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New Target After Confederate Statues

I will irritate some people with saying this, but ... honestly ... the history of most of the Confederate monuments, memorial and statues is sketchy, to say the least. They were put up around the South during the height of Jim Crow laws as a very strong symbol to Black folks, "Sure we lost the war, but we are going to keep ya'll in our places" and here are our heroes.

I'm all for remembering history, but not honoring the men who fought for the Confederacy.

Germany does not have monuments and tributes to their "brave heroes" of WWII....for good reason.
 
A Short Histroy Lesson


History is not there for you to like or dislike.

It is there for you to learn from it.

And if it offends you, even better.

Because then you're less likely to repeat it.

It's not yours to erase. It belongs to all of us!

⁣Regards
 
Again....and I'm not sure why this point is hard to understand (actually, I think I do know why), but assuming it is just a difficulty with comprehension....

We do not "remember history" by keeping monuments in place that were first put up to honor and to glorify the Confederacy. Removing them is not "erasing history," it is being truthful about that history: the history of the Confederacy is a history of defending and protecting chattel slavery and rebellion against the USA. No amount of "white" washing this reality will change it. But we have no room or place for the continual romanticizing and glorification and hero worship of the Confederacy. The political and military leaders of the Confederacy do not deserve to have statues honoring them.

Arguing that we should not take down monuments glorying the Confederacy because to do so is "erasing history" is as stupid an argument as claiming Germany should not destroy monuments and statues of the great heroes of the "lost cause" of NAZI Germany. Oh, wait, there aren't any and no German has forgotten that history. They have preserved the "monuments" of the death camps.
 
I hate to destroy these statues, but I say put them in the racist museum: The USA Rogue's Gallery, like Madam Tussaud's but just US.

Put it right in DC & charge a token fee to see our ancient racist history, just like the today's Romans go to see the statues of villains like Nero and warmongers like Caesar.

Send the profits to a school for orphaned black kids. People would go. Capitalism would work like a clock to provide $.

Look, my Irish ancestors suffered huge bigotry in the US, but the ones who came at the previous famine during the slave era were turned to crime, because the only jobs they could often get were things slaves were not risked on.

The US Irish slowly gained acceptance, but the lingering prejudice was long there.

BTW, the other half of the family was German, who came here between the Kaiser and Hitler. I'm lucky they weren't rounded up and detained, but by 1930's they were respectable folks. Plus they lived at Germantown, which is the market area of Cincinnati Ohio. Huge German population there.

But there was prejudice galore. My family never spoke of it, but I've read the old news reports of the trouble at our entry into WW2.
My great-grandpa Joe drove a truck in the US Army, because they weren't running from the army. They escaped Nazi warhawk insanity.

I don't want to erase any of that. I want it to be known and known to be true. The good and the bad.
We don't have to revere Lee (one of Americas best generals ever) for being a slaver, but we must remember him as a human.
He was wrong, but he was still formational in our history.

If we erase that, what fiction will fill the hole?
 
Again...

It is not "erasing history" to take down memorials to the Confederacy's political and military leaders. You can go to many museums to learn all about the civil war. You can read a bazillion books. You can visit national battlefields where the Civil War was fought. You can learn all about Robert E. Lee as a "human" ... it's easy.

Statues put up to honor and glorify Confederate political and military leaders are not needed to remember the Civil War.

Why is so very hard for some people to wrap their minds around?
 
The "problem" I see with statues and syrup is that there are a very vocal group of brain-washed pussies that are told and taught to be offended at anything and everything. :mad: Instant "victimization". And pussy communities and companies that are falling over backwards to capitulate to them. :rolleyes: No corporation or person should have to prove they are not a racist because most of us and them are NOT! If someone is so shallow that a statue or a movie or a box of rice "offends" them, they have bigger problems to worry about... :rolleyes:

And it IS erasing history AND re-writing it at the same time. THAT is the part I can not "wrap my mind around". :mad: I could care less about the statues but what I DO care about is that these are people that will NEVER be satisfied. What next? Crayola Crayons? Count Chocula? Construction paper? I hear Mr. Clean is a "white supremist", the Keebler elves are "nazi sympathizers", and that Quaker Oats guy owned slaves and I am quite offended about it. If that sounds ridiculous it does because it is... ;)
 
Maybe they are needed for other reasons. Maybe we need them for another reason than they were made.

