There is no doubt NC is involved in the worst sort of Jim crow laws. But so? Sure, they passed a law to protect memorials , but no-one, I repeat NO ONE, asked that Silent Sam be excempt. The Town, the University could petition the Historical Comm. They could have claimed it was unsafe (The Governor even said they could). They could have gotten rid of it before that pernicious law was passed- but they did none of those things.
So, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the “will of the people” or “voter suppression” .
"S*tate lawmakers passed Senate Bill 22 in 2015. It stops the removal of monuments, including Confederate monuments, without the approval of the State Historical Commission.
Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger said Friday he has not been asked to bring the law back before the body.
“The law is in place,” he said. “I think the law should be followed. If someone has proposed changes to the law, then obviously they have an opportunity at some point to offer those.”
The law provides an exception when “a building inspector or similar official” determines it poses a threat to public safety.
Governor Roy Cooper told UNC that is grounds for the university to remove it.
“We’ve had our legal people look at it,” Cooper said. “I’ve looked at it. I believe that exception is there.”
Well, if the people had really tried legal methods to take it down, but the racist NC assembly had blocked their attempts- I can see the frustration. But Silent sam is one of the more innocuous statutes. I mean there are still statues of that murdering racist swine NB Forrest up.
We had a revolution right? We had a civil war right? Obviously words can’t stop cannons once they are firing. Systems of morality derive with logic from moral axioms. We live in a society that indoctrinates people with the highly useful fiction of intrinsic natural rights. Obviously, the truth of the matter is that might makes right. But we don’t want to stress that too much because you can justify eugenics, genocide, and all sorts of horrors if might makes right is recognized as the sole moral axiom.
Why do you think we promote the idea of self defense? The castle doctrine? Jury trial? Jury nullification in rare cases? A constitution for that matter? A difficult to achieve super majority to change the constitution? Checks and balances? All of these are to constrain society and the state.
So when you have a state that contradicts the stated principles which the government and the laws that the government enact are derived from you have a conflict. So with regards to slavery I think you have every right to fight against it with whatever means you have at your disposal. That’s because I think slavery contradicts the basis of the origin of our government. That is a government that governs with the consent of the governed and with enshrined natural rights. Additionally, slavery is a grievous offense that is immediate and severe in nature. A statue is not. A peaceful assembly is not. Extrajudicial remedies are not necessary or productive in those cases.
I explained that above. And just because something is “regressive” doesn’t mean it’s not society’s will. What if a counter mob started protecting that statue?
That’d be regressive. THAT would actually be something the 2nd amendment is for.
Ok, so locals aren’t allowed to tear that statue down, because state law forbids it, dubiously. And the state has done so much voter suppression and gerrymandering, that it’s no longer considered a democracy by independent observers. So both democratic avenues have been blocked: we’re discussing a situation of rule by force, might makes right.
North Carolina patriots could stand down. But that would be wrong. All experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. In the mean time, there is a very good case for nonviolent civil disobedience, done by the book. Chat with the cops. Chat with the Mayor. Chat with DA. Acquire a permit to bring deconstruction equipment onto the lawn, along with yellow tape. Call it a performance piece. Everyone likes performance art. Well some do anyway.
Then hit the gas. Then turn yourself into the local constable and lawyer up. Nonviolent! Civil! Disobedience!
Alternatively, have a bunch of local frat-boys hook their RVs to the Confederate Carl at 2AM. It’s all good.
There’s a case for making these actions local. Silent Sam may not be the worst, but the OP established that he’s associated with an ugly history and ill intent. If the locals want him gone, he should go.
Any independent observer would say that North Carolina is a democracy. If having to show ID to vote means not a democracy then Canada, Brazil, France, Germany, Israel, and Norway are not democracies.
No, I don’t buy the “North Carolina is a totalitarian regime and therefore the good citizens had no choice but to take the law into their own hands,” argument.
I live in Pa which apparently ranks far lower than North Carolina.
If I trust the the study you cited I should probably flee to North Korea to protect my political freedom.
I don’t want to touch off a firestorm, but the rebellion actually was about States’ rights; but the point is subtle since the right to choose to allow slavery was high on the list. There were others.
Consider that the position of the US Government a.k.a. “The North” was not to declare war to end slavery, but to -quote- Preserve the Union -endquote- , that is to prevent the states from seceding from the United States. The States that attempted to secede felt they had the right to do so, and the United States government disagreed.
That being said, I agree with removal of a statue to a racist of that magnitude, by whatever means necessary.
There were no other states rights that showed up on every state’s articles of secession, no others that were called the cornerstone of the Confederacy, no other states rights that in any way would have initiated secession.
People try to wave this away because they imagine that 19th-century whites, like 21st-century whites, are by and large ashamed of racism and try to obscure it. But that’s not true. 19th-century whites, specifically those who held the power in the South, thought white supremacy was the basis for a new Camelot, considered chattel slavery the best thing that had ever happened to Africans and the way to build a pan-American utopia.
The states that seceded weren’t ashamed of slavery, they didn’t try to obscure the causes of their secession behind states rights rhetoric. They were out and proud.
Southern/Confederate politicians of the time regularly attacked states’ rights – particularly the rights of Northern states to welcome escaped slaves. Southern states demanded that Northern states cooperate with capturing and returning them.
It was about white supremacy and slavery, as is demonstrated in many of the Southern states Articles of Secession, as well as the words of Confederate politicians of the time.
How on earth can you make that claim? The Confederate states explicitly opposed ‘the right to choose [whether] to allow slavery’, they wanted to force newly admitted states to be slave states over the objection of the actual residents and government of the territory, and to require them from ever making the choice not to allow slavery. “They wanted states to have the right to ‘choose’ slavery (as long as they didn’t make any other choice)” is the direct opposite of State’s rights, it’s the Federal government overriding the individual state government.
More generally, the rebellion was about slavery, period. “States Rights” is simply a lie that revisionists came up with after the war. If you read the secession documents form the seceding states, its abundantly clear that it’s about slavery, period.
Oh, slavery was #1 through # whatever you like. Reread CSA VP Alexander Stephens’ Corner Stone Speech if you’re unsure. “States’ rights” was a cover term, used by the kind of GWTW gentlefolk, to whom their honor was precious, who called their slaves “servants”. It meant the right of the states to have and preserve slavery, just like it later evolved to mean the states’ rights to practice Jim Crow, lynchings, segregation and other means of racial oppression, and now means a variety of subtler but still no more moral views.
At first, yes, arguably, when abolition was not yet the dominant public view. When the political climate, induced by the war, made it possible to end slavery, slavery was ended. It was already being done wholesale, everywhere the Union Army went.
It wasn’t a matter of what they “felt”, but of what the Constitution said. No, secession was not authorized, it could only be obtained by rebellion. The invocations of the spirit of the Founding Fathers was the cover story.
As we can all see from this, the artificial history in which the rebellion was not about retaining slavery remains strong even today. But it was still manufactured as a way to avoid discussing the *real *history, to “erase” it as current usage has it. The monuments to slavers and traitors are part of *that *attempt to erase history, and *that *has to end.
I don’t share in your condemnation of escaping slaves, blacks sitting at whites only lunch counters, families hiding Jews from Nazis, and a host of other people who chose morality over legality. I find the large scale implications of that condemnation rather disturbing and unpleasant, but not really surprising. It’s especially bizarre because civil disobedience and jury nullification have a long history in the US and common law systems in general, which given your background you should be aware of. Completely ignoring the entire concepts of civil disobedience and jury trial is actually surprising.