The removal of statues

[laughing dog]

20th revival? Are you sure they got disbanded that many times?

Sorry, the "century" got left out - the 20th century revival.

 

[RavenSky]

Huh, I'd never actually seen a picture of that stone mountain carving in context. I'd only seen close ups before. Am I the only one who thinks it looks half assed and ugly? Like they defaced a beautiful cliffside with cheap and childish graffitti?

^^^ That

 

[Arctish]

Huh, I'd never actually seen a picture of that stone mountain carving in context. I'd only seen close ups before. Am I the only one who thinks it looks half assed and ugly? Like they defaced a beautiful cliffside with cheap and childish graffitti?

Same here, and you're not the one. It's an ugly scar on a natural wonder, and I'd say that even if it depicted more admirable persons than those slavers.

 

[Derec]

Acting like you don't know whom the oppressed are is weak and simple-minded. And yes, it is an act on your part. You knew very well whom I meant and tried to derail with a load of horseshit. Insults are all you deserve.

Actually, I was asking sincerely whether you considered statues of civil rights figures to be "oppressed" for the purposes of that statement.
You decided to get snarky, and only then did I respond in kind.

 

[Arctish]

In a perfect world, I think statues of Lee could have been a reasonable compromise, in exchange for removing other symbols of the Confederacy. By most Southerners, Lee is remembered as a reluctant Confederate, never having supported succession, and in the post-war period, became a symbol of reconciliation. So, yes, in a perfect world, maybe. Unfortunately, too much of this has been co-opted by Neo-Nazi's and white-supremacists.

I think you're thinking of Longstreet. He fought bravely for the South but worked for the U.S. government during Reconstruction.

 

[DrZoidberg]

...
I don't think you understand what I'm saying. I definitely think that the statues erection and KKK popularity are linked. That's one reason why it should stay. That happened. The world we have today is a result of fighting that world. Sure, nothing lasts forever. But trying to stretch today's values into the past, is also a folly.

I disagree. The destruction of Palmyra and the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas is the worst things Al Qaeda and ISIS ever did. Every culture/nation/people have a golden age, a peak. This is all that remains from them. These cultures had the wealth and power to put up these magnificent buildings. Yet, they perished. Their existence is a reminder of the impermanence of everything. They are extremely valuable. It reminds us to keep fighting, to keep working for the world we want to have. If we destroy every trace of the past we'll only get a bland soup of boring. A brave new world.
...

These confederate themed statues are not a reminder of history's lessons. They are symbols of a continuing battle.

Ehe... a battle that is now lost. It was lost when the statues went up. I'm pretty sure that's why they were built. All our most magnificent monuments are built by dominant groups at a time when their dominance is slipping from their grip. This is no difference.

They are a negation of what lessons should have been learned from the war. And they have no particularly noteworthy use as a monument to the peak of southern civilization nor any artistic or archealogical value. They remind people of the glory of war and say nothing about the carnage.

If all you think when you see a war monument is glory, then you Sir, are a fool. The carnage is implicit in all of these.

The confederates were traitors to their government and had as their founding principle the right to brutally subjugate an entire race of people. This sentiment festers to this day and we need to finally crush it. We pulled down the statues of Saddam Hussein for the benefit of the Iraqi people and we should do the same for the unfairly disadvantaged minority in own country. That's really the only issue. If the nation had come out of the civil war with blacks being given all the rights of citizenship and we now lived in that promised land of equality (more like your own country I'm sure) the statues would lose their negative significance. They'd be largely forgotten about like the civil war statues still found in parks and traffic circles in the northern states. In the meantime they are more than just a symptom of our nation's problems.

Hmmm... The statues of Saddam are more like unionist statues being erected in Southern states. Just to rub people's noses in having lost. Saddam didn't represent anything but himself. There's no symbol here worthy of note. All his regime symbolises is that it's good to be the only one with a gun in a fight.

There is still plenty of interest in all things having to do with the civil war and new perspectives are being discovered by historians constantly. There's a barrage of it every weekend on the C-Span networks. And we've preserved the battlefields. Mainly as memorials to the fallen but also as witnesses to history. But we shouldn't require that people live every day under their shadow in the public square.

Living in USA after the civil war is to litteraly live in it's shadow everyday. You can't not do that. Trying to clean that away won't change that. The way to prevent a repeat of the holocaust isn't to make people forget about the Nazis. Museums are nice. But museums, by their very nature, aren't part of everyday life. Statues in squares are.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Looking forward to unifying statues of Benedict Arnold popping up across America--long overdue.

There is one - sort of.

