Now a mob of morons have torn down a statue of an abolitionist who died fighting for the Union. The morons violenty mobbed because the police arrested a guy carrying a bat and screaming on a megaphone in a restaurant.
I don’t think the centre-left is against capitalism. I also don’t think that the centre-left supports the mob making decisions on which statues to tear down. But move further left, let’s phrase it as strong-left, and apologists for the mob come out. Likewise, anti-corporatism and anti-wealthy sentiment become prominent. Move further left, to the hard-left, and you’re into the territory of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Alexendra O’casio-Cortez. These are people who are seeking fundamental shifts in US governance and economic policy. And to restate my earlier question, is there a prominent liberal figure from that hard-left territory who’s made a statement on if it’s wrong to pull down statues of mainstream venerated figures? I may have missed it, but I think it’s most likely they’ve been silent because because they want the support of the far-left. The ones who are actually pulling down statues. The ones who are active members of Extinction Rebellion or Occupy Wall Street. I think it’s entirely accurate to classify those far-left activists as “leftists” in the same category as Marxists, Leninists, and Castro. If you want to declare some line between leftist and left aka liberal aka progressive then feel free. But your line should be to the right of the people who aren’t speaking out against the mob removal of statues of Washington, Jefferson, and Grant.
Do you seriously believe that modern liberalism is the same as classical economic liberalism? Just to pick two examples from your Wikipedia cite, do you believe that liberals believe in small government or are anti-authoritarian? Do you agree that vigilantism is a form of authoritarianism that often acts outside of democratic structures? Which is exactly what the “leftists” who are tearing down the statues of Washington, Jefferson, and Grant are practicing.
Now that’s just plain stupid and wrong. It’s good that the governor has called out the Guard as this has gotten past the point of being out of hand in Wisconsin and is nothing about George Floyd and the police.
shrug . . . if you can’t articulate the significance(s) of the Jefferson Memorial, then how can you expect to be taken seriously in a debate about whether it should stay or go? What ground are you standing on?
According to Wikipedia, the monument was funded entirely by freed slaves - apparently mostly black Union veterans, after the Civil War and Frederick Douglass himself was the keynote speaker at its dedication.
[quote=“Telemachus, post:96, topic:912321, full:true”]
…From slavery to Jim Crow to the Southern Strategy to George Floyd, the story of black America has always been one of unrelenting trauma and degradation. And America’s dealings with Africa have always been, by turns, violent, overbearing, and imperialist…[/quote]
There is plenty to regret on both fronts, but these are gross overstatements. As counterexamples for the first, I will just offer MLK winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Colin Powell becoming Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Barack Obama being elected to two terms as President, and too many other people and accomplishments to mention. As to the second, I will offer the U.S. fighting the African slave trade after 1819, longstanding food and development aid to Africa, and our efforts to fight Ebola and AIDS there.
Oh, I certainly can, I am just astounded that I would have to. Have you ever been there? If so, are you blind? It, along with many other of the other DC Memorials, is awe inspiring. I wouldn’t have to know a damn thing about Jefferson, and still be impressed enough to find out more about him, warts and all (you know, like a memorial should). This would not be accomplished by “The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Park Bench.” It is a magnificent piece of architecture and art and is well recognized as such. It represents thousands of hours of work by skilled professionals and would be, imo, a major loss on all those points were it to be removed. It is also a major, MAJOR cultural icon. And, along with the other memorials, is a tourist attraction that brings in thousands of people a year. Maybe not on the Taj Mahal level, but up there. None of this could be said about a park bench. And a majority of what I’m saying here is not an opinion, it’s objective fact.
I won’t deny that things are certainly better for black people today than back in the 50s. But things were truly horrific in the 50s so that’s not saying a great deal. Also, there are a few points which I need to make to properly contextualize your examples.
Firstly, America didn’t award MLK a Nobel Prize. That was the Norwegian Nobel Committee. In America, MLK was repeatedly arrested, threatened, and eventually assassinated.
Secondly, while it’s great that Colin Powell and Barack Obama attained the levels of success that they did, that success was completely and utterly unimaginable until very, very recently. It’s difficult to imagine a black man being elected President in America any earlier than Obama.
