing dog. I do not ascribe any beliefs or utterances to you, except your feelings of guilt.

You wrote I was personally complicit in this. The implication is clear. And then you repeated the crack about my feelings of guilt. As usual, your explanation is unconvincing.

None have explained to me why if a town or city had a clear majority that opposed a statue why the statue would remain. None. Not a single person.

That is utter bullshit. There are states in which it is against state law to remove the statue. That has been explained numerous times by numerous people. Sites that list and explain those laws have been linked.
So, you literally have no clue what you are posting about.

You prattle on about how a clear majority should prevail in a democracy without any observable knowledge about a representative form of government in the USA. We don't have a democracy. We elect representatives from electoral districts - districts that are either formed by elected officials which are usually formed to enhance their party's chances of election (a process called gerrymandering) or by geographical lines that were set long ago and no longer represent equal amounts of voters. The result of these processes is that the representatives may not represent the will of a clear majority. This is known to most people living in the USA. Clearly you don't know this at all. Which means you don't know what you are posting about.


In a perfect world, there would be no mobs. In a less than perfect world, where a representative form of government was set up to represent the people in a fair and consistent manner, there would be no mobs. But we don't live in those worlds.

Whether you understand it or not (and there is clear evidence you are posting out of your ass) or whether you like it or not, sometimes democracy or a representative form of government gets it wrong long enough that the population gets angry and takes matters in its own hands. Of course that is not the preferred way, but it has happened throughout history in many places in the world. And sometimes that mob gets it right. Frankly, it doesn't matter if the mob represents a clear majority or not in those cases if it is acting to right a wrong or to improve society. Sometimes the ends do justify the means in the real world.

 

[Rhea]

Because the existence of better options is in dispute, and the severity problem with this method is in dispute.

Once again, lose your straw-man. We are not talking about “violence, looting and indiscriminate destruction as a means to an end.” The people with a greivance about the statuues are not the looters and they are not violent and they are mostly not indiscriminate”

Studies say otherwise. I have posted articles with references and links to research that demonstrate the efficacy of peaceful demonstration and civil disobedience. Why is that research ignored in favour of looting, rioting and idescriminate destruction of property as a means to reform?

So the fact that you use this phrase again suggests that we need to talk about it.

Earlier in the thread you wrote that you understood that the people wanting these statues gone are not the same people as the looters. Did you change your mind? Are you now deciding to conflate the looters with the statue topplers? Painting all with a broad brush and saying that they are one and the same now? Is that how you see this, or is this deliberate hyperbole? Do we need to step back the argument about whether it is appropriate to do this to discuss WHO is doing this (all over again) or are you bring this up to distract from the points of whether it is appropriate?

Earlier in the thread, I argued that the tearing down of these statues (in almost all cases) was not at all indiscriminate. It is targeted and historically protested. Are you claiming that these people suddenly don’t know what they are doing and why? Why do you think “indiscriminate destruction” perpetrators would have pull straps with them? Pull straps are not normally a tool of indiscrimnate destruction, now are they. That would be hammers and batons. But the presence of pull straps sort of proves that it is not, in fact, indiscriminate, now doesn’t it?

Earlier in the thread many people pointed out to you that toppling these statues is not violence, it is destruction. Are you choosing to use these words in your effort to conflate the person-on-person violence in protests to the people pulling down statues? Even though they are clearly not the same people?

Once again, lose your straw-man. We are not talking about “violence, looting and indiscriminate destruction as a means to an end.” The people with a greivance about the statues are not the looters and they are not violent and they are mostly not indiscriminate.

 

[Rhea]

Saw today

By Caroline Randall Williams
June 26, 2020

I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.

If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.

Dead Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to redress it. But there are still those — like President Trumpand the Senate majority leader,Mitch McConnell — who cannot understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter of “airbrushing” history, but of adding a new perspective.

I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.

According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people. Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward, and more sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.

It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.

What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South and its past. The black people I come from were owned by the white people I come from. The white people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals?

You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.

And here I’m called to say that there is much about the South that is precious to me. I do my best teaching and writing here. There is, however, a peculiar model of Southern pride that must now, at long last, be reckoned with.