Don't forget USA's insistance to stick with Imperial weights and measurements. Long after Great Britain herself gave in to metric. If that ain't continued homage to their former British masters, I don't know what is.

Joking aside, it's a valid point. Pretty fucking far from all Americans wanted indipendence. I suspect most of them didn't. People tend to resist change. Their voices have been obliterated from history. That's a worrying sign.

We all need to accept our own country and culture, our own history, warts and all. If we don't we have no chance to build a prosperous and peaceful future. We need to resist the temptation to demonise our enemies. We should always honour those who sacrificed their lives to fight for "their people" and causes they believed in. To try to see the good in them. Especially those we don't agree with. It's healthy to get into that practice.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Isn't a better response to put up new statues? That way we get more statues = more prettiness. It's ok to be wrong. The racist statues are the wrong ones. Acknowledging their existence and letting them stay isn't to agree with the opinion.

East Berliners have been fighting tooth and nail to keep their communist monuments. The communist party didn't get any votes last election. It's not about opinions it's about keeping your history, for good or for bad.

No, it is not a better response. The best response is to remove these statues and the flags of an openly rebellious movement from state capitols.

Again: This. Isn't. History.

It's ok to be rebellious in a democracy. The rebellion happened because the politicians failed. Keeping a nation together is in the job description. The Union politicians backed them into a corner, gambled and lost. Blaming it all on the rebells is not how you keep a nation together. It's always a shared responsibility.

If you fail to venerate and honour the leaders of the losing side, you have failed at your job as a politician. It's important to honour them.

This is going on right now. These statues and confederate flags were raised in the modern era, explicitly as a response the expansion of civil rights to African Americans, and yes to proclaim that these towns and cities and states thought that the Confederate cause was just, and that black people are subordinate to Whites. Yes, having such monuments **is** saying you agree with that message - and Charlottesville is free to take down statues that give a message that they don't wish to make.

It's easy being generous while the economy is expanding. But the IT revolution happened. Now the western world are full of white working class people who are too uneducated to find work in this modern economy. That's what they are angry about. And like all uneducated people everywhere, they're blaming it on the wrong thing. They're longing back for a time when they actually could find work. That world was more racist. That's all that is happening. It's a phase. It'll blow over. Because it is dumb.

The analogy you are making would be like the Germans wanting to take down surviving concentration camps. I would agree there that they should be left to stand. But that isn't analogous to this situation. Instead, it is more like Berliners taking down statues of Hitler raised in the 1980s.

The Germans did exactly that. The result wasn't what the German government or German people wanted. Nazi symbols are more iconic and powerful today than they've ever been. They learned their lesson. Which is why they're letting the Communist monuments stay. Or most of them. The communist used all free real estate for monuments. Not really practical if you want to put up new ones. So the old had to go.

I think the Nazis and communist are comparable when it comes to evil.

 

[ZiprHead]

Acting like you don't know whom the oppressed are is weak and simple-minded. And yes, it is an act on your part. You knew very well whom I meant and tried to derail with a load of horseshit. Insults are all you deserve.

Actually, I was asking sincerely whether you considered statues of civil rights figures to be "oppressed" for the purposes of that statement.
You decided to get snarky, and only then did I respond in kind.

SMH

 

[LordKiran]

Meh delete

 

[LordKiran]

These confederate themed statues are not a reminder of history's lessons. They are symbols of a continuing battle.

Ehe... a battle that is now lost. It was lost when the statues went up. I'm pretty sure that's why they were built. All our most magnificent monuments are built by dominant groups at a time when their dominance is slipping from their grip. This is no difference.

They are a negation of what lessons should have been learned from the war. And they have no particularly noteworthy use as a monument to the peak of southern civilization nor any artistic or archealogical value. They remind people of the glory of war and say nothing about the carnage.

If all you think when you see a war monument is glory, then you Sir, are a fool. The carnage is implicit in all of these.

The confederates were traitors to their government and had as their founding principle the right to brutally subjugate an entire race of people. This sentiment festers to this day and we need to finally crush it. We pulled down the statues of Saddam Hussein for the benefit of the Iraqi people and we should do the same for the unfairly disadvantaged minority in own country. That's really the only issue. If the nation had come out of the civil war with blacks being given all the rights of citizenship and we now lived in that promised land of equality (more like your own country I'm sure) the statues would lose their negative significance. They'd be largely forgotten about like the civil war statues still found in parks and traffic circles in the northern states. In the meantime they are more than just a symptom of our nation's problems.

Hmmm... The statues of Saddam are more like unionist statues being erected in Southern states. Just to rub people's noses in having lost. Saddam didn't represent anything but himself. There's no symbol here worthy of note. All his regime symbolises is that it's good to be the only one with a gun in a fight.

