Does that case apply across the board, or just to Pennsylvania?
Across the board. Some states have home rule laws or constitutional provisions that make it harder to interfere with local government, but that’s an internal matter totally under state law. So long as a state follows its own laws as interpreted by its own courts, it can do pretty much whatever it wants to its own local governments.
This case puts it even more succinctly:
Charlottesville’s argument against the law seems to be about whether the law even applies to the statues in Charlottesville, not whether the state could pass a law doing that.
No it wasn’t:
Fuck that monument.
Wow, I had no idea that local governments had no inherent rights vis-a-vis the state. I’m surprised (given the recent upswing in state-level interference with local governments’ decisions) that some local government doesn’t just say, “if all we are is an arm of the state, and the state is going to tell us everything we must and must not do, then let the state run this county directly - we disband. Let the state carry out its own damn orders.”
Why?
I’m not seeing how it’s Canada’s problem which side was which. As far as they’re concerned they were both helping some foreign country or another; it one of them lost the war and has since disbanded I don’t see how it’s any skin off their nose.
I mean, we don’t mind when a company sends guns to both sides; what’s wrong with sending soldiers?
We don’t?
Not as much as we mind people waving confederate flags, at any rate. Plus it doesn’t look like Canada actually sent anybody at all to either side of the war - it didn’t actually exist as a country yet! People hailing from the regions that became Canada acted on their own to support whichever side they supported.
If Canada wants to respect their (sort-of) citizens who chose to give their lives for another country, then I figure that’s not something I’d gripe about. It’s not like the monument is in honor of slavery or the confederacy or anything.
The obelisk brings an important part of our history to our minds, and it does so without honouring the Confederate side, let alone the evils of slavery that the Confederates fought for.
The obelisk can be criticized for the sin of omission. It fails to state that the US civil war was fought over the Confederacy demanding that slavery be continued, that slavery was, is and always will be heinously evil, and that about fifteen percent of the Canadians who fought in the US civil war were so morally bankrupt that they fought for the evil Confederacy. It also fails to state that the USA is extremely fucked today to the point of no longer being a full democracy due in large part to historic and ongoing racism, both individual and institutional, and that despite slavery having been outlawed by statute in the colonies in Canada and throughout most of the British Empire on 1 August 1834, and de facto stopped by the judiciary in Lower Canada (Quebec – which was about as populous as all the other colonies in Canada combined) in early 1798:
But rather than explicitly stating the obvious (a) that slavery is evil ergo Confederates were evil, and (b) that Canada was done with slavery decades earlier, the obelisk avoids presenting interpretations of the facts and instead assumes the viewer will have a basic understanding of (a) and (b), and is capable for learning more about the involvement of Canadians in the US civil war from other sources, so the obelisk only sets out five basic facts: the number of Canadians who fought and the number who died in the US civil war, the names of those Canadians who won the Medal of Honour (not mentioning the five Canadian Union generals and not mentioning any awards or ranks of Canadian Confederates), that Canada confederated in 1867 (two years after the US civil war), and, via a depiction of two soldiers shaking hands, that the USA continued on as the USA:
The obelisk is in a material culture museum in eastern Ontario, The Lost Villages, which consists of ten historical buildings and a reading-room building scattered over the museum grounds. The museum covers the local area from the mid-19th through to the mid-20th century, when these buildings and objects therein were relocated when the building of the St. Lawrence Seaway permanently flooded over much of the area, including a dozen villages.
The driving force behind the making of the obelisk was The Grays and Blues of Montreal, Quebec, which is a US civil war reenactment group that participates in reenactments and related events in the USA, Quebec, and Ontario. Participants take turns playing at playing union and confederate soldiers, the stars and bars rather than the battle flag is flown by the confederates, and white supremacists etc. are shown the door.
As with many countries, Canada is into material culture museums, living history museums, and reenactments. These help make the past tangible, particularly for large numbers of people who are somewhat interested, but not interested enough to dig into dusty texts. For example, up the road from my chalet is Fort William Historical Park: Canada’s largest living history museum of 250 acres, 50+ reconstructed buildings (including a fully functioning canoe factory), populated by living history reenactors, and housing Canada’s foremost library on the fur trade that was integral to the forming of Canada. Down the road is a small living history museum: The Founders’ Museum and Pioneer Village (a Slate River teacher/farmer wanted to preserve local history, so he started accepting donations of artifacts to store in one of his barns. Things got out of hand, as things are wont to do, when folks started donating entire historic buildings – the Kakabeka Falls church, a school, a town hall, a house, a rebuild of from original blueprints of the Upsala train station, and all the stuff that you would find in such buildings.)