Constantine had a problem. In Rome, there were dozens of really nice expensive statues of pagan gods done by the worlds finest sculptors with the world's finest stone. If he wiped out that huge body of work he would be very unpopular with the non-Christians and newly Christian alike, who had previously donated for all the statues and temples at the will of the government/church. Plus it was a part of the landscape by then. People were used to it.

What to do?

He ordered the names chiseled off of the statues, and later renamed them for Christians.

2000 years later, nobody is fooled. The history is known. We are lucky to know it. We are lucky the statues were not destroyed, even though the subject humans generally murdered their fellow humans with abandon. They are our art heritage. Period. Evil or good, we all own that history as humans.

When we rip it down we are no better than the crazy moslems who ripped down a 3000 year old buddha.

What's wrong with an attached history like this?

"This statue was created by famed artist Seymore Chiselhands and it is his 3rd known commission.
Seymore studied 6 years at the Sorbonne and created these notable works:
Blah blah blah... he died in 1916 at the age of 66, etc....

The statue was cast in New Charlston in 7 pieces from naval bronze using the lost wax process, and segments were joined by sweat soldering in a special brick furnace erected for the sole purpose....

The So Pawtucket rail company delivered it in July 6, 1887 and it was erected blah blah

The statue depicts the defeated slaver and secessionist general blah blah blah on his horse Dickey, after the battle of...

It was purchased at a cost of $$$$ in 1885 with donations from notable Jim Crow era bigots an a continued attempt to whitewash the cruel history of colonial slavery and their subsequent racist treatment of the former slaves and their progeny.

Some attempts were made by racial justice groups to remove the statue as being offensive, but it was saved by the actions of the Art history society of blah blah blah as a fine example of 19th century bronze art done in the style of blah blah blah. To reproduce this art in the year 2020 would cost in excess of 1.3 million dollars and require two to three years to complete."
 
The statutes and monuments were put up for a very specific purpose: to glorify and honor the Confederacy and its political and military leadership for the purpose of glorying the cause of the Confederacy. They were put in public squares and other public spaces for a very specific reason: to send a very strong message to the Blacks in the area: we lost the war, but you are still not equal to us and we are going to keep you in place as best we can.

The vast majority of the statues were built between the 1890s and 1950s, which matches up exactly with the era of Jim Crow segregation. No coincidence. Earlier, more close to the end of the war, memorials were put up to mourn the Civil War dead, but the statues commemorating the political and military leaders are nothing of the sort.

The Civil War was fought to preserve legalized slavery throughout the South and the Confederacy sugar-coated it under the guise of "we are standing up for state rights" ... which everyone with even passing familiarity with the history and the era knows is just bullshit. The South wanted to pull out of the Union to keep slavery going. Everyone realized slavery could not stand any longer in the USA and we simply paid for the "original sin" of the American Republic: not abolishing slavery when the nation was formed.

Your last comment was clever and a bit amusing, but also entirely specious.


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So use the existing statues and monuments to tell that awful klan history, however it actually was.
(Clearly I was making up silly analogies on purpose. I don't have the exact history so I was trying to make you smile.)

But you would destroy the master work of a great sculptor because the guy who paid him was a crook? Or the relics of antiquity because they literally depicted murdering slavers as pagan Egyptian gods?

What if it was a statue of JFK or Washington, and it turned out the sculptor was a racist, who only did it to feed his 6 starving kids?

Destroy his work or celebrate a famous president?

