I wonder how Americans would feel if Arabs started putting up statues around the Middle East celebrating the “lost cause” of Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
JBGUSA, if you are opposed to nursing grievances, I would assume you are for removing the statues. They are, after all, monuments to an army that marched to defend slavery and that was defeated 152 years ago. The issue is settled and dotting the landscape with monuments to honor them is clearly keeping the wounds from healing. I don’t think it is a coincidence that the statues are present in the parts of the community where racism has been most cruelly institutionalized over the years. So in the interest of not further nursing grievances, they must come down.
This is the perfect answer to the OP.
Think they’d care more about statues, we are talking about inert lumps of metal or stone, then about real atrocities that are occurring in the Middle East? I won’t link anything here but you can find videos of some pretty heinous stuff if you want. Furthermore, you can even buy a sex slave from ISIS.
The civil war in Syria is quite brutal. What with chemical weapons and mass torture being employed. Sectarian violence in Iraq is bad. I hear Israel has to profile and they may even have a wall along their border. I think Americans won’t be triggered by a statue of Bin Laden.
No graven images, dude, so not an issue. 
Thanks. It just seems to me that when people are opposed to keeping the statues to “keep the peace” they always mean not to offend white people. Some times in the interest of social cohesion and historical accuracy, it’s your turn to be offended. I’m sure the native Americans won’t mind skipping a turn.
I have mixed feelings about these statue removals. Where do we draw the line?
— Columbus is often hated these days; should we change the name of “District of Columbia”?
But in fact, the Confederate Flag is an on-going symbol of racism and hatred. When I see such a flag I just think “another stupid Trumpist, sigh!” But for some, that flag is an on-going reminder of their 2nd-class status and the racism directed against them. I’m happy to give up the tiny joy of “recreational outrage” I get from seeing racist Southerners demonstrating their despicable ideas if it mitigates the dread that underlies millions of black American lives.
:eek: Do you really think the absence of these flags and statues will hold you back from full participation in society? Steve Jobs managed to achieve a lot even though he grew up in a state without all these reminders of his racial “superiority.”
I once posted a link to a YouTube of racial sensitivity training. I’ll hunt it down again, if you promise to click, JBGUSA. In the session, teenagers were asked to pretend, for an hour, that blue-eyed people were discriminated against. One young blue-eyed lady, who had no problem with the way society treats blacks, left the session in tears and in great anger, bitter at the idea that, even in pretend, she was inferior.
Which kind of actually makes the point- it very conspicuously does not identify him by name. It’s more of an insult than an honor.
As a black person, the Confederate flag doesn’t remind me of my 2nd-class status. Because to be honest, as naive as this may be, I don’t feel like a second class citizen. It does remind me of racism, but also to be honest, the American flag does too. The KKK waves both flags. It has been my experience that people who treat the American flag like it’s a sacred symbol also tend to be people with very “old-fashioned” views about race.
The Confederate flag reminds me that in the not-so-distant past, people like my next-door neighbors fought to keep people like me in permanent bondage. When it is waved in my face, it reminds me that a lot of people don’t give a fuck about what permanent bondage means–and this includes a lot of non-racist people. And that makes me question if whether people really are as freedom-loving as they claim they are.
This past Friday, a coworker cornered me into a discussion about the removal of the statues. “I just don’t get it” she said. I didn’t want to have the discussion and I told her so, but she dragged my opinions out of me. (When someone says they just don’t get something that is so blatantly obvious, I guess it’s hard for me to not say something.) I told her I am glad they are removing the statues because they represent a really bad time in history–not just for black people, but for all Americans. I mean, I’d like to think that if I were white, I wouldn’t want to see reminders of the Confederacy either. Just like if I were a German, I wouldn’t want to see Nazi statues. So, it kind of bothers me when people make it out to be a black people butthurt thing. IMHO, the wrongness of the symbology should be clear to all freedom-loving, equality-seeking human beings. Even if a person can’t get it on an emotional level, they should still be able to understand why people have a problem.
As a side note: when I asked my coworker why we should memoralize people who fought against the USA, she immediately replied: “No, they didn’t!” I asked who they took arms up against and then she nodded her head and said, “I guess you have a point, but they were still Americans.” WTF. If people can’t even agree that Robert E. Lee and them fought against the USA and thus meet the full definition of “traitor”, then we have a serious problem with the educational system. And I can’t help but to blame the Confederate symbols for contributing to this problem. It’s kind of hard to call someone out as being a guy who made horrible choices when there’s a giant monument in his honor smack dab in the middle of the city.
