I hope the next step will be getting rid of Columbus Day !
I think until recently, a lot of white people didn’t understand what the big deal was. It took seeing Nazis storming the streets of a college town and a tragic death for them to really get it.
But black people have been expressing their feelings about Confederacy worship for 100+ years. We complain about a lot things that other people ignore because it doesn’t affect them.
Please provide a cite, so that I can properly re-post this as appropriate on other forums.
I support the OP on taking down those other statues and monuments but one thing at a time.
And what’s your problem with removing statues of a slave-runner who only became famous after Washington Irving wrote the highly cleaned up and rather imaginative A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus?
You know what happens to statues that few even care about? They never get put up in the first place. People did care about these statues. They cared about telling blacks that they were second-class citizens. They cared about proclaiming that they’d fight anyone who said otherwise. They cared about committing treason, and about declaring that they’d rather do it again than admit that people are equals. They cared about glorifying slavery. They cared about the joy of whipping uppity black women. They cared so much that they put up statues. And that is the reason they must come down.
Columbus was an asshole and reviled in his own time.
It’s not accurate to suggest that “suddenly,” out of nowhere, people started being offended by Confederate flags and monuments.
It IS true that movements to remove flags and monuments have risen AND fallen sharply and cyclically over many years. There have always been blacks and liberals who were adamant in demanding that Stonewall Jackson statues and the Stars and Bars be torn down for good, just as there have always been Southerrn Die-hards who still love them. Both sides have usually been outnumbered by the Mushy Middle, who tend to think “I’m not crazy about the flags or statues, but they just aren’t that important to me.” And a LOT of blacks are in the Mushy Middle.
What’s changed recently? What made this such a hot issue again? Dylan Roof, for one thing. As long as Robert E. Lee fans seemed like harmless old coots, the issue lay dormant. Once a Southern white nationalist went on a Killing spree, the “Tear Em Down Movement” got a huge shot in the arm.
I guess my problem (and I wouldn’t go so far as calling it a problem so much as a… wonder?)
So just wondering… Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, get rid of those monuments/statues too?
You could kind of get to a point where you don’t have anyone from the past on anything at all. Money. Monuments. Portraits. Since something from the past could be brought up against pretty much any and all of them.
So it was wrong for the Germans to remove Nazi monuments after WWII? You’re saying that it’s never okay to remove a statue because society and/or local government decides that the message it sends is harmful?
Not this crappy argument again,
I will have to notice that recently it was neo nazi Pat Buchanan the one making that point a few years ago. It was dumb then and it is dumb now.
Specially when one takes into account that both the Union and the Confederacy kept on remembering the founding fathers with . Meaning that whoever is demanding to get rid of monuments to Jefferson, Washington, Franklin etc, is a fringe position of a fringe. That has no respect coming from the old confederates also. Meaning that indeed what you are doing with that reheated (many times) point from a paleo fascist to be a slippery slope fallacy.
Were they incompetent slave-runners that were nothing but footnotes in history and certainly never set one foot in this country, that nobody gave a flying fuck about until a teller of tall tales made up stories about them, or were they important historical figures whose exploits stand on their own in the annals of history, feet of clay notwithstanding? If you want to attempt to compare one with the others, bring a lot more to the table.
Why should there have been statues of Columbus in this country in the first place?
Yes, but – as was already pointed out – if you say big fine things about Washington or Jefferson, I can then bring up stuff from the past against them, the way I could against pretty much anybody; and, so what? I can bring stuff up about pretty much anybody. But if some CSA sympathizer is out to make a case for Lee, he’s going to, what, point at the very stuff I’d be bringing up against the guy? That’s just weird.
That’s putting an awful lot of words into my mouth and intent into things I haven’t said or believe… “wrong for German to remove Nazi monuments”? No. “You’re saying that it’s never okay to remove a statue”? Um, no again.
I don’t have a “problem” with Germany doing anything or our doing anything with Lee, the confederate flag, or even Columbus for the matter.