Don't be a luddite. Explain art for historical context, hide it if you must (some art is clearly adult art) but Do NOT burn classic books, slash antique paintings or smash fine art.

Once you stoop to that, your justifications are meaningless. You become another savage looter.
 
Again, your comments are just plainly absurd. You are either unwilling to consider the point I'm making, or simply incapable of rational thought about this.

By the way, you are using the word "Luddite" incorrectly. Unsurprisingly.
 
OK, I gotta admit it. I am a sculptor. I've never done stone, but I've done wood.
I am a painter too, though cow skulls on a fatbob might not impress you as fine art.
I made a lot of my living from drawing by hand and on computer.
My work is sacred to me because my labor created it.
 
Ah....so you grieve for the sculpture. I get that part.

Maybe gather all the Confederate sculpture all together and put them all in some kind of "Hall of Shame" and then call it good.
 
Last night out on the left coast in Portland, OR another offensive statue removed and an American flag burned. Maybe it's not completely about the confederate history.

"A group of about 20 people met at NE Sandy Boulevard and NE 57th Avenue around 10 p.m. at the site of a large bronze statue of George Washington. Some wrapped the statue’s head in an American flag and lit the flag on fire. Their numbers grew over the next hour until there were enough people to pull the statue to the ground. They quickly scattered. A KOIN 6 News crew found the statue face down and covered in graffiti. Portland police arrived a short time later."

I suspect soon they will be burning books they don't agree with! Maybe even bibles?

Better yet maybe the should burn dollar bills if George is so offensive to them!

Regards
 
Centuriator said:
Ah....so you grieve for the sculpture. I get that part.

Maybe gather all the Confederate sculpture all together and put them all in some kind of "Hall of Shame" and then call it good.
Click to expand...

You kinda missed the line where I suggested exactly that in post #24.
 
Ernst said:
. . . I suspect soon they will be burning books they don't agree with! Maybe even bibles? . . .
Click to expand...

They had some scruffy street preacher in CHAZ who set up a little tent church and went around with a sign for his come-to-Jesus
meetings.

They manhandled him, took his sign and beat him with it.

So much for the Mayor's "Summer of Love" festival atmosphere.

I don't know what happened in the end. I hope they didn't nail him up on a pole.
 
I understand why people hate the whole business.

I think the biggest problem here is not some inert objects made of iron and stone, but unwillingness of inert people on both sides to forgive.

Instead people are being encouraged by so-called leaders to spread hate and violence, for vague reasons, or in the memory of past atrocity.

Unfortunately, if people can’t forgive general Pike or even George Washington and Christopher Columbus, over things that happened long ago, how the hell are we gonna teach them to forgive their next-door neighbor because he played the stereo too loud?
 
We can teach forgiveness and remove the statues glorifying and honoring the Confederacy's political and military leadership. It's time to get rid of them. The vast majority were put up during the Jim Crow era.

Imagine if after WWII, say, about twenty or thirty years later, there was a campaign in Germany to put up statues of prominent NAZI politicians and military leaders and then people finally had enough of it and realized they needed to be torn down....that would make sense, right?

And imagine then you were a Jewish person in Germany..imagine how you would feel if you local town square had memorials glorifying and romanticizing NAZI "heroes" of WWII?

Same situation here.
 
I’m afraid that I find it very unfair when you bring up Nazis, as a comparison with citizens of the American south.

I think you will find that nazis were mostly involved in mass-murdering of slaves which was Not done in the Old south.

Slaves were never objects of hatred to be slaughtered like Hitler slaughtered the Jews.

To the South they were a prime economic resource. You do not destroy that willy-nilly but you try to increase your supply by feeding and breeding them. That’s what was done, while on the other hand Hitler was constantly reducing the available supply of slaves with mass execution.

So while American Southerners have treated blacks as beasts of burden they, did not gas them and use them for target practice.

Well there was awful treatment in many many cases, it was never anything like the Nazis.

Show me ovens full of Negroid bones and we will have something there to discuss.
 
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