Reenactors do their thing at such places. When the history they are portraying includes battles, those too are reenacted, e.g. the Plains of Abraham (England v. France); Niagara, Fort Erie, Fort St. Joseph (England/Canada v. USA), Old Fort William (English Hudson’s Bay Company v. Canadian Northwest Company).
The Montreal reenactors are not pathetic American racists clinging to their evil lost cause of “The South will rise again!”, their evil United Daughters of the Confederacy who handed out honors after the civil war and promoted racism and Jim Crow through their funding and placement of Confederate statutes, their evil Klu Klux Clan who combined racist terrorism and murder under the guise of Christian family life, their evil National Rifle Association that makes a business of killing through encouraging and empowering the white supremacists (e.g. Bundys, Nazis, citizen militias, and good old boys who come running to the bubba dog whistle), their all too often evil law enforcement (e.g. Arpaio and any number of murders by cops – leading to Black Lives Matter), and their all too often evil law makers and executive (e.g. many of the GOP and Trump Co.).
The Montreal reenactors take turns at which army they will represent during reenactments. The stars and bars is flown, rather than the battle flag, given how racists fetishize the battle flag. [T]he Grays and Blues of Montreal has zero tolerance for white supremacists in their ranks and makes sure they “never even get through the door.” . . . . “. . . the place for reminders of the Confederacy is museums.” Quite simply, they are historical reenactors who do not have an agenda other than to enlighten people as to our history – our Canadian history – and have a nice time doing it as a hobby.
Finally, why is it Canadian history, and why is it so important to Canadian history to deserve an obelisk? In the late 18th century, when various English colonies in North America revolted and formed their own nation, through to Confederation in 1867, the remaining colonies were left pondering existential and practical questions. Do we want to stay the way we are as separate colonies (Confederation began in 1867 with the colonies of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Canada – the merged Upper Canada/Ontario and Lower Canada/Quebec – but Confederation of the land mass known today as Canada was not completed until 1949 when colony of Newfoundland and Labrador signed on)? Do some or all of us want to joint the USA? Do we want to become a unified nation? How do we deal with the difference between French Lower Canada/Quebec and the other English colonies (the Maritimes and Upper Canada/Ontario)? How do we deal with annexing Rupert’s Land, the west coast and the arctic, bearing in mind that the USA purchased Alaska a few months before Confederation, and that the USA had been making noises about annexing Rupert’s Land for itself? How do we deal with the already existing people (eventually recognized as sovereign nations) that populate these areas? How do we fight off the Americans when they want to invade us (and yes, you’ve invaded us a few times:
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1775 – 1776 Invasion of Quebec – we fought you off but eventually you won your war of independence;
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1812 – 1813 – The War of 1812-1813 – we fought you off again but this time you lost the war;
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1836 – the Dickson Filibuster – the Hudson’s Bay Company gave you jobs and Dickson fucked-off;
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1837–1838 the Patriot War – both Lower Canada and Upper Canada were struggling to develop responsible government when the financial panic of 1837 hit and things got violent, some Canadian revolt leaders gathered American patriots from across the US border to join the struggle, then Canadians seized a US Navy vessel, set it on fire, and extinguished the blaze by running it over Niagara Falls, which led to the US president sending in troops to try to calm things down, but American raids dribbled on until a Canadian north of Windsor figured that prisoner exchanges were prolonging the war and that the irregular Americans raiders were not actually regular American troops, so he and his unorganized militia captured and executed a bunch of them without trial on the grounds that they were land pirates, which solved the problem (and although he suffered a court martial, a parliamentary debate, and a duel over the killings, he eventually was made the first judge up my way);
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1866 – 1871 (or 1881) the Fenian Raids – the English treated the Irish like shit, so many of them moved to the USA, but you treated them like shit too, so after they fought for you in the US civil war, they did the only logical thing: about 400 of them invaded Canada in hopes of trading Canada for Ireland, and when they lost, they invaded again, only this time with over a thousand troops, and they kept raiding us again, and again, for five years, from Campebello Island off the coast of Maine to south-western Ontario, but even then, like a punch-drunk pugilist, they didn’t want to quit, so they commissioned a submarine with a 1 × 9 in (230 mm) pneumatic gunthat was launched in 1881, but fortunately never made it into action because none of them knew how to operate it (Seriously, I’m not even making this shit up :smack:);
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1990 – the Oka Crisis – it’s too complicated to cover in a single run-on sentence, but the long and short of it is that the Mohawks fucked over the Hurons, the Roman Catholic church and the Quebec municipality and judiciary fucked over the Mohawks, a blockade by the Mohawks resulted in a major gunfight (killing one cop) and an extended stand-off, Mounties were called in but not permitted to fight, so the Mountie-snot was beaten out of them (ten were hospitalized) and Quebec had the Feds bring in the Army, such that at the end of it of it all the standoff ceased by way of a water canon fight that turned into a water baloon fight, the golf course developer being bought out, the best man at the dead cop’s sister’s wedding was the brother of a protester who was jailed for six years, and it was learned that there were 30 armed American Mohawk warriors in the fight.)