Thirdly, there are millions of black Americans who can remember what it was like to live under segregation in fear of lynch mobs. The burning of Black Wall Street is still in living memory. This is all recent history, and present day black Americans are still dealing with it. The burden of living every day under the threat of racist systems - especially when the rules of those systems are enforced by racist police who kill black people more than any other race, and often for no reason - is traumatic, and that’s what we’re seeing an outpouring of at the moment.
I understand, Telemachus. But you wrote, “the story of black America has always been one of unrelenting trauma and degradation. And America’s dealings with Africa have always been, by turns, violent, overbearing, and imperialist…” I take exception to the italicized words, which are, as I wrote before, gross overstatements.
I’m not sure where destroying American history should begin or stop. Should we delete the “N-word” from “Forrest Gump,” or delete the movie? Destroying metallic relics of our history will not change that history, and, I think, it is better to remember than to forget. Certainly, we shouldn’t celebrate slave owners, but we should remember them. Taking down a monument is fine, but I don’t think the current culture is satisfied by merely toppling a statue, and I don’t think they understand the significance of such actions. I bet many current protesters would tear down a statue of John Brown, because he was a racist. They seem to want to remove all traces of slavery, oppression, and racism from everyone’s memory and consciousness. That is not the best way to proceed. Many more are just, ugh, white statue, destruction, ugh.
This is a rather difficult topic, but I’ve never been especially impressed by concerns about “historical revisionism.” Revision is what actual, professional historians do all the time. Interpretations of history change, sometimes due to new evidence and archival sources, but just as often due to changing ideas about what constitutes an important topic of study, or an important analytical approach. Even the efforts to remove the Confederate statues constitutes historical revisionism, because it involves a revision of earlier attitudes to these men, and to the circumstances in which the statues were erected.
If there were no historical revisionism, I’d be teaching my college-level history students that slavery wasn’t so bad, and that African Americans had a pretty decent life. I’d be teaching them that the Reconstruction period after the Civil War was terrible because corrupt, uneducated, and racially inferior blacks were getting involved with politics. Those were some of the predominant historical interpretations, agreed upon by many professional historians, in the first half of the twentieth century.
Here’s a paragraph about slaves and slavery from one of the best-selling US history textbooks of the twentieth century:
This was a book first published in 1930, and written by two prominent and highly-respected Northern liberal historians, one from Harvard and one from Columbia University. The quote is from the 1942 edition. This paragraph was preserved almost exactly as it appears above in the 1950 edition, except that the work “darky” in the second-last line was replaced by “black.”
By the 1962 edition, Morison and Commager’s interpretation was much more nuanced, and much more cognizant of the brutality of slavery. Even more changes were made in later editions. That’s historical revisionism. It reflects not only new evidence, but new interpretations and understandings. Sometimes it’s much better than what went before. The use of the term “historical revisionism” as a pejorative completely misses the point.
Actually, even historical figures who owned slaves, like Jefferson, pretty clearly recognized the moral problems with slavery. How could he not? He had articulated the Enlightenment idea of liberty and natural rights in the Declaration of Independence, and like many other rebellious “patriots,” he understood (even if he didn’t always want to admit) that it was rather hypocritical to champion these ideas while holding other human beings as property.
Here’s a section from his Notes on the State of Virginia, written during the Revolutionary War:
The British sometimes used this hypocrisy against the American rebels. English author Samuel Johnson asked, in a 1775 essay, " How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?"
Yeah, sorry, but while the specific mechanics of the removal might not have been overseen by Jackson, Indian removal was a direct product of the policy he vigorously pursued during the whole of his two terms in the White House, and that policy was partly a product of the antipathy to Native Americans that he demonstrated well before he even entered politics. You can’t just let Jackson off the hook by arguing that he was out of office when the physical removal took place.
“I see in him the vigilant, firm, impartial, and wise protector of my race from all the malign, reactionary, social, and political elements that would whelm them in destruction.”
- Frederick Douglass, from an 1872 pamphlet supporting the re-election of President U.S. Grant.
Pulling down statues of Grant shows an embarrassing ignorance of history.
On the other hand, Tennessee legislators can’t bring themselves to remove a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest* (one-time slave trader, Confederate general and leader of the Ku Klux Klan) from the state capitol.
I have no problem with statues of genuinely despicable people being removed from display on public property. Mob action however is typically an ugly, stupid thing.
*as mentioned in another thread, Civil War historian Shelby Foote regarded Forrest as a fine fellow. People can have amazing blind spots.