This is not an ignorant pride but a defiant one. It is a pride that says, “Our history is rich, our causes are justified, our ancestors lie beyond reproach.” It is a pining for greatness, if you will, a wish again for a certain kind of American memory. A monument-worthy memory.

But here’s the thing: Our ancestors don’t deserve your unconditional pride. Yes, I am proud of every one of my black ancestors who survived slavery. They earned that pride, by any decent person’s reckoning. But I am not proud of the white ancestors whom I know, by virtue of my very existence, to be bad actors.

Among the apologists for the Southern cause and for its monuments, there are those who dismiss the hardships of the past. They imagine a world of benevolent masters, and speak with misty eyes of gentility and honor and the land. They deny plantation rape, or explain it away, or question the degree of frequency with which it occurred.

To those people it is my privilege to say, I am proof. I am proof that whatever else the South might have been, or might believe itself to be, it was and is a space whose prosperity and sense of romance and nostalgia were built upon the grievous exploitation of black life.

The dream version of the Old South never existed. Any manufactured monument to that time in that place tells half a truth at best. The ideas and ideals it purports to honor are not real. To those who have embraced these delusions: Now is the time to re-examine your position.

Either you have been blind to a truth that my body’s story forces you to see, or you really do mean to honor the oppressors at the expense of the oppressed, and you must at last acknowledge your emotional investment in a legacy of hate.

Either way, I say the monuments of stone and metal, the monuments of cloth and wood, all the man-made monuments, must come down. I defy any sentimental Southerner to defend our ancestors to me. I am quite literally made of the reasons to strip them of their laurels.

Caroline Randall Williams(@caroranwill) is the author of “Lucy Negro, Redux” and “Soul Food Love,” and a writer in residence at Vanderbilt University.

 

[Jokodo]

Thereby handing a win to the bigots who want you gone. Isn't that cowardly?

No, any more than fleeing a warzone is cowardly. My parents fled their country of birth; they were not cowards.

I guess we're making progress: you effectively just said that, as long as those statues remain in place, living under them must, for black people, feel like living in a warzone.

It might. Some of the opposition to removing the statues sure is out of a conviction that they represent a good cause, but a lot is pure inertia: Most people oppose change for the sake of change, so until and unless they clearly understand the motivation for the change, they'll defend the status quo by default. But their mind can be changed by pointing out just how much the status quo is hurtful for some people, which they might not have considered up to that point.

So, on the one hand you are saying people's minds can be changed, and on the other you are saying they can't and so the mob has to destroy the statue?

I am saying no such thing. I'm saying that direct action is sometimes more efficient at bringing a point across than lengthy debates nobody not already involved in the issue listens to (on most issues, that would be the majority. See above on inertia for what that means for the prospects of change).

 

[Rhea]

I have to say, for me, it is so sad and dispiriting to have people argue so strongly to preserve the situation of the black people in my country having to walk past, work at, drive over and do court business at places with names or likenesses glorifying their oppressors.

I think about that and it just makes me really sad for humanity that it is the choice of some people to argue, “no, keep those in place because you have to ask nicely for the statues of your oppressors to be taken down, and only if he right people agree and it’s all over now anyway, right, so what’s your complaint?”

I feel for my fellow citizens who have to fight not only the rabid racists, but also YOU, to get their condition changed. While the people who think it is right to oppress people of color, putting them in jail more often, calling them thugs and “the Blacks” and dindus and saying that it’s their own fault they are killed by police, etc, those people hear your arguments and say, “yeah, see? LOTS of people think we’re right to keep black people right where they are!”

The racists see you and hear you and they feed on you. And the oppressed, they also see you, and know there is a higher hurdle to clear because of you, yet you think you’re being fair and just, from your position of not being harmed at all by the poison of oppression, but you think you’re harmed by the actions ending it.


It really makes me so sad for people of color to know they have a harder fight (this is not news to them, of course, they’ve always known that the “moderate” white is as big a hurdle as the racist one in terms of not making change,) and it does increase my resolve to be part of the solution, instead of part of the stone anchor that holds back the progress of justice.

 

[repoman]

Another thought experiment:

Imagine that a previous legislature passed a constitutional amendment that bans removal of any monuments whatsoever. Repealing that that amendment would require a two third majority in the state legislature.

