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I was looking for that one!
Couldn’t find a decent linkable gif of that
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Happy to help 
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Oh oh you two are so uncivilized. This can only serve to enrage the nazis and make their cause stronger! We need to dialog with these poor misunderstood people and figure out what really drives them, then we can all implemwnt some kind of final solution that satifies everyone!
/sarc for the imbiciles
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I was thinking the same thing. Of course, a lot of that (all?) was done soon after the conflict when the adrenaline was surging, and giddiness filled the air.
These statues went up 50 years after the fact, for darker reasons, and have been left in place undisputed for decades. It’s a bit harder to combat that kind of inertia through petitions and policy makers.
Especially when some of the people you are aligned against are descendants of the people that are being honored, and secretly - or not so secretly, or they just really like the statue because it’s been there “forever”, or whatever reason – feel as though the South should have won in the first place and will rise again.
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History will not cease to exist because we remove some hunks of cheap bronze. Maybe if we actually taught it instead of using racist propaganda as our stand-in, we wouldn’t be in this situation.
We haven’t forgotten who Lenin is just because the statue is no longer there.
Your “solution” just exacerbates the problem. It leaves the visual reminder still standing and gives the racists something concrete (or cheap bronze) to literally point at as to how they’re mistreated. You would rather give them propaganda and talking points into the future and continue to force people to continue to navigate an eyesore, than actually do something to solve the problem.
If you can’t remember who Robert E. Lee was without a big-ass statue, that says more about you than anything else.
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You are aware that the term “if” is used as a conditional in the English language, yes? Since you say that doesn’t apply, then logically the rest would not either. How is that an accusation.
You have been hostile towards anyone who has offered criticism of your “alternatives”. You claim we won’t consider them, but the fact that we do have criticism shows that the idea has been considered and discarded. I am not the only poster you have treated in this fashion. Nor are your ideas novel – indeed, others have tried and rejected them many times throughout history.
I am not going to continue this conversation with you, because I do not have time or energy to “debate” someone who will not do so in good faith, such as throwing accusations of closed-mindedness for disagreeing with their stance, or
ETA:
Incidentally, what I quoted, that is hyperbole. I only mention it because of what you have accused other posters of doing.
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It’s as if there were “fine people on both sides” statues of literal Nazis all over Europe 
That oath that federal employees are supposed to agree to? The one that says “against all enemies foreign and domestic”? At the time the oath was conceived and written, the foreign enemy they were talking about was the Confederacy and the domestic enemy was Confederate sympathizers.
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On 21 January 1945, withdrawing German forces planted demolition charges inside the entrance tower and the tower previously housing von Hindenburg’s coffin, causing both towers to collapse. On 22 January Germans demolished more of the construction with a further 30 tonnes of explosives.
Of course, there was subsequent demolition work, too.
It still is. They still are.
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Yeah, but teaching history is a waste of time… /s
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To @alahmnat @Akimbo_NOT @docosc @MalevolentPixy and others I would like to make an apology for being unnecessarily stubborn and combative yesterday about this topic. I could and should have done a better job at articulating my viewpoint and understanding yours, and it is also clear I need to think more about why this bothers me like it does. I understand the context of these statues in this time when an egalitarian ethos has consensus as to their offensiveness, irrelevancy, and need to be removed. We are agreed that both the message and the medium represented by these statues is unacceptable. However, given the history of conflict around censorship of other messages (e.g., diversity in fiction, pornography, political messaging, religious tracts, representation in clinical trials) and other mediums (zines, films, music, medicine, etc) and the contemporary trend of radical fringes retreating into their own bubble realities, I cannot help but wonder whether the short-term tactic will lead to the intended long-term cultural change. I look to history and see direct cultural conflicts using protest and revision causing reactionary retrenchment, mutation of misinformation, and radicalization; I also see cultural changes having been most effective when something new is built that renders the old or inequitable either inefficient or irrelevant. My view of this pattern may be wrong; I do not defend it as an absolute truth or polished opinion, it’s just a sketchy pattern I wonder about and I did a piss-poor job articulating that yesterday. I do not have an answer here one way or the other and I thank you for engaging with me to challenge what I was saying despite my combativeness. Take care.
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One of the suggestions for how to handle removal of these statues is to aggregate them in museums where the full history and context is laid out. Initially, it was suggested as an appeasement to the modern racists who complain about “erasing history” or “but muh heritage!” I think that it makes sense for exactly the reasons you have laid out: retaining the historical context. It has the added benefit of completely removing them from the public eye, unless people choose to view them.
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Sort of like this place in Moscow, but with better contextual framing:
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It still isn’t going to penetrate a few of the thicker skulls, though. One of the prominent memories of my visit to the National WWII Museum is a couple of numbskulls using the exhibit about racist stereotypes of Japanese as an opportunity for a “hurr durr” selfie. Still, it’s a start.
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I think what you’re missing is the reason why these were put up in the first place - they were a reminder of white supremacy, put in place by groups like the daughters of the confederacy (the primary promoter of the lost cause mythology), who were peddling a historically inaccurate version of the antebellum south and of the civil war. It’s why people still think the civil war was not about slavery, when it very much WAS about slavery. That is why they should come down, because they were put there to remind black southerners that they weren’t really from the south, and that white supremacy reigned under Jim Crow.
In other words, these statues and places like preserved plantations are what are historically inaccurate and need to be recontextualized or gotten rid of.
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They continue to try and rewrite history to this day.
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people really underestimate how much their lost cause mythology has gotten mistaken for actual history…
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