"Liberty Monumen t" in new Orleans taken down

[Malthus]

@elbows

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’ !

Buddhists may have reacted with equanimity, which is admirable; that doesn’t make such vandalism remotely okay.

Treasures such as the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan belong to humanity as a whole, not just to present-day Buddhists. Their destruction cannot harm Buddhism the religion or philosophy; it can impoverish us of our cultural treasures, though.

Taking a sledgehammer to the monuments of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey would be a tragedy, even though we haven’t a clue as to what gods, if any, were worshipped there, as they have been utterly forgotten.

Not that the monument in the OP is in that category, mind.

[madmonk28]

@Ravenman

Perfectly stated. And, of course, perfectly ignored by the other side…

Yup, that’s how you know you really have befuddled the conservatives, you don’t get shouted down, they just straight up ignore the question.

[madmonk28]

See? Crickets.

[Lord_Feldon]

@Sailboat

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.

It’s quite possible given that a very large number of the people in the South were the slaves. (In 1860, slaves were a majority of the population in South Carolina and Mississippi, and were in the 40-50% range in several other states, including Louisiana.)

[ftg]

@Sailboat

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.

In Georgia they held a vote to elect representatives to attend a convention to decide on succession. If you add up the votes, the pro-Union votes outnumber the pro-secession votes. But like in the electoral college, it’s an indrect vote. The number of pro-secession delegates was larger.

Slavery was relatively newer in Georgia and wasn’t as popular as elsewhere.

There were a lot of post-war myths created. A lot.

[BobLibDem]

The removal was appropriate. While the monument represented ideals that we now consider to be abhorrent, it is an important historic artifact that should be in a museum where it can be preserved and presented in the proper context. Similarly, I expect to see Nazi flags in German historical museums, I do not expect to see them flying in Germany today.

[wonky]

If changing something is an attempt to hide history, how can we change anything? Want to change a law? You’re just trying to rewrite history!

It’s such a silly argument. Changing a monument is not an attempt to rewrite history. It’s an attempt to write the present in a better text and create a better prologue for the future.