He’s been dead for almost two thousand years, ruled only for a short period and didn’t accomplish anything of note. Why would anyone put up monuments dedicated to him today, after his name has been (mostly) cleared? He’s a nobody. We don’t put up monuments to honor even the best Roman emperors today.
And how’s that different from what I wrote? Of the 30+million Russians, Ukrainians and Poles killed only a small portion were soldiers, but they weren’t killed in some super high-tech industrialized fashion. It was mainly just bullets. In fact it wasn’t even all that efficient. The tiny nation of Rwanda killed around 1 million of their own citizens in the span of under a half year – and they were mainly just using machetes.
You used the phrase “Nazi slaughter” to refer war casualties. For most people, “Nazi slaughter” refers to the Holocaust. I think that’s what Measure for Measure was commenting on.
I don’t think he’s talking about war casualties. A whole lot of the Nazi genocide wasn’t carried out in camps with gas chambers, it was carried out by SS squads with machineguns.
Also ordinary Muslim citizens fell prey to the religious cleansing initiated by Queen Isabella and King Ferdiand and performed by the Spanish Inquisition. I wonder what people would think if they saw their relatives desecrate Queen Isabella’s grave.
Really? I don’t think I ever heard anyone, even Southern heritage worshippers, idolizing Jefferson Davis the way they do Lee. Not to question your experience, just that it’s different from mine.
As Alessan pointed out, Davis was a politician who stayed in Richmond and argued with governors; Lee was a soldier who rode a majestic horse and got shot at. Lee’s got the better iconography, too: Traveller, “Lee to the rear!”, Marse Robert, the Last Order. Not to mention, Lee’s exit was far more dignified than Davis’: clad in his best dress uniform and riding off to the salutes of his enemies, versus being captured while fleeing in a heavy shawl (which inspired the urban legend that he was wearing women’s clothing in an attempt to escape.) No question, Lee has Davis beat all to pieces in the realm of historical mythmaking.
I read “industrial slaughter” as something new and uniquely cruel and efficient which haven’t been seen before in history, but machine gunning a whole town isn’t really that much different from what have been done for millennia. Just swapping bullets for swords. In fact the Mongols under Djengis Khan and Tamalane seem to have approached the work of extinguishing cities with much more meticulous and dispassionate discipline.
Yes, and it appears that I was mistaken. I thought that Rune was conflating death due to war crimes and ordinary (though too large) casualties from war. They are different.
I had neighbours from India who put of swastika decorations for Diwali; the first year they got police visits twice because a confused neighbour though they victims of some kind of hate crime.
They also have a page for Israel; the ancient temples do not surprise me, but apartment building in Tel Aviv sure does. :eek: Especially considering it was probably build in the 1930s.
The swastika appears in Nepali art, Native American art, and western art before the 1930s. A few years back, the people of Hull (MA) had their town hall tile floor cleaned-and were chagrined to discover that the borders had a swastika decorative pattern.
So it is a symbol that long predates Naziism.
Those two are turining the wrong way though, for them to be Nazi symbols. But I don’t know if people in general distinguish, so that left-turning = good, right-turning = bad.
I am not Indian, but Hindu friends gave us a good luck coin and I noticed the swastika on it. I was horrified at the symbol, but I took the gift and thanked them. I can’t nor would I denounce a gift of genuine kindness, even though that symbol to me is the most loathesome sign of hatred in history. For them it is a sign of good will. That is not to say I would put it in my pocket and carry it around for “good luck” or then give this coin to anyone else, because it simply is not my cultural experience.
For me, that symbol is much too powerful a reminder of death and destruction, and it not something I can genuinely share as a good luck charm. My father’s uncle fought and died in that war, and my mother’s brother came home a shattered man. It’s not something one can easily forget. When I see the swastika I remember sacrifice and I won’t erase that in order to be culturally sensitive.
I attend a lot of Hindu weddings and, over time, my association of the swastika has actually shifted from Naziism to religious iconography, so it can be done. It took me seeing it in a religious context many times to shift perspective, but now my first thought is not of Naziism, as I am much more likely to encounter the symbol in a religious context than a hateful one.