It just seems so… revisionist? That’s not it. Idealist? Well no, not really. I honestly don’t know what it is, but it’s something.
My brother has grown to despise my grandparents because in todays world they’d be considered embarrassingly, cringeworthly, racist. I agree. But I don’t take it so far as he does where he wants to erase their memory, who they were, and what they were to our family as it is today - positive morals, ideals passed down, etc… He wishes they were never born, and holds them in contempt and utter disrespect.
I on the other hand look at it in the time that it was. I can overlook that part or put it in a context that I don’t have to pass judgement on them back then with todays standards. It’ more to friends, family, 'Do you believe how they talked, how they felt? How completely backward that was? I really wonder what my grandchildren someday will say, or the grandchildren of them, are going to say about me and how awful a person I and the society I lived/live in now, were… a hundred years down the road.
I would hope, as I do with generations past and things done then, to put it into the context of the time and place, and hold off making judgements about the people and the things done then based on things known and done now.
Learning by observing and acknowledging bad and good, not erasing and rewriting things to only be ‘good’.
I hope but doubt that will make much sense. I have a hard time making sense and coming to the black and white conclusions and declarations that others so (apparently) easily do. And how far they’re willing to take it.
You brought up Columbus, so can you tell us why there should be statues in this country dedicated to him?
Your whole post is [checks forum] a self-serving mess. The two paragraphs I quoted are the heart of it, tho.
Treason was wrong then, and it’s wrong now. The people who committed treason knew they were committing treason. There’s no “new light” that we are seeing these treasonous jerkwads in: they’ve always been (and been known as) treasonous.
To suggest otherwise is revisionist or idealist or “something” AND THAT SHOULD BE OBVIOUS TO ANYONE AND EVERYONE.
How is that a crappy argument? We have statues, monuments, money, emblazoned with the images of slave holders… racists… horrible people (and not meant facetiously. These people owned people).
How is one (Lee, Columbus, et al) worse than the other (Jefferson, Washington et al)?
I’m honestly not seeing how you draw the line, and draw it so absolutely that one is horrible and the other is fine.
If you can’t come up with a way to describe your feeling, maybe you’re not being honest with yourself about what that feeling is.
Of course we should be passing judgment on them according to today’s standards. That’s one reason why we have today’s standards, because we passed judgments on the old ones.
If in hindsight, it turns out that I did something that was really awful, I hope they will judge me for it.
In the case of racism, we haven’t changed because of some information that didn’t exist in the past.
Who exactly are you saying are “erasing and rewriting things to only be ‘good’” and how are they doing it?
This is as good a thread as any of its cousins to post this.
In 1958, Congress passed a law granting Confederate veterans the same status and privileges as actual veterans of the United States armed forces. Of course this was done in response to the Civil Rights movement as you can tell by the fact it was done fully four years into said movement. This status–94 years after the end of the Civil War–certainly wasn’t done to actually benefit any actual Confederate veterans as the last of them died in 1951. Just like the flag redesign in the southern states, this was purely a poke in the eye to prove to the Black populace that the people in power, the White people in power, are still lording it over them and are not happy with “uppity” behavior.
Oh, and there are people in the South today, citing the 1958 law, calling for people to be prosecuted for vandalizing those statues to Confederates. And they’re wrapping up their call for such prosecutions in the patriotic support of today’s members of the armed forces.
So there you have it folks. This isn’t about slavery or subjugation. It’s all about honoring people who don’t commit treason against the United States of America by glorifying people who did commit treason against the United States of America.
I’d love to call it cognitive dissonance, but that would require those folks to be uncomfortable with their conflicting views.
p.s. The 1958 law is BS.
p.p.s. OP: I’d be willing to be real money that there were quite a few people (you know, Black people) who were offended from the get-go by the stated reasons for commemorating these traitors.
p.p.p.s. For a fun exercise, go check out the dates of adoption of state flags hearkening back to/glorifying the CSA.