I'm not a nationalist. I see all of humanity as one nation.
No, I think we should keep the statues. I think you put me in the wrong ideological box.
My point was that if the people of London do not see them as oppressors, because they did their oppression in the colonies, and the people of London further see them as someone to be venerated, then it is a non-issue for them. I doubt that the same statues would be allowed to stand in the colonies they oppressed.
No one who is advocating that statues venerating Confederate leaders be removed is advocating that we hide our history. In fact, it is those who want to keep the statues who are trying to hide history, by turning those venerated into heroes, rewriting history to claim they were fighting for something other than to keep people enslaved, and are also now passing laws that both sides the fucking holocaust in our schools.
The confederate statues are just as much monuments over how racist the south was in the 1930'ies.
No, they are not. Not if you do not know the history, because the history is not displayed on the monument, or worse the history displayed has been revised by those who erected the monument.
There are no Nazi statues in Europe. But we still have plenty of Nazis. Wonder why? If removing the statues magically removes what they represent we shouldn't have.
I never said that removing statues magically does anything. It very clearly removes the perception that the State is endorsing their ideology, and there is nothing magical about that.
In a democracy states shouldn't endorse any ideology, and don't.
You may be right about the former, but in the US you are definitely wrong about the latter.
Are you sure that's why we keep the statues?
I am absolutely certain that played a part in both why they were erected, and why people resisted removing them for so long.
Sweden is a country where 90% is atheist. We've kept all the churches and we keep them maintained. It's hardly because the Swedish government are promoting Christianity.
That's nice. We aren't talking about Sweden, or churches.
All a statue means is that some time something or someone was really important, and it's worth to stop a moment to think about it. It's to keep a link between the present and our ancestors. It's interesting to think about why our forefathers thought it was really important to honor this or that person. The statue is a living memory of that.
And when they did it to revise history, and to show the people they hate because of the color of their skin that the State still endorses racism against them, they do none of what you say. They only encourage division and perpetuate racist ideologies by honoring them.
In colonial Britain the colonial heroes from the peak of British power (1870) were mostly placed in cramped little squares and other awful locations. Because all the good locations had already been snatched by heroes from the Napoleonic wars. This is interesting.
In the Southern US States they were placed in wide open places in the middle of town, atop high pedestals with plaques that either white washed their history, or revised it, because that showed the blacks where their place was.
Creating a world where nobody is ever offended is a dangerous world.
Creating a world where we appease offensive racists by venerating their leaders with statues on public grounds is a dangerous world. One in which the targets of their hate are lynched, oppressed, and/or treated as second class citizens.
It's not venerating IMHO.
It was venerating them, and anyone who knows the history of those statues knows that. Unfortunately, you don't need to know the history of the Statue, you only need to read the plaque on the Robert E. Lee statue to know what a great person he was, because it says "NAMED IN HONOR AND MEMORY OF GENERAL ROBERT E. LEE. / “IT IS BETTER TO DO RIGHT, EVEN IF WE SUFFER IN SO DOING, / THAN TO INCUR THE REPROACH OF OUR CONSCIENCE AND POSTERITY.” And mentions nothing about the terrible things that he and his Confederates did to our nation.
The concentration camps are still there. We didn't remove them. I wonder why? Do you think it's to promote Nazism?
The concentration camps were not erected to venerate the Nazis, they were left as a reminder of the atrocities committed by the Nazis. They have been turned into places where the horrendous ideology that they represent can be critically examined and learned from. There is a qualitative difference.
Not at all. They do the same job.
Are you saying that when one visits the concentration camps, one is not educated about what happened there, but is rather treated with a nice plaque about how it was cool little summer retreat for the Jews to visit during the war, like the one above that gushes on what a great guy Robert E. Lee was?
We are not advocating that tasteful markers on Civil War battlefields that teach the history of what happened there be removed. We are only asking that Confederate leaders not be venerated with statues on public grounds. I do not have a problem with them being removed to museums where they can be placed in the context in which they belong, and those viewing them can learn about the horrendous ideology that they truly represent.
Fuck tasteful. History isn't tasteful. History is quite often horrendous. Like slavery.
OK, fuck tasteful. It doesn't matter for my argument if the markers are tasteful or not, only that they teach the actual history
Isn't it a better idea that for every confederate statue we put two civil rights statues next to it?
Maybe, if when it was first proposed that the statues be taken down, the State legislatures countered with something like that, or at least removing the plaques that honor them and replacing them with the actual history of what they did. That did not happen. They dug their heels in for decades, and yelled "Y'all ain't taking mah Rebel statues down without a fight!" (paraphrase)
The problem with hiding things in museums is that only special interest nerds (who already know the correct story) will ever see it.
The problem with leaving them intact on public grounds is that they tell an incorrect story, which is far worse that not knowing the original story to begin with.