About two and a half percent of the men who lived in what was to eventually become the Canada today fought in the US civil war, only a few decades after we had attained responsible government, and at a time when we were having all these discussions on whether or not, and if so then how, we should confederate, or be annexed by the USA. That was a relatively large portion of our population.
It was and is part of our history.
Imagine for a second what the USA today would think if, during a period of great political change and nation building, four-hundred thousand Americans got it in their heads to march off to fight for some other country. It’s the sort of thing you’d look into. It’s the sort of thing that you’d remember. It’s the sort of thing that you’d call History and you’d teach to your children. Well, it works the same way up here in The Great White North, so take off, eh!
Even a monument to the confederate soldiers who died in the war isn’t such a big deal. They fought in a war to preserve slavery and paid the ultimate price. If someone wants to put up a monument that says “Isn’t it sad that all these people died?”, that’s fine. It’s always sad when a bunch of people die.
It’s only a problem if the monument goes further to celebrate the cause for which they fought.
For example, in my town there’s a little memorial to the local men who died in the Vietnam War. Even if I thought the Vietnam War was wrong, we can still have a memorial for the kids who died there. But putting up a statue of General Westmoreland to celebrate his role in the Vietnam War? Yeah, I’m gonna have a problem with that.
Tru dat.
Nice analogy.
Similarly with the Korean War and Vietnam memorials on the Mall. They both memorialize those who fought and died in those wars, but neither glorifies its war, and neither contains implicit messages (AFAICT) about the virtue of having fought those wars.
Updating this thread there is a renewed effort to remove Confederate statues in the wake of George Floyd’s murder:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/us/confederate-statues-george-floyd.htm
These include:
Robert E. Lee in Richmond:
Confederate Sailors and Soldiers Monument in Birmingham:
Excellent. Bring that shit down.
I realize this is a rather old post (but RTFirefly does still regularly post on the boards); the Korean War memorial, at least, does have some “glorifying” elements: FREEDOM IS NOT FREE.
I don’t really think I have a problem with that. While there were some appalling atrocities in the Korean War (the No Gun Ri massacre; the general American air campaign which absolutely flattened North Korea), the war was nonetheless arguably a defense against aggression by a totalitarian state, and I can’t imagine very many people in modern South Korea aren’t very happy they don’t have to live under the benevolent and enlightened rule of the Kim Dynasty.
But the public memorials to the glorious Lost Cause of the Confederacy? As I’ve said many times before: To hell with those guys.
I just want to note that here in Dallas, the city covered up the Confederate War Memorial with black plastic, and for a year now, it’s looked a lot like a skinny black penis from certain angles. Amuses me every time I see it.
As a Richmonder, I am stoked right now. Artistically, the Lee Monument is awesome. But it’s had a good long run. Now is the time for us to move into the modern era.
It is awesome, artistically. Nicely put, monstro. I’m glad I got to see it 3-4 years back when I visited. But, yeah, its time has come.
** What should we do with confederate monuments and statues**
Beat them in to plowshares?
Melt them down and reform them into monuments of justice and equality? Then install them in the same spot as the former statue.
A monument to tennis great Arthur Ashe right down the street from Lee. Not too far away IIRC.