There is still plenty of interest in all things having to do with the civil war and new perspectives are being discovered by historians constantly. There's a barrage of it every weekend on the C-Span networks. And we've preserved the battlefields. Mainly as memorials to the fallen but also as witnesses to history. But we shouldn't require that people live every day under their shadow in the public square.

Living in USA after the civil war is to litteraly live in it's shadow everyday. You can't not do that. Trying to clean that away won't change that. The way to prevent a repeat of the holocaust isn't to make people forget about the Nazis. Museums are nice. But museums, by their very nature, aren't part of everyday life. Statues in squares are.

Again, they're not tearing anything down, they're relocating these statues so that northern tourists wont have to see them. They're trying to reinvent themselves as a sort of tourist attraction for money and trying to cater to the sensibilities of the people who have money is seemingly the driving factor here.

No statues are being 'erased from history' that's nonsense. they're moving it five feet to the left to a nearby park.

 

[ZiprHead]

 

[DrZoidberg]

There's 70 remaining Confederate civil war monuments in USA. USA is a big country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_monuments_and_memorials_of_the_Confederate_States_of_America

Here's 76 monuments commemorating the American civil rights movement of the 60'ies and 70'ies.

http://peace.maripo.com/p_civil_rights.htm

New ones are going up all the time. The rate is increasing.

 

[Mumbles]

Having watched them haul off those statues from around here (Baltimore), they served no educational value where they were. The few people who knew what they were about at all, thought they were distasteful.

Better to fix up the public schools, if we want people to be more educated about the civil war.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Having watched them haul off those statues from around here (Baltimore), they served no educational value where they were. The few people who knew what they were about at all, thought they were distasteful.

Better to fix up the public schools, if we want people to be more educated about the civil war.

Yes, they are distasteful. That's the point. The lesson is that people had different values back in the day. Art is always more visceral than lessons in school.

The statues are also a lesson in that people with money (enough to erect statues) aren't necessarily good people. USA has a very unhealthy worship of the rich (Trump is now president, for instance). The rest of the world tries to keep rich people the fuck away from political influence because it's bad and they already have too much. Whatever makes USA stop doing that is good.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Having watched them haul off those statues from around here (Baltimore), they served no educational value where they were. The few people who knew what they were about at all, thought they were distasteful.

Better to fix up the public schools, if we want people to be more educated about the civil war.

Yes, they are distasteful. That's the point. The lesson is that people had different values back in the day. Art is always more visceral than lessons in school.

That isn't the point people want them up. They want to glorify these people.

The statues are also a lesson in that people with money (enough to erect statues) aren't necessarily good people.

You are really reaching here.

 

[angelo]

Yea good luck with trying to stop the rich and militant unions from buying political influence.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

How do you define "the oppressed"? There are a lot of Civil Rights (and in particular MLK) themed memorials and statues in the South as well.

Well in their defense a few of them were victims of political assassination, so that could partially explain why statues for them exist. That doesn't explain the statues commemorating the rebellion. I mean, how many statues stand up in Massachusetts celebrating Shay's Rebellion?

 

[DrZoidberg]

Yes, they are distasteful. That's the point. The lesson is that people had different values back in the day. Art is always more visceral than lessons in school.

That isn't the point people want them up. They want to glorify these people.

Exactly. People, who are wrong, want to glorify horrible people. There's a lesson here.

edit: Nah, they weren't necessarily horrible. They were people who fought for what they though twas right. Based on science and beliefs of their day. Brainwashed by their surroundings. This is a valuable reminder in a world of... let's say... Christians. They hold ridiculous beliefs that couldn't possibly exist without brainwashing.

I think Christianity is mostly evil. But I fight for Sweden to keep our churches. I like them. They're symbols of our history. As well as pretty.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Yes, they are distasteful. That's the point. The lesson is that people had different values back in the day. Art is always more visceral than lessons in school.

But the statue isn't usually distasteful unless you know the history behind the subject. Which is better presented in a textbook than summarized on a plaque.

The statues are also a lesson in that people with money (enough to erect statues) aren't necessarily good people.

No, not really.
The people who paid for the statue also paid for any plaque. They're not going to put 'wasn't a good person' on a statue built to honor any particular guy.
That remains something to learn in school, completely separate from the statue.

EVERYONE in the US has a chance to learn about Grant's or Lee's war record in textbooks. You can't erect a statue in every school district in hopes that someone will see it and wonder, huh? Why'd they put a statue up for this Yahoo? and goes to read up on him...