Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/10/11/zinke-with-worst-trump-era-stu.html
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Um, I’ll honor the fact that he was instrumental in putting down the Slaveholder’s Rebellion, and certainly his reaction to the Fort Pillow Massacre, but I’ve never heard his work called “heroic” before. They called Grant “the Butcher”, you know, on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.
EDIT: Very much appreciate the revision by @jlw - and Little Big Man is an awesome movie!
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He was heroic enough to become president, apparently 
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Zinke said removing the statues will inhibit the U.S. from being able to “learn” from history.
It’s puzzling that someone so concerned about this won’t acknowledge the history of the statues themselves. In the decades after the Civil War, most monuments to the Confederacy’s war dead were behind cemetery walls. Most of the public ones we see now were erected in the 1900s through the 1920s (a period that just happens to co-incide with the height of the KKK’s power in the U.S., the rise of Jim Crow Laws, etc) and the late 1950s through the mid-1960s (a period when there was strong reaction in the south to the movement seeking to undo some of the damage done by the Confederacy). Many of those monuments were mass-produced, the generic Confederate soldier one easily altered to represent his Union enemy if a customer so desired.
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The BBS caches early copies of posts and doesn’t update very quickly.
Teapot Dome, baby. Never forget!
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I don’t see them in any rush to add historically accurate modern commentary to those statues. When is this “learning” scheduled to take place?
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I went back to Massachusetts a couple years ago to see my grandmother, and we took a trip to Plimoth Plantation. They’ve added a Wampanoag lodge since I was last there, with Native guides. While we were there, some lady asked one of them “So … how DID the Indians get here from India?”
Props to the re-enactor, because he was able to answer that without laughing right in her face.
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Wait? Are museums still a thing? Oh right. Museums are still a thing.
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Zinke said removing the statues will inhibit the U.S. from being able to “learn” from history.
Statues refer to moments in history but have nothing to do with the history itself. They are meant to memorialize a topic or subject. But seeing he’s an idiot i will provide the definition:
Memorialize:
transitive verb
If a person or event is memorialized, something is produced that will continue to exist and remind people of them. To commemorate.
Commemorate:
transitive verb
To commemorate an important event or person means to remember them by means of a special action, ceremony, or specially created object.
With those definitions in mind. Tell me what those Confederate figures stood for and why they fought for the South? Those statues only exist to glorify their racist ideals. They are not heroes.
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Was it more corrupt than Harding’s administration?
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What was Hardings Elo number?
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God, what a fucking dingus.
No monuments for traitors. Memorials for the dead in cemeteries and on battlefields.
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Isn’t removing the statues a sign that we have learned from history?
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I wonder if Zinke supports erecting statues of Hitler to promote learning about World War 2?
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C-SPAN have Grant at roughly mid-table on their latest rankings. It’s too early to see how far from being second bottom Trump will be.
Going by all the polls referenced on this wikipedia article, he is consistently in the bottom four. Grant’s position started improving around 20 years ago from bad, to “not terrible, but also not a presidential role model”.
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Just think of all those statues of Stalin that were pulled down in Eastern Europe during the 90’s. Now we have all forgotten how evil he was because we don’t have those statues to look at.
[/sarcasm]
Note to free market capitalists without an a sense of humour. If the entire left (including those who would have been executed for being counter-revolutionaries, like myself) has to answer for Stalin’s actions then you get to answer for Pinochet’s.
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sounds like a candanianism badly translated.
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