that’s a different goalpost ENTIRELY.
I call shenanigans.
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Pound them into plowshares chamber pots.
Spear tips to slay the white walkers.
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Well, call shenanigans if you like. You may not have been making that argument but others were.
I said:
Following that post someone objected to my mentioning the godawful Mel Gibson/William Wallace statue. I responded saying I agreed it was awful.
You saw fit to reply to that with:
Foolishly, I thought you were responding to the bit in my earlier post about what kind of memorials I think are acceptable and which are not.
That post was influenced by this:
If your argument is not that any sort of memorial to those on the wrong side of a war should be removed then happy days - we agree! Calloo, Callay!
any sort of memorial to those on the wrong side of a war should be removed then happy days - we agree! Calloo, Callay!
[/quote]
I don’t have an argument I am making. I came in for a discussion. But let me note one thing: you just said:
but earlier you referred to it as:
I think we can agree there is a venn diagram involved there, a non equivalent set of memorials.
So, your confusion may be because you’ve not realized you’re changing categories?
I’ll offer you the benefit of the doubt when you clarify if you mean monuments to the events and the dead and the awfulness so as to -include- or -exclude- their leadership. You do understand the distinction, lets not split hairs on semantics there. What do you say?
Well, you know if you read my posts, it’s pretty clear (you might try it some time).
Memorials to the fallen - fine. Memorials glorifying the conflict or the leaders - iffy at best and certainly open to removal later if political climate changes.
In this context - memorials to Confederate leaders and generals or which put forward some narrative of how the war was righteous or support slavery - remove away.
If you’re going to get into Venn diagrams, “any sort of memorial to those on the wrong side of the war” will include “every memorial to the dead on the wrong side of the war”.
I agree, but you’re talking to a wall that basically claims that non-white feelings (such as those of black people who endure daily reminders in the form of idolizing monuments to those who enslaved their ancestors) don’t matter.
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If no one else beat me to it:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-ci-monuments-removed-20170816-story,amp.html
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Thank you for that.
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That’s what I thought shoukd happen with the Jeff Davis statue at UT-Austin. (IIRC it was recently moved elsewhere.) Wheat paste a pair of lace panties to the front.
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The professor’s analysis fails, fortunately though not for a lack of good faith.
With rare exception, the various totems to the Confederate State of America, a self-declared breakaway nation, were created and erected a decade and more after the seccesionists were defeated in the war they had initiated. As others here have noted, the aims of post-Reconstruction “confederates” were to exploit the animus and shame of the defeated and, more importantly, to employ symbols of violence to terrorize and reassert the politics of dehumanization against the then newly freed (read: humanized) and enfranchised black Americans of the reintegrated seccesionist southern states. All politics being local, “Jim Crow” ideology was an overt rejection of U.S. (read: northern) Constitutionalism and the Reconstructionist’s goal of politically and structurally unmaking the vast sub-culture built on the manifold evils of slavery and “3/5ths clause” dehumanization.
For the analysis in the professor’s essay to prove illuminating, the Communist Party would have had to grapple with an open embrace of Czarist politics within several of the Soviets - to included the constuction of icons to Russian imperialism and the Romanov dynasty. That, as is well known, didn’t happen.
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Silver lining to this mess: at least no one will ever have to tear down any monuments to Trump.
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You really think so?
Short attention spans being what they are now, I can imagine his presidency weathering this current mess.
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I’d suggest that we already have battlefield cemeteries for that.
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As a matter of carefully compiling history I’m all in favor of the “just keep adding explanatory text” approach; but what to do with the somewhat limited supply of commanding pedestals in preferred public places?
The supply of reference library microfilm may allow arbitrarily many data points and interpretations to be collected; but the supply of prime monument spots is limited enough that you can’t really escape putting your priorities on display(which doesn’t imply that you need to swap statues, “extra lawn” counts as a priority; but if somebody gets a big bronze on a pedestal with nice sight lines by the courthouse, it’s because somebody really cared about having him there).
There’s also the issue of salience. To a careful reader, the text and the footnote may indeed stand as dispassionate equals to be judged on there respective merits; but when it comes to political public art pieces, it’s hard to realistically imagine that “Here is a larger than life size statue of some guy exuding gravitas and tasteful patina on a horse; beside it is a couple of closely spaced paragraphs you can read about how he was a pretty terrible person who consoled himself with paramilitary violence against civilians after the failure of his career in treason.” is actually going to balance out on inspection. Some details just draw more attention than others.
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I don’t think it is “censoring” history to take these statues down. Was it censoring history to remove all of the Nazi regalia that was still standing at the end of WW2?
The only problem with that is that they were often put up in the 20th century, during either the 20s (the nadir of race relations in America) or during the civil rights era - both to express a belief in white supremacy as the law of the land.
We constantly rewrite and recontextualize history, especially on a national level and for good reason. Our ideas and values change (and hopefully, improve) with time. We don’t think about ourselves the way our grand parents did and we don’t think of our country the same way either. There isn’t any reason to keep things the same because “history” in many cases. I am generally in support of saving and preserving buildings, but statues can be easily moved elsewhere and recontextualized in an effective manner.
Case in point, do we really need a statue to this guy in 3 states, given how he was basically a antebellum Mengele? What do we actually GAIN by having this statue in a public place, to remind black women how little we valued their physical safety and autonomy, and how they were used to better the lives of white women? Why not find a museum, where you can highlight his role in modern gynecology while stressing how horrid his methodology was?
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Scots bashing was a local pastime among the English far right when I lived in Carlisle.
Those same arseholes would have a huge problem with a statue of William Wallace, and will quote some crap about Lanercost priory while not caring about how Henry VIII did far more damage to it in the reformation.
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Oppressed Minorities & Allies: That monument appears to be glorifying a racist cause, which makes me feel unwelcome in my own community.
Historians: Yeah, that was pretty much the idea. That monument was built as a symbol of white pride during the Jim Crow era and/or civil rights movement.
Apologists: This monument doesn’t glorify anything! It’s just a reminder of a tragic period when—
KKK, Neo Nazis, etc: WE MUST DEFEND THIS SYMBOL OF OUR GLORIOUS WHITE HERITAGE
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Nailed it!
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