Yes, thank heavens cooler heads prevailed during the Revolutionary period and the equestrian statue of King George is still there on Bowling Green in Manhattan for the Ivy League students of King’s College to admire.
I specifically mentioned Loewen’s second book in the OP.
As others have said, that’s 100% fine. If they’re really better people than me, I laud them in not idolizing the people I might idolize. If they’re shittier people, they’re gonna do it anyway. In either case, I’ll be worm food, and won’t give a crap.
As an aside, several years ago I spent the summer in Boston. It was my first visceral realization of how crappy our monuments are here in the South. Everywhere you turn down here it seems that you see another monument to Confederate Civil war generals, politicians, and soldiers. Up in Boston? Monuments were to folks like nurses who helped out in the Revolutionary War and stuff.
I’m not saying everyone in the Revolutionary war was an angel, but goddamn, compared to what we get down here, it was refreshing.
I know where you can probably get a good deal on a Joe Paterno statue. Put a checkered hat on it and claim it’s The Bear!
We seem to remember Benedict Arnold just fine without a statue. Though he does have a memorial of sorts.
Take the fucking things down. If they have actual artistic or historic value, let some private group find a place for them.
Yeah – that always fascinated me. Benedict Arnold was apparently an impressive general who felt he got rooked by the Americans, went over to the British, and was an impressive general for them.
I don’t think there ever were any statues to him, anywhere. We have the “boot memorial”. In London, a private citizen (a collateral descendant) put up a plaque at his own expense:
The people who got killed when he burned New London, Connecticut might feel differently, but, then again, he killed a lot of British soldiers, too.
Since the object is a commemoration of cause célèbre cop killers, perhaps it should be displayed alongside tributes to Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier.
Are you an American? Because I am. And the white supremacists that monument memorialized were not “our best.”
I would be happy to publicly smash that monument to smithereens, and make any Kukluxers who want to keep it watch, their eyes held open Clockwork-Orange style. And I resent any implication that that is equivalent to burning the Library of Alexandria.
Sorry, the mention skipped right past me.
None. But I doubt many 21st century Italians see the principles that Caesar espoused as completely antithetical to those they hold most dear today. And to modify your own analogy to better fit the situation we’re discussing, I note that Italian law bans fascist symbols, and virtually all fascist-era statues have been destroyed or removed.
In Salem, Massachusetts, where they hanged nineteen people (and pressed one to death) as witches, they now have a statue of Elizabeth Montgomery as witch Samantha Stephens in Lappin Park. What the heck does that say about us?*
Don’t get me started about the statues of Ralph Kramden, Dr. Robert Hartley, Mary Richards, Andy Taylor, Opie Taylor, Elvis, and the Fonz.
*I suspect it says that we’ll do anything for a buck, or that makes for a photo op. Tourists pose with the Bewitched statue and take pictures of themselves, because it’s cute and happy. Nobody does that at the Witchcraft Memorial.
Rocky?
I find the latter, including the “Ugly Lucy” that was replaced, pretty benign. Putting a cute witch statue in Salem is pretty insensitive and tourism-grasping, but if a town wants to celebrate a famous son or daughter known as a characters, no harm no foul.
“Won’t somebody please think of the white supremacists!”
This question gets to the heart of the matter. If you thought that Eastern Europe pulling down statues of Lenin in the 90s was a good thing, why is it a bad thing for New Orleans to be removing statues from public spaces now?
I’ll point out that the “Liberty Monument” does NOT reflect the values of its time – it was hugely controversial from its start, and it was installed by a reactionary minority.
There’s this persistent comfortable myth that people in the past were okay with racism and slavery and bigotry. It’s a lie – a lie of omission, at least. SOME people were supporters of those things, sure. But slavery and racism and similar hatreds have always been opposed in every era by some outspoken individuals, and doubtless many more people knew it was wrong even if they personally avoided involvement. It’s entirely possible, for example, that a solid majority of people did not support slavery in their hearts even in the South, but an armed, angry minority enforced their own will over them. We may never know. But pretending people in the day did not know it was wrong is baloney. Hell, from the angry, defensive assertions of many pro-slavery politicians, it feels like they themselves knew it was wrong; they just weren’t going to give it up.
Well, the 20th century Fascists in Italy were thrilled when Mussolini explicitly took Caesar as a role model and began building an empire with military force.
Really? The statues to Rameses II, Hitler, Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin, and countless other tyrants and mass-murderers of history represent “the best among us?”
Damn right. I’m from South Carolina and I’ve spoken on the steps of the State House trying to get that damned flag taken down. I hate that nine people had to die to make it happen, but it was for once a great day in South Carolina when it was gone. (And they didn’t just take down the flag and the pole, they jackhammered up the little concrete area where it was and pulled up the fence, too. Root and branch, motherfucker.)
To my mind, the issue is whether the thing is itself a bit of history, or part of a still-ongoing controversy.
Ramses III may have been a horrible despot - but no-one now is overly concerned about that; his statue is a matter of purely historical and aesthetic interest. Smashing it, now, would be vandalism; removing it from public sight, so it will not offend the eyes of passersby, would be pointless.
In the US, racial matters have, unfortunately, not yet been settled. So such a “monument” isn’t yet a bit of history - it’s part of an ongoing controversy.
Same as when the statues of Lenin came down in the '90s.
Nowadays, Communism is pretty well defunct, outside of some oddball holdouts. Oddly enough, statues of Lenin and the like have passed into history faster than this “monument” to White Supremacy - you could more easily see a (surviving) statue of Lenin left as a marker of historical interest. That’s because racial animosity has had a longer shelf life than 20th century state Communism.
Perfectly stated. And, of course, perfectly ignored by the other side.
I would like to see someone make an argument with a straight face that our understanding of World War II has been undermined as a result of swastikas being removed from buildings.
I’ll go further and say that only a heartless monster would decry monuments like this one.
Although I would understand if future humans, after the Rise of the Planet of the Bears, treated old Paddington how the Allies treated this ornament on the Nuremberg soccer stadium: Blowing Up The Swastika | Best Funny Gifs Updated Daily
Perhaps the world ought to take a lesson from how the Buddhist world reacted to the Taliban blowing up those ancient Buddha statues?
While this thread has lumped them in with other outrages over destruction of cultural monuments that’s actually pretty misinformed.
In the case of the Buddha statues the Buddhist world generally took the, “Well, that’s unfortunate.”, attitude. Small pockets of outrage from mostly outsiders it’s true, but Buddhists just moved on mostly with no shrieking or outrage.
Because ultimately it’s just a thing. That represents something. And the something it represents, doesn’t need the thing to survive. In fact, it’s incidental.
Just sayin’ !