Do you seriously believe that modern liberalism is the same as classical economic liberalism?
Modern liberalism has far more in common with classical liberalism than “hard-left” policies like anarcho-syndicalism or communism. You want things to be defined by absolute extremes and that mindset falls flat on its face when discussing the realities of real world politics. You seem to believe that 1 inch = 1 light year, and that is why you are having difficulties with basic definitions.
Bernie Sanders, Warren and AOC advocate for small modifications to the capitalist system to make it functional again. They do not even remotely advocate for the smallest demands of communism (which is no less than the complete abolition of private ownership of the means of production, the violent overthrow of the ruling elite, and the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat).
Just to pick two examples from your Wikipedia cite, do you believe that liberals believe in small government or are anti-authoritarian?
Nevermind that you’re literally cherry picking in your own words, modern day liberals are extremely anti-authoritarian. Do you seriously think defunding police forces is authoritarian? That opposition to government spying is authoritarian? That the advocation for the defense and expansion of voting rights is authoritarian? Do you think the expansion of the “in-group” to include historically disparaged populations is authoritarian? How, exactly, does any of this dramatically concentrate power into a single persons hand?
Do you agree that vigilantism is a form of authoritarianism that often acts outside of democratic structures?
No, vigilantism by definition is anti-authoritarian. You need to go back to basic definitions because you are calling up down. Vigilantes challenge the government’s monopoly on the use of force. That monopoly is the central pillar of authoritarian governments.
Which is exactly what the “leftists” who are tearing down the statues of Washington, Jefferson, and Grant are practicing.
There are certainly anarchists and marxists within those groups tearing down statues, but there are also monarchists and literal nazi’s in right-wing protests. That doesn’t mean that every single republican is an avowed Nazi as your logic demands. “The right” is a very broad brush, as is “the left” but you want to define “the left” as entirely communist. It’s reductionist, illogical, inaccurate and renders you entirely incapable of understanding nuance or distinction. The BLM movement isn’t “hard-left” and doesn’t advocate for the end of private ownership of the means of production even if there are those within the movement who do - exactly like your being right wing doesn’t make you a Goebbels.
The optics are going to be pretty head-spinning. At the same time that Confederates who promoted slavery are getting their statues removed, Lincoln (primarily known for freeing the slaves) is going to get his removed too. All people are going to see is, “The slave-freeing guy’s statue got toppled.”
As best as I understand it, they’re not trying to get rid of sculptures of Lincoln because Lincoln was insufficiently anti-racist/woke/whatever, they’re trying to get rid of this sculpture because of the submissive or inferior position of the black man depicted in it.
It’s eminently reasonable to argue that, when thousands of slaves escaped northward and thousands of black men fought and died in the Union military, black people took an active role in their own liberation from slavery rather than the passive stance implied by the sculpture.
Lincoln by himself is fine. Lincoln with a standing black Union soldier and a standing black woman to represent escaped slaves would probably be fine. IMHO, this sculpture isn’t.
About 2.5% of slaves escaped. About 10% of union casualties were black soldiers. It is incorrect to say that slaves were not freed by Lincoln.
The people who funded and erected the statue were ex slaves, I think they knew what happened to them and who did it.
I never said they weren’t freed by Lincoln, just that they had a more active role in assisting that effort than the sculpture in question implies.
And black troops had an impact out of proportion to their numbers. Lincoln evolved from wanting to send ex-slaves back to Africa to “if I could save the Union without freeing any slave…” to making a speech endorsing voting rights for literate and veteran black men at least partially because of the moral and emotional impact of black men fighting and dying in the Union military.
They’re not at all gross overstatements. The fact that black people achieved greatness doesn’t change the fact that black communities have had the deck stacked against them from the beginning, and still do. Beyond slavery and the Jim Crow era, there was redlining, segregation in schools, segregation in housing, and rampant discrimination in hiring and lending. Their communities have been stripped not only of dignity but of resources that enable them to function as semi-autonomous communities - and many neighborhoods and cities are still highly segregated.
The people who funded and erected the statue were ex slaves, I think they knew what happened to them and who did it.
Yes, but then the people who built the statue said “thanks for the money, now GTFO” and ignored any and all input the statue funders had. The ex-slaves who funded this statue objected to the “subjugated” black man imagery then too, but were ignored for fairly self explanatory reasons.