Sorry, but it’s you who are missing the point. My point, and perhaps I was not clear enough, is to question whether there are some actions that are so hideous that they preclude us from ignoring them while “celebrating the good stuff”.
To use an absurd example just to make a point, we wouldn’t expect the Westminster Kennel Club to use Hitler in their logo based on his legendary love of dogs, right? Even though loving dogs is a good thing, Hitler did a lot of very bad things. But it’s not enough to say “Well, Hitler is only known for the bad things”, but that’s circular logic. He’s “only known for the bad things” because we have judged those bad things to overshadow any talk of the good things.
My question is: To what extent did Jefferson and/or Washington fight (even if verbally) to preserve the institution of slavery, and if they did to some significant degree, should we not reconsider our celebrating any of the good things they may have done? Surely there is some point where the bad thing overshadows the good thing. As noted, I’m not enough of a student of history to know just how much either of those men fought to keep slavery alive. I do know that TJ kept his own children in bondage, which seems pretty monstrous to me, apart from anything else one might say.
Again, this is more of a question than a statement. Those who know more about history could perhaps answer my question.
Was he a citizen of Virginia, one of a loose association of sovereign states, or was he a citizen of the United States and an oath-bearing officer of its Army?
We honor him most strongly on the basis of his noble words about equality and freedom that are at the foundation of who we consider our nation to be. His own hypocrisy could not be more rank or more adamantly in opposition to his words, and it cannot be separated or ignored. Yes, it’s complicated.
There aren’t obvious answers because everyone under consideration for a monument, or its removal, was a human, not an angel or a devil. So you have to be clear what exactly it is about them that merits the decision. In the case of the Confederate leaders, the memorials are all about what they fought for (slavery) and how they did it (treason). The rest has always been a bunch of lies.
We can easily draw a line here at “tried to overthrow the Constitution” for American figures. And now we have pretty much every mainstream liberal on record as supporting drawing a bright line there, so we’ll never have to worry about this in the future.
For foreign figures like Vladimir Lenin, they can grind those statues into dust and should.
Apparently they radiate knowledge, which is why some people say to leave them up so that we can learn from them. People who don’t like to read books, I’d guess.
Yes. Lenin was directly responsible for the deaths of at least 1 million people, possibly 5 million if you include the deaths from the famine during his rule. Should a statue of Josef Stalin stand in America, or Chairman Mao? Or for that matter, a statue of Mussolini or a monument dedicated to the Khmer Rouge?
Also, Lenin was our enemy in his lifetime. It’s often forgotten but we did send troops to fight in the Russian Civil War against the Reds.
i’d say no. It’s privately owned and on private property. Lenin was a pretty bad man, but unlike him, I think you have a right to private property, and the government shouldn’t be destroying privately owned statues.
Virginia willingly joined the Union and ratified the Constitution. When Lee committed treason, he rejected that joining and ratification. Thus, he betrayed Virginia.
And why is there a statue of Lenin in Seattle? Apparently because some individual wanted one, if it’s on private property, but has that individual ever stated his or her reasons?
All Confederate statues, monuments and the like should be erased from the face of the earth. Stone Mountain make take a nuke, but I’m good with that. Then deny any and all Federal services and benefits to anybody who wears, displays or has tattooed upon themselves any Confederate flag or symbol. Fuck all of 'em.
Actually, it seems to me the current line is actual traitors. Ever see a statue of Benedict Arnold? There are two “memorials” to him that I know of - a boot monument in Saratoga National park and a plaque at West Point. Both of them conspicuously omit his name.
I agree that the line can be moved if societal sensibilities change, but if society doesn’t change, only a certain subset of liberals do, and they start demonstrating at the Jefferson Memorial, they’ll deserve the derision they get. Most prominent liberals are now on record drawing as clear a line as you can, and some have gone so far as to explicitly defend former slaveholders like Washington and Jefferson. I’m not sure how one can flip flop on that without damaging their reputation.
I read somewhere that in the years after Independence in India, rather a lot of statues of British Royals, Governors, Generals and the like got relocated - in some cases to a park set aside for them.
I’ve got no dog in the fight in the US at the moment but I don’t see a problem with moving statues of Confederate figures to a “Confederate Memorial Park” (not a shitty abandoned lot in a weird part of town, but an actual, properly maintained city park) so people who want to see them can see them and people who don’t want to be reminded of the injustices their ancestors suffered every time they go to pay their rates bill at the town hall don’t have to be.
No, because there was no legal means for it to do so, it having already ratified the Constitution. It tried extralegal means, but those also failed.
EDIT:
No, not a city park. Why should tax dollars go towards memorializing traitors? If any of the deplorables want to set up a park on their own privately-owned, privately-maintained land, they’re welcome to do so.
AFAIK the confederacy did claim to follow the real design of the founding fathers. The point here is that this shows how empty this argument is, specially when it comes from Trump too. Both sides in this case did/do respect the founding fathers, even IIUC for different reasons.
In essence: Most Northerners and most Southerners would appreciate the founding fathers enough to dismiss ideas of the fringe of the fringe about also removing statues of Washington or other founding fathers.
Now this is an interesting statement. Can a state be a traitor? Seems to me that Wilson’s Fourteen Points addressed the right of people to self determination. If the people of a state don’t want to be in the Union anymore, don’t they have a fundamental right to no longer be a part of it?
This is aside from the legal issue of whether a state can renounce the Constitution. Legal precedent says they cannot. But it seems to me that around the world, peoples who want to leave the larger nation to establish their own nation is a pretty well established human right. Labelling a whole people traitorous sounds pretty sinister to me.
My point, and perhaps I was not clear enough, is to question whether there are some actions that are so hideous that they preclude us from ignoring them while “celebrating the good stuff”.