Statue Removal II

[lpetrich]

Intended as a continuation of The removal of statues | Page 7 | Internet Infidels Discussion Board from over 4 years ago.

Nathan Bedford Forrest statue along Interstate 65 removed - The Tennesseean

The contentious Nathan Bedford Forrest statue that stood along Interstate 65 in Nashville for more than two decades came down Tuesday.

The move comes just over a year after the owner of the statue died. Bill Dorris died in November 2020.

The statue of Forrest, located on private property alongside I-65 south of downtown, portrays the early Ku Klux Klan leader and former Confederate general riding a horse.

No word on where that statue is now.

Dorris' Forrest memorial has been shot at six times and vandalized other times, he told The Tennessean in 2017.

The statue was vandalized and painted pink that same year.

Before the 2016 presidential election, someone placed a sign that read “Trump 2016, Make AMERIKKKA Great Again” on a fence on state right-of-way property near the statue. State officials removed the sign shortly afterward.

The memorial is not the only contested one in the state.

In July, a bust of Forrest installed in the Tennessee Capitol was removed from the building, loaded onto a truck and driven away.

Charlottesville African American museum will melt down Robert E. Lee statue for new public art piece

The 1,100-pound bronze statue of Robert E. Lee that was at the center of a 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., will soon be melted down and repurposed into a new public artwork.

A proposal by the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center was accepted Tuesday by the Charlottesville City Council. Titled “Swords Into Ploughshares,” the project will see Lee’s statue re-created into an entirely new form following input from the community.

The center's executive director, Andrea Douglas, said in a video that the goal of the project is “to create something that transforms what was once toxic in our public space into something beautiful and more reflective of our entire community’s social values.”

The city government of Charlottesville voted to remove that statue and that of Stonewall Jackson back in February 2017. Far-right activists organized "Unite the Right" on August 11-12 to protest that action. White supremacists showed up, chanting "Jews will not replace us!", and one protester attacked some counterprotesters with his car, killing one of them, Heather Heyer.

 

[lpetrich]

Journalist Colin Woodard wrote an article for the WaPo a month ago: Book review of Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History by Alex von Tunzelmann - The Washington Post

In the tumultuous summer of 1776, New Yorkers learned of the signing of the Declaration of Independence when George Washington ordered it read aloud to his troops assembled there. Their reaction was to go tear down a statue.

The likeness of King George III had stood on the Bowling Green — then at the heart of a city that petered out into marshes in Tribeca — for six years. The king, cast in lead and covered in gold gilt, sat on a horse and wore a Roman toga and a crown of laurels. That night, much to Washington’s chagrin, a crowd of soldiers and townspeople tore the monarchical effigy off its 18-foot pedestal, severed its head, sheared off its nose and laurels, and battered the body to bits from which musketballs were later cast.

Does anyone miss that statue?

Soviet invaders built monuments to Lenin and Stalin across their Eastern European satellites to assert their control over those countries’ destinies. Later, uprisings sought to topple these statues by way of opposing all they represented. Last year, racial-justice protesters beheaded Christopher Columbus in Massachusetts, toppled him to the ground in Minneapolis, and prompted officials to remove Confederate generals from city squares and state capitols across the South. Champions of genocide and race-based slavocracy, they were asserting, will be championed no longer.

And that’s how it ought to be, argues Alex von Tunzelmann in her thoughtful and fast-paced new book, “Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History.” Surveying centuries of high-profile statue topplings on five continents, she makes a compelling case that scrutinizing monumental statuary is an integral part of what open societies do as they reassess past values and seek new ones to guide their futures.

She considered statues of leaders Cecil Rhodes, Rafael Trujillo, Vladimir Lenin and King George V.

The stories she relates follow distinct trajectories but have a common pattern. From George III in Manhattan to Saddam Hussein in Baghdad to Robert E. Lee in New Orleans, one subset of citizens erected a statue to assert a story about a people. Years, decades or centuries later those stories had been discredited, the values they asserted now offensive to great swaths of the societies over which the statues loomed.

The same arguments against iconoclasm appear over and over: that it’s tantamount to erasing history; that the person was acceptable in their time; that they can be taken down only through the proper channels and processes; that if we topple say, enslaver Edward Colston from his plinth, will Oliver Cromwell and Winston Churchill be next?

AvT then considers a thought experiment. What about statues of Adolf Hitler? They were destroyed by US troops in 1945.

Continuing in this vein, why not a statue of a Japanese military aviator at Pearl Harbor? Or a statue of Benedict Arnold?

Would anyone in Atlanta want a statue of General William Tecumseh Sherman in the center of their city?

Most of her subjects are a bit more nuanced than Hitler and his ilk. Von Tunzelmann explores, for example, why protesters in Portland, Ore., pulled down a statue of George Washington in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. But we also join the Hungarian revolutionaries of 1956 as they topple the Joseph Stalin statue in Budapest (which the Soviets chose not to replace after they crushed the rebellion). In the Dominican Republic, a mob tore down and beheaded dictator Rafael Trujillo’s statue shortly after his 1961 assassination; it stood before a grand colonnaded monument to himself that has been repurposed to honor soldiers who fought for independence from Spain. And a statue of Lenin was erected in Kyiv in 1946 to celebrate the retaking of the city from Nazi invaders, but it was torn down by masked protesters in 2013, by which time he had become a symbol of Russia, independent Ukraine’s greatest adversary.

AvT notes case of statues that have not come down, like one of King Leopold II of Belgium, who presided over atrocious conditions in the Belgian Congo, like cutting off rubber-plantation workers' hands for not reaching their quotas, with some 10 million people dying as a result.

Humans being human, this can be a step backward, and “Fallen Idols” would have been stronger with a chapter on, say, how French revolutionaries replaced Louis XV’s statue in Paris with the guillotine and a (plaster) seated Liberty, or how the statue of Russian secret police chief Felix Dzerzhinsky, toppled in Moscow in 1991, was un-toppled after Vladimir Putin consolidated control of the country.

 

[marc]

Question.. the people who oppose taking down confederate statues… have any of them said we should apologize for taking down the statue of Sadam in Iraq in the early part of the war?