Sorry if this is up-thread. TL;DR and tired
I say leave the statues, and change it’s plaque to reflect that he perpetuated crimes to humanity, list them, and leave a warning to remember and never let them happen again.
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Adding a new plaque is the equivalent of putting a pretty bow on a turd. It’s still gonna stink.
I’m not a big fan of erasing the past, even if it was horrific. We need to learn from it and stop glorifying it. The symbol is more powerful than the words below it. No matter how meaningful and inspiring you make that plaque, 99% of the people will only see the statue general and all that he represents.
The only solution as I see it, is to recontextualize the statue either by moving it somewhere else out of the way where it can’t be misinterpreted as something that the state supports.
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Another suggestion from Twitter: “If you can’t physically topple a confederate-on-a-horse statue, epoxy a dildo onto its forehead to turn it into a hate unicorn”
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Kentucky was a boarders state that stayed with the Union. It has more citizens fight int he Union than the Confederates. I forget the count, but the CSA vastly out number the Union.
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And spread it to the world.
The Confederates were planning to conquer south all the way down to the Straits of Magellan. They weren’t just after independence; they wanted to establish an empire of slavery.
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In Canada, we have monuments to loser leaders. (I took both pictures in the article.)
I doubt we’ll tearing Jesse down any time soon. So what’s the difference, “his cause being just and his quarrel honorable”, or that, as far as I know, there are no white supremacists wanking to it on the full moon?
Not that Canada doesn’t have its statue controversies where historical founders turned out to be genocidal bastards. We’ll sort those out. Of course, if you want to spark a real controversy, propose a statue of Louis Riel in Ottawa, as close to Parliament Hill as possible.
Anyway, what Americans do with Civil War statues is up to you. Personally, I’d keep the war dead memorials that aren’t hagiographies for the Confederacy.
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This is exactly it, what @ff is saying.
Most of these statues are repros and scattered about the South in an attempt to rewrite history. They are knockoffs, made of thin metal, not solid or thick walled casting.
That’s why they crumple like this when they get knocked over. They’re cheap, made to look like a Rodin or classical bronze casting, to imbue the observer with a sense of power and History, as if it’s important.
What’s more, most of these things were put in at the tail end of right after reconstruction, during Jim Crow, and then again in another big wave in the 1960’s during the civil rights era as a protest against racial equality.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/08/the-real-story-of-all-those-confederate-statues/
These things don’t need to be preserved. Southern states are under immense pressure from white supremacists to enshrine them in the protections of law in perpetuity. But the real story is they are shoddy work like the pulp fiction of the South. They are a slap in the face of every black Southerner and like-minded white person. We got rid of slavery for just this reason: old thinking that needed to be changed. And here we are, 150 years later, still fighting this same old thinking.
Fuck these stupid statues. Grind them up and make pennies out of them, for all I care. Any shreds of history will be preserved. We have plenty of pictures and lots and lots of stuff on the internet and in books about them. The space they are taking up can be put to better use, like trees and gardens, or how about pure artwork commissioned by the state. Lots of alternatives. Get rid of them. They are worthless.
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I think a museum is a good destination for many of them, though some will probably have to be destroyed just for lack of space. I feel that teaching the history they chronicle is important, but teaching that that history was terrible and was willingly glorified and venerated is equally instructive. If it’s in a museum with informative signage and proper context, it’s not a threat and in fact can help prevent history from repeating itself.
Bonus: putting them in museums or other places of learning and culture is the easiest way to make sure that those who would worship them never go near them.
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Thanks for the info.
How perfectly perfect that they’re hollow inside.
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No large bronze statues are solid castings. I’m sure there are quality and thickness differences, but it never makes sense to cast them as solid objects.
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This one is.
(hahahaha)
Ukraine knocked down their Lenin statues after the putsch against the previous corrupt regime. Nobody knows what happened to the bronze. 
And before creating that provocatory fountain, David Černý was improving Monuments to the Glorious Soviet Occupation with coats of bright pink paint.
Any Historical Statue is improved by PINK PAINT.
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Ireland is complicated
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Honestly I just don’t trust this country to make anything that would recontextualize the statues in a way that would be meaningfully different from just creating some kind of white supremacist tourist destination.
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The English are complicated…
Okay, lets be fair, the English have a long history of victim blaming. If you can tell me when the Irish Army had half its men stationed in England to ‘keep the peace’ we can talk about comparing the responses of the oppressor to the responses of the oppressed.
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THE UNION WON. Those stay.
Know what else is a testament to the Union victory?
Today.
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