Imagine that there's an 80% majority for removing the statue in the city council, and a 60% majority in the state legislature.

Imagine further that the statue in question was explicitly and specifically erected at the initiative of known KKK members to demonstrate to the world in general, and to any black people who might be tempted to forget their place in society in particular, to demonstrate that 'even after losing the war, we still have enough influence that we can erect a monument to the defenders of the noble cause of slavery right in your face, with your tax money - do you really think they'll go after us if you die in an unexplained "accident"?'

So just to clarify, your position is that the statue should stay in place until such time as a two-third majority at the state level to repeal the constitutional amendment is reached, and there's nothing anyone can or should be doing about it before then, and anyone who tries should be held criminally responsible?

In an absurd scenario where a Constitution was amended specifically for the purpose of erecting statues to insult people, I would fund cheap statues, with the 80/60 majority's blessing, that specifically insulted by name and exploited the likeness of anyone voting against repealing the amendment, and I would place them in public places. After all, the amendment bans the removal of any monuments whatsoever. And if they still voted against it, I would increase the public ridicule of them until the amendment was repealed.

In the real South, those statues were not erected to insult anyone. They were erected to oppress black people. They were just too dishonest to call it for what it was: instead it was to revere the Glorious Past! When black people knew their place. And to remind them that even if their place had changed a little bit, they still needed to stay in it. That place right underneath the heels of white people.

Yes, but not exactly. More that their white antebellum ancestors were brave (true) and honorable (questionable) and that blacks may have been an afterthough for some of these statues. Or at least for many who liked the statues. But some were as you said.

Columbus statues were put up not to put native american in their place, but because they were irrelevant in comparison to that great man.

 

[Worldtraveller]

I have to say, for me, it is so sad and dispiriting to have people argue so strongly to preserve the situation of the black people in my country having to walk past, work at, drive over and do court business at places with names or likenesses glorifying their oppressors.

I think about that and it just makes me really sad for humanity that it is the choice of some people to argue, “no, keep those in place because you have to ask nicely for the statues of your oppressors to be taken down, and only if he right people agree and it’s all over now anyway, right, so what’s your complaint?”

I feel for my fellow citizens who have to fight not only the rabid racists, but also YOU, to get their condition changed. While the people who think it is right to oppress people of color, putting them in jail more often, calling them thugs and “the Blacks” and dindus and saying that it’s their own fault they are killed by police, etc, those people hear your arguments and say, “yeah, see? LOTS of people think we’re right to keep black people right where they are!”

The racists see you and hear you and they feed on you. And the oppressed, they also see you, and know there is a higher hurdle to clear because of you, yet you think you’re being fair and just, from your position of not being harmed at all by the poison of oppression, but you think you’re harmed by the actions ending it.


It really makes me so sad for people of color to know they have a harder fight (this is not news to them, of course, they’ve always known that the “moderate” white is as big a hurdle as the racist one in terms of not making change,) and it does increase my resolve to be part of the solution, instead of part of the stone anchor that holds back the progress of justice.

MLK had similar thoughts regarding many of the white 'allies' of his time. Honestly, we'd make more progress if those so called allies (who, I believe, honestly think they're helping) would just STFU.

 

[Toni]

In the real South, those statues were not erected to insult anyone. They were erected to oppress black people. They were just too dishonest to call it for what it was: instead it was to revere the Glorious Past! When black people knew their place. And to remind them that even if their place had changed a little bit, they still needed to stay in it. That place right underneath the heels of white people.

Yes, but not exactly. More that their white antebellum ancestors were brave (true) and honorable (questionable) and that blacks may have been an afterthough for some of these statues. Or at least for many who liked the statues. But some were as you said.

Columbus statues were put up not to put native american in their place, but because they were irrelevant in comparison to that great man.

You are correct: Some of the statues were specifically erected to honor the 'fallen heroes' of The War Between The States. But some were erected long after the Reconstruction period, at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement specifically to remind black people that they were slaves once and should know their place.

And yes, Columbus statues were erected not to oppress Native Americans, who, by the time these statues were erected, were largely erased from American culture, except as props in cowboy movies.

 

[Politesse]

Americans don't care about Haitian lives now, they couldn't possibly be roused to care about Haitian lives in 1500.

