# Changing names, removing statues while avoiding 1984-ism **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [June 23, 2020, 4:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/changing-names-removing-statues-while-avoiding-1984-ism/912444 "2020-06-23T16:51:36Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 60
**Author:** ![UltraVires](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecccb3/32.png) [@UltraVires](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UltraVires)\ **Post date:** [June 25, 2020, 9:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/changing-names-removing-statues-while-avoiding-1984-ism/912444/60 "2020-06-25T21:17:00Z")
> [@Irishman](#): > > Sure, if you take a vote, you’ll probably get a majority wanting to keep the statues and monuments. The Black population of North Carolina is only about 22%. Too many White people are caught up in the Lost Cause myth. Plus, there is an natural tendency to favor the status quo. What’s that we say, “It’s taking longer than we thought.” Now you are goalpost shifting. You said in your post that “the present day” doesn’t want these monuments to stand. Now you are saying, “Well, ok, it does, but we are working on it!” Again, the Lost Cause stuff is bulllshit. But I’ve been a Civil War buff my whole life and I have read books and visited probably every battlefield. It’s good that the North won. But I can still look at some of the ballsy and truly heroic stuff that those guys did, even if the ultimate thing, the thing three steps above what they were personally fighting for is the single worst thing that ever happened in U.S. history. It’s too simplistic to say that the North was fighting to free slaves and the South was fighting to keep slaves. That was simply the issue du jour. A lot of people still admire the sacrifice to stick a middle finger in the face of the federal government and that underlying purpose is what was celebrated, and still is celebrated, and it should not be tossed aside for an easy and cheap one-liner that these guys were just all about slavery. There are reasons that these guys should be respected, and it is improper to teach the new generation that they were simply white supremacists. They certain were, but so was Abraham Lincoln, and almost all of the people in the North at the time and especially those in Delaware, Maryland, and West (ern) Virginia who fought for slavery until nearly the end and who Lincoln and the North did nothing to stop. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/changing-names-removing-statues-while-avoiding-1984-ism/912444)._