Thank you for the kind words. As to why we need navies, it’s obviously for national security (defense, knowledge and control of the nation’s sea borders, etc.).
Pssst: octopus, the American revolutionaries are not generally considered “treasonous”, because they won their rebellion.
Also, American revolutionaries weren’t fighting to maintain slavery. They were fighting for freedom from the English crown. Lee is not honored because he owned slaves, rather because he was a leading figure in the attempt to protect the right of millions to own slaves.
If there were a statue of GW that glorified his wife-beating, that celebrated his wife-beating, then, yes, I’d like that statue removed. I don’t think we should honor GW for beating his wife, had he been a wife-beater.
Is the GW statue in Trafalgar Square there to honor his treason? No, and we know that because he’s not dressed up in his general gear and on a horse. He’s there looking like a statesman and president and, I imagine, the Brits have that statue there to honor his role in forming the country that’s their closest ally, and his role in setting up a nation that has values that closely align with the UK’s own values.
Likewise, statues of GW here may glorify his role as first president or as general when fighting for the freedom of our own country. Sure, it was treason to the the British, but not to us Americans.
So, what do the Lee and Jefferson statues glorify?
So winning is the difference. I just think that if slave owning and bad behavior is enough to exclude one from having a statue or something named in honor of, we should be consistent. No Caesar salad. No Genghis Grill. No Lee jeans. No Nike shoes.
The Lee in Lee Jeans is another guy.
Nike shoes were boycotted at one point because of their exploitive labor practices; I don’t know if they’ve gotten better at that.
Otherwise, what is your reasoning putting Nike shoes on the same list? What battle did Nike lose? (“Nike” means victory! Nike wins all her battles!)
The Nike statue has been beheaded. Just saying…
-
The statue wasn’t destroyed. The head is gone.
-
Nobody seems to be reporting this story except such luminaries as Daily Caller and Gateway Pundit.
-
Heads fall off statues, especially cheap ones where a head was glued on a generic body to save costs.
-
This blew up on Friday. I’m waiting until Monday when, possibly, the restorer remounts the head and apologizes for not leaving a note.
-
Pizzagate.
Then you can make that case. No one else is, so you will be out in a field of straw all by your lonesome, but it is your case to make. No one is making the case that slave owning is enough to exclude one from having a statue.
The case that others are actually making is that Washington is honored in spite of having slaves. Lee didn’t just have slaves, he fought against his own country specifically to maintain slavery as an institution.
If you cannot see the difference between the two, that problem is on you, it is not on those who are capable of seeing the very obvious differences.
Ah yes, the infamous slippery slope.
Reminds me of the old saying “As Bucyrus, Ohio goes, so goes the nation.”
Anyone else getting really tired of right-wingers demanding that the left apologize and make amends for every damn thing anyone does… and yet they still fully support all the crap Trump et al are doing? 'Cause I know I’m sure getting tired of it.
The thing is, the only groups that have advocated the idea that the removal of civil war statues set up during Jim Crow to intimidate Blacks should be extended to other statues is those on the right who use it as a slippery slope straw man. This makes it unlikely that the statue was consciously targeted by the same people who are angry about the civil war statues. To my knowledge Colonel Crawford didn’t even own slaves so the standard slippery slope argument (well, Washingotn and Jefferson owned slaves so why aren’t you taking down their statues) doesn’t apply. We will have to wait for an investigation before we can determine what the actual motive was but my three guesses in no particular order are as follows.
- Drunk highschool kids just wanting to wreck stuff, as they have always done.
- Stupid anti-civil war protestor who that this was a civil war statue, just like those stupid people whomistakenly target Sikhs for abuse thinking they are Muslim.
- Some guy in favor of cilvil war statues hoping to provide support for the slippery slope idea you set out in your OP.
Too late to Edit. recommended viewing for Octopus. Note this came out 27 years ago and it was a trope back then.
I know who did it. Native Americans. Crawford was rather not nice to the Ohio Indians.
You persist in ignoring one specific fact related to these statues: They were erected with the explicit purpose of supporting the myth of The Lost Cause.
As Mayor Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans said when he declared the intent to remove several statues from public venues in that city:
Can you point to a statue of Washington Jefferson, Henry, or others that was erected to celebrate their slave ownership?
There have been posters, here, who have argued for the utter destruction of all Confederate memorials, however that is not a majority opinion. The basic public call for those statues is that they stop being used to re-write history in the way that they were intended when they were erected and the way in which the current crop of white supremacists would use them.
I am not ignoring that fact at all. I’m saying it’s not very relevant to most. When I first posted here regarding why people fly the Confederate flag I made the same argument. Just because you know a set of facts and you interpret people’s intentions as X doesn’t mean that people who fly a flag or like a statue or are neutral about the issue know the same facts and have the intentions imagined.