That would be an interesting exercise… one thing that makes it different from discrimination against blacks is that eye color is very hard to tell from across the room. (More similar to anti-semitism, possibly?) So you’d be meeting somebody for the first time and then realize–oh, they’re one of those people…
There’s a lot of people in this country who are offended by leaving these statues up. There’s a lot of people in this country who are offended by taking these statues down. Why is it only “pandering” to listen to the people who want the statues removed, and not “pandering” to listen to the people who want them to stay?
So this part described in the article is just a total coincidence?
Generally a good rule of thumb is that if one side is celebrating murder, rape, and torture, (which is what slavery entails, and so is what the Confederacy fought for, and what was explicitly celebrated by putting statues in) you don’t want to be on that side. I didn’t really think this is a complicated decision.
But, what if they are only celebrating the good parts of slavery?
/s
Adolph?!?
Now that coincidence is something that writers of fiction would be shot for using it. So yeah, truth is stranger than fiction. Stranger when one takes into account that Ochs fought against anti-semitism but unfortunately he did not see how wrong slavery was.
Yeah but that’s assuming one’s own conclusion. It’s complicated because Confederate memorials aren’t entirely about the CSA as a political entity. To the extent they were, that simple argument would be convincing. The Confederacy as a political institution was primarily dedicated to protecting the institution of slavery, the secession documents said that clearly. However the CSA as political institution isn’t in every case what’s being venerated in memorials to CSA military leaders or ordinary soldiers.
In a strictly military context, Jackson and Lee were among the most capable American generals ever. And we should want the US Army to be an over-performing military organization like say Jackson’s army in the Shenandoah Valley in 1862. Those names in battlefield memorials, military base names, M36 Jackson tank destroyer in WWII, etc in part symbolize what the Army should be basically about: military capability. When and for what cause the Army should be sent to war is a different issue.
The Confederate forces were often among the toughest and best led American armies in history. Another very tough American Army was the standing army in 1846 in early battles outnumbered by a Mexican Army many foreign observers viewed as more professional. That war wasn’t on very firm moral ground either necessarily, but in strictly military terms the Army’s performance contrasts to the sometimes embarrassing stumbles of the ‘come as you are’ version of the US Army early in more morally positive (WWII, Korea or Union forces in the ACW) wars.**
And in a strictly memorial context, literally honor to people who served and died, similarly acceptable IMO. Here again the question is not whether there were positive aspects to slavery which there were not, but if those men gained any right to say why they individually fought and died (also considering a larger minority of them were outright draftees later on than Union, though the Union draft was more notorious).
Where the memorials are more political, clearly when it’s political figures (Jefferson Davis) the simple rationale ‘they were for slavery’ is more convincing IMO. On top there’s the aggravating factor to the extent Confederate symbols were adopted, as political symbols, much later explicitly in opposition to Civil Rights (eg. SC capitol Confederate flag flying from 1962, backers gave that as a reason at the time).
I don’t think it’s necessarily pandering that it go either way. Really depends. But there’s definitely opportunism going on now.
**if the comeback is to skirt the edges of Godwin’s Law and ask if the US Army should venerate the WWII German Army 1) it’s not conventional tradition building to look to other countries’ armies 2), but that was man for man the most effective army of its time and can thus be learned from, in military terms.
Well, a tough army up to a point. (actually thanks to many points):
In the last year of the war:
[Quote= The Civil War, Ken Burns Episode 8]
Lee’s army was shrinking. In nine months 60,000 southern soldiers had deserted.
[/quote]
IMHO it is to these men that risked execution the ones that we should remember. As they helped shorten the war.
You are, of course, making the same demands of people who fly Confederate flags, right? I mean presumably they should be encouraged to let it go too.
No, that’s just “Lost Cause” nonsense. The confederacy was explicitly about slavery and white supremacy, period. That’s what it’s soldiers fought for, and that’s what it’s military leaders forswore their oaths to the United States for. Trying to say that memorials that hold up the treasonous Confederate Battle flag are about prowess in battle and really have nothing to do with what they were battling for is absurd on it’s own, but is even more absurd when you add in the context that the statues weren’t generally erected in the lifetime of the people they were supposedly honoring, but were instead primarily erected during the worst of Jim Crow and the big fight over Civil Rights for blacks. The timing makes it very obvious to anyone with an ounce of sense what part of the Confederacy is truly being honored.
If it was really about honoring southern soldiers and nothing to do with what the Confederacy stood for, they wouldn’t be bedecked with explicitly racist symbols mostly standardized after the war (like the Confederate Battle Flag) but with symbols tied to the common soldiers. And they shouldn’t look like they belong in a victory parade or an action sequence, but should be something quieter. And, most critically, they wouldn’t have dedication speeches like