Has anyone mentioned desecration yet? If taking them down isn’t an option, how about mockery?
That’s happening now, with a statue taken down and another defaced. Prior to this week I would have called that vandalism but the Charlottesville protesters made this happen.
I’ll go with a combination of #1 and #4 depending on where said monument is and who/what is depicted. A statue of Jeff Davis in the town square needs to be relocated; the monuments at Gettysburg should remain in place. Likewise graves of the dead and the markers on them should be left alone.
How about putting silly hats or scarfs on them? Silly masks? Dogshit in an outstretched hand?
There you go! Laugh at them enough and the Nazis will be asking they be removed.
The two aspects of this debate that just drive me up the wall are:
- Americans were traitors once, too; so we should not judge other traitors.
The Founding Fathers wrote a document that described why they took up arms against Britain, and although maybe they were a little exaggerated at some points, the fundamental complaints involved pretty reasonable things, like that jury trials had been suspended at times, self-government was frequently overruled, the presence of the military that served to suppress civil authorities, and so on and so on. Overall, if people at any place on the globe at any time seek to revolt against oppression like this, I’d say that I can sympathize with their efforts.
The Confederacy, on the other hand, enjoyed some disproportionate political advantages in the U.S. political system, and still decided to revolt against the government over the issue of slavery. How is that in any way equal? If we are to consider revolutionaries for the cause of increasing civil rights to be equal to revolutionaries for the cause of decreasing civil rights, are we also to revere revolutionaries like Mao and Che? Of course not. We can use our brains and distinguish between those who incited rebellions for reasonable purposes and unreasonable purposes.
- Statues teach history. They really don’t. There is typically no context to a statue, and even with a few lines describing the person, it is nearly contentless to the vast, vast majority of viewers. Even the Lincoln Memorial, which includes the text of some outstanding speeches that Lincoln made, provides such a meager amount of information about Lincoln that people could actually learn, and that is one of the great monuments of the world. Also, it should be said that there are some monuments that come with a real point of view, like the Holocaust memorial in Berlin or the Vietnam Memorial in DC, but they are informative in that they come with a definite opinion on the events at hand. Statues of generals are, for the most part, unremarkable in that respect.
What the Lincoln Memorial does do in an incredibly effective way is inspire people to think well of Lincoln. That’s generally why we build such things, to inspire or remind. We don’t build statues of Hitler to remind people of the Holocaust; why should we have statues of Confederate leaders to remind us of the gross injustice of slavery? It makes no sense.
Send all the statues to museums, except those that clearly have an actual historical context for where they are presented. For example, a monument with a Confederate flag at a cemetery for Confederate soldiers doesn’t bother me much. It makes a lot of sense. And if museums say they don’t need seventeen statues of General Lee, well, I suppose it is further evidence that so many statutes don’t have much in the way of a story to tell.
Well, be driven up a wall a little less, because I acknowledge the truth of what you say.
What the statues can really teach us–with well-written informational placards–is about the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and about how many white Southerners tried to win the war after losing the war through sustained propaganda, coupled with murderous violence and racism both legislated and cultural. I mean, they can’t teach all of that, but they can teach about the propaganda aspect of the effort. Put as many statues as necessary in museums to illustrate that–but just as you don’t need every butterfly in a species to be mounted in the entomology museum, you only need a couple of statues to illustrate the propaganda effort of the UDC and other white southerners.
Melt 'em down and make something useful or pretty out of them.
Yes – if people are to learn from the statutes, they need a context. For example, the Lee statue in C’ville, to the best of what I can figure out, is simply a giant statue of a guy on a horse with his name engraved on the pedestal, along with his birth and death dates. As it stands, people learn about as much from that statue as they do looking at a mountain. One has to bring with them virtually all context that was learned prior to seeing the statute to get anything out of it… which is precisely the problem! Such statues do not open people’s minds to anything in particular, they serve to affirm the biases that people bring to the spot where they can see them.
Museums are infinitely better venues for these statutes, because they can actually describe the context of the statute, notable aspects of the artist’s techniques, the situation surrounding the establishment of the statute, etc.
What would you call it now?
Beautification.
And then there are various state holidays venerating the likes of Davies, Lee and Jackson.
Fucking racists fighting for slavery being venerated? Beyond pathetic – heinous.
#2 or
Leave them up but place a placard around their necks that clearly read:
TRAITOR !!! Defenders of SLAVERY, the Shame of a nation.
Now that last option, is little different from when those statues were erected to say F*CK you to blacks in the south and romanticize the cause of the civil war and the legitimacy of jim crow. Just a modern version of putting modern cultural sensibilities to update the statues, just as relevant as the original motivation of the statues right?
Of course, the moment you do that, the true MAGGOTS of this world will come out of the woodwork talking about how disrespectful it is to defile those statues and the memory and the cause they represent. I would LOVE that, then THEY would be put in the same position as all the blacks who have to walk underneath that affront to modernity.
Oh? You want to respect the dead for that cause? No. I do not honor them, and do not stand with those who do.
Lincoln’s decision was very wise in retrospect. Draconian treatment of the Confederacy would only have led to future rebellion. European allies in WWI didn’t learn from it, which eventually fostered the second-deadliest regime and the deadliest war in history.
This one. All over the world there are statues of and monuments to people who were Not Nice in one way or another. Do we get rid of all of them too? America needs to grow up.
Just melt them down. With as little fuss as possible, just take them down and melt them down. They serve no positive purpose and are a blight on society.
I also wouldn’t recommend defacing them as a method of goading racists. The reaction you would get wouldn’t be shame and apology; it would be violence. Which we don’t really need.
If the people who own them want to, yes.
The Germans got rid of their pro-Nazi monuments after WWII. Should they not have? Was it not within their rights?
They should have, and it was within their rights. Similarly, the US should get rid of monuments that celebrate monstrosities like fighting for slavery.
Further, the US has been removing monuments for decades. There’s nothing new about any of this – it’s just become more prominent publicly. Monuments have been moved, removed, and destroyed many times long before the current controversy. Citizens get to decide what they want publicly celebrated in their community.