 

[Worldtraveller]

Americans don't care about Haitian lives now, they couldn't possibly be roused to care about Haitian lives in 1500.

This.

 

[Lion IRC]

Violent mobs are not any kind of way to take down public property.

That is counterfactual. Clearly they an effective way to take down public property. Come on, please stop making grandiose "principled" statements that are false.

Its true. Violent mobs are an effective way of getting things done.
https://www.history.com/topics/holocaust/kristallnacht

 

[Arctish]

Violent mobs are not any kind of way to take down public property.

That is counterfactual. Clearly they an effective way to take down public property. Come on, please stop making grandiose "principled" statements that are false.

Its true. Violent mobs are an effective way of getting things done.
https://www.history.com/topics/holocaust/kristallnacht

View attachment 28420

No one is saying it's the preferred method.

Not unless you are.

Are you?

 

[Metaphor]

That is utter bullshit. There are states in which it is against state law to remove the statue.

Who makes the law? If there was a clear majority against the statues, the law would be repealed.

You prattle on about how a clear majority should prevail in a democracy without any observable knowledge about a representative form of government in the USA. We don't have a democracy. We elect representatives from electoral districts - districts that are either formed by elected officials which are usually formed to enhance their party's chances of election (a process called gerrymandering) or by geographical lines that were set long ago and no longer represent equal amounts of voters. The result of these processes is that the representatives may not represent the will of a clear majority. This is known to most people living in the USA. Clearly you don't know this at all. Which means you don't know what you are posting about.

In this scenario, all the gerrymandering has to be one-way only--gerrymandered districts formed that will always under-represent people who want statues removed, and (if it's on party lines), that somehow Republicans always gerrymander and are successful and Democrats never do or are not successful.

Whether you understand it or not (and there is clear evidence you are posting out of your ass) or whether you like it or not, sometimes democracy or a representative form of government gets it wrong long enough that the population gets angry and takes matters in its own hands. Of course that is not the preferred way, but it has happened throughout history in many places in the world. And sometimes that mob gets it right. Frankly, it doesn't matter if the mob represents a clear majority or not in those cases if it is acting to right a wrong or to improve society. Sometimes the ends do justify the means in the real world.

Thank you for making it clear that you don't care if the mob represents the majority or not.

 

[marc]

Its true. Violent mobs are an effective way of getting things done.
https://www.history.com/topics/holocaust/kristallnacht

View attachment 28420

No one is saying it's the preferred method.

Not unless you are.

Are you?

But that is not a mob. That is an execution being carried out after a court finds a woman to be a witch, as the Bible instructs

 

[Metaphor]

I guess we're making progress: you effectively just said that, as long as those statues remain in place, living under them must, for black people, feel like living in a warzone.

No, I didn't effectively just say that. I said that leaving a country where you are not wanted is not cowardly. With regards to the statues, I think most people never thought about them or cared, and that's why some of these statues have remained standing for a hundred years or more.

I am saying no such thing. I'm saying that direct action is sometimes more efficient at bringing a point across than lengthy debates nobody not already involved in the issue listens to (on most issues, that would be the majority. See above on inertia for what that means for the prospects of change).

So, there's no majority now because of people's inherent conservatism, but people will be very quickly convinced of the righteous actions of the mob. That's an empirical question, I suppose.

 

[repoman]

Not Confederate traitors, not in a public area that public have to traverse to get on with their day.

So, this is about tactical methods of NOT showing end goals first. Don't say Mt Rushmore first...

 

[laughing dog]

Who makes the law? If there was a clear majority against the statues, the law would be repealed.

These are state laws enacted by state legislatures preventing localities from removing statues, even if a clear majority in that locality wants them removed.
It really seems like you have no clue how government works in the USA or in most countries.

In this scenario, all the gerrymandering has to be one-way only--gerrymandered districts formed that will always under-represent people who want statues removed, and (if it's on party lines), that somehow Republicans always gerrymander and are successful and Democrats never do or are not successful.

Right now, in those states, the Republican party is in charge.

 

[Rhea]

Who makes the law? If there was a clear majority against the statues, the law would be repealed.

Still don’t get it, huh?
The majority of Americans want universal background checks on gun purchases.
Guess what we don’t have?

This happens on various scales all over the place.