Look at the same discussions that periodically arise concerning racial slurs. Some people are fixated on a static meaning. Others argue that meaning evolves and furthermore is context sensitive. The position in the majority on this board is seen from the lens of a particular educational and ideological perspective. This education in this particular topic is not as widespread as you might imagine. In other words, check your privilege!
All kidding aside, I myself was ignorant of many of these facts until I started posting here. I read many of the cites and links provided on the subject and educated myself on the subject. And you are correct, at the time that many of these statues and monuments were erected they were done for a shitty reason and by shitty people. Spite is not a good reason to erect statues. Especially not spite directed at people who were treated by law as 2nd class citizens.
But that was then. Nowadays, those statues and flags mean different things to different people and many of the people who don’t want them down don’t want them up due to spite. They like them for their own reasons.
I kid you not when I say I’ve seen many black Southerners wear Confederate gear non-ironically. Why? Cause they are Southern. Then again I see white guys when I was growing up wear gold chains and NWA gear so perhaps everyone is guilty of a bit of cultural appropriation or diffusion.
Now why would people wear that stuff if it was intrinsically hateful, racist, or evil? They wouldn’t. It’s proof that symbolism and language evolve over time and place. Shakespeare is modern English. And it’s quite different than colloquial American modern English. Same language yet quite different in meaning.
Back to context, my education is not poor. I don’t bother to write as an English major because A, I’m not an English major and B I don’t care enough to study grammar to write on a website. That said, I have a college degree in engineering. I took a bunch of AP classes. I scored highest in my high school on the SAT and ACT and I wasn’t aware of all this Lost Cause narrative and post Reconstruction era propaganda.
It wasn’t a major topic in my AP American History class. All I knew growing up in the south was that some of the streets and schools were named after Civil War generals and that the rebel flag was the rebel flag. I’m not even trying to brag on my personal education. I only put that out there to highlight that someone who is interested in history and is educated and knows quite a bit about different wars still has gaps in knowledge that can lead one to believe something different about why a statue may exist.
So instead of being accusatory towards people who don’t share your education about this particular subject and making enemies it’s probably better to educate over time. Or just ignore those statues altogether because the amount of people still around who knew they were their out of spite is shrinking every day. Why make statues martyrs? What is there to be gained?
You folks are the ones who are giving these symbols the power. If they were treated as ordinary and mundane adornments in parks and decorations on top of orange bootlegging cars they’d have so little power. We can’t even have Nazi flags at Disney World in the Indiana Jones exhibit because people think that any display of anything is endorsement of everything negative associated with that word or symbol. It just becomes ridiculous and so easy to parody and satire.
But by treating these symbols as terribly dangerous and scary we, as a society, are creating the danger. Don’t you see the irony?
But to the real topic. Why? What is the real motivation about exploiting these statues and such for political purposes? The end game of causing a furor over statues is not the removal of statues. But what is the end game?
People like iiandyiiii seem to want to treat each topic as a separate and quarantined subject. But that’s not what the left wing radicals who are violent and are agitated about this subject are about. This is a means to an end and it’s not going to stop with a sports announcer named Robert Lee being moved, or statues vandalized, or Gone With the Wind banned.
The targets of ire will continue to shift and capitulation to extreme, violent anarchists will become habitual. It’s happening with free speech and it’s happening with monuments.
The end game is the removal from the public space of monuments that do not represent our values. For these statues to stand on public land is an acknowledgement that the community celebrates and honors the figures represented and the cause they fought for, which it’s becoming increasingly clear they do not. It’s the locals who want these statues gone, and outside troublemakers from the Naziest parts of the internet showing up to “defend their history”. You’re suggesting that no public statue should ever ever be taken down no matter how abhorrent it becomes - the Nazi icons should have stayed up after WWII, the statue of Saddam in Baghdad should still be standing, Oliver Cromwell’s skull should still be on a pike.
If you think the “history” these statues represent is in such dire need of protection, why don’t you adopt them and put them in your front lawn, on your land, so you can show the community what you stand for?
Who’s banning Gone With the Wind? Nobody’s banning Gone With the Wind. You want Gone With the Wind? Here you go. Buy as many copies as you want. Us left-wing radicals won’t stand in your way.
Yeah… See, I don’t believe that’s the end game of radical leftists. I believe the current game is to normalize a climate of political intimidation, violence, and street fights. Why? I don’t know because that’s not a fight they are likely to win.
And why don’t I have a statue of Lee? Same reason you probably aren’t personally housing a family of refugees. More importantly, the HOA wouldn’t approve. And on an unnecessary to share personal note, I’m not a fan of the Confederacy or secession movements in general.
You mean like those guys who marched with swastika flags and murdered a woman with a car?
Yeah, like those guys. BTW, has it been established which side initiated the mob violence at that event? Because you realize the natural progression of normalized political violence is more political violence?