I don’t know why you keep claiming this when it is so easily proved to be not true.

In this scenario, all the gerrymandering has to be one-way only--gerrymandered districts formed that will always under-represent people who want statues removed, and (if it's on party lines), that somehow Republicans always gerrymander and are successful and Democrats never do or are not successful.

Almost all of the gerrymandering is one-way. It happened, if you know anythign about America, over the course of several decades where the GOP spent time and money on local and state elections and made sure they campaigned hard in years when there was a census but no presidential election - specifically 1970 and 1990.

Once they are in in that year they get to draw the districts, and it doesn’t change for 10 more years.

This is important to understanding how the minority grabbed power and kept it through trickery and deceit.

The districts are drawn - down to the very house - to make as many GOP-majority (but just by a modest amount) districts as possible, and packing all of the dem voters into hyper-partisan districts. Thus diluting the majority of dems in the large number of districts, and giving up on one or two at a huge tilt. But that’s okay, because it means in the state house, the GOP rules. They can get less than 50% of the votes, but make up 70% of the legislators.


Do you get this yet?


Being a majority in a state DOES NOT GIVE YOU POWER IN THE STATE HOUSE.


Not sure why it is so hard for you to understand what we are saying here, but those are the facts. Yes, it is overwhelmingly done by the GOP, specifically the most extremist wing of them. They get into office and then they deploy the deceit to cement their power against the actual majority.


So you need to just acknowledge that you are dead flat wrong to claim a simple majority is all it takes to overturn a state law in the USA.

It’s not. It never has been.

 

[DBT]

Because the existence of better options is in dispute, and the severity problem with this method is in dispute.

Once again, lose your straw-man. We are not talking about “violence, looting and indiscriminate destruction as a means to an end.” The people with a greivance about the statuues are not the looters and they are not violent and they are mostly not indiscriminate”

Studies say otherwise. I have posted articles with references and links to research that demonstrate the efficacy of peaceful demonstration and civil disobedience. Why is that research ignored in favour of looting, rioting and idescriminate destruction of property as a means to reform?

So the fact that you use this phrase again suggests that we need to talk about it.

Earlier in the thread you wrote that you understood that the people wanting these statues gone are not the same people as the looters. Did you change your mind? Are you now deciding to conflate the looters with the statue topplers? Painting all with a broad brush and saying that they are one and the same now? Is that how you see this, or is this deliberate hyperbole? Do we need to step back the argument about whether it is appropriate to do this to discuss WHO is doing this (all over again) or are you bring this up to distract from the points of whether it is appropriate?

Earlier in the thread, I argued that the tearing down of these statues (in almost all cases) was not at all indiscriminate. It is targeted and historically protested. Are you claiming that these people suddenly don’t know what they are doing and why? Why do you think “indiscriminate destruction” perpetrators would have pull straps with them? Pull straps are not normally a tool of indiscrimnate destruction, now are they. That would be hammers and batons. But the presence of pull straps sort of proves that it is not, in fact, indiscriminate, now doesn’t it?

Earlier in the thread many people pointed out to you that toppling these statues is not violence, it is destruction. Are you choosing to use these words in your effort to conflate the person-on-person violence in protests to the people pulling down statues? Even though they are clearly not the same people?

Once again, lose your straw-man. We are not talking about “violence, looting and indiscriminate destruction as a means to an end.” The people with a greivance about the statues are not the looters and they are not violent and they are mostly not indiscriminate.

I used the phrase again and again because that is the distinction between my position and whatever the opposition is arguing.

The crowds pulling down or damaging monuments were not peacefully dismantling statues, they were fighting, people were killed, rioting, looting happened. Statues that had nothing to do with the issue were damaged or pulled down.....the mob was on a roll, out of control.

That is the point, not reasonable protest or civil disobedience, not removing inappropriate monuments through due process, but rioting and indiscriminate destruction of property.

That is what separates the two positions.

 

[DBT]

Americans don't care about Haitian lives now, they couldn't possibly be roused to care about Haitian lives in 1500.

This.

People don't care about a lot of things if it doesn't effect their own lives, poverty, oh, dear, that's bad, homelessness, shocking, pass the biscuits please.....the world is a reflection of how much we care and precisely what we care about.