Removing monuments of the Confederacy: Yay or Nay?

[💗Freddie Freaker💗]

Nay. It's historical revisionism, plain and simple. It reminds me of those fundamentalist muslims who wreck ancient monuments because they represent another era in which Islam wasn't as strict. Removing monuments won't rewrite history.

It also rustles my jimmies that most people who want the statues removed are just virtue signalling. Most normal people don't care about the statues.

 

[Hollywood Hulk Hogan]

Remove them. They were traitors to the union.

That said, there's a lot more pressing concerns and no one gave a shit about it until Trump was in office.

 

[Mimic]

Leave them where historically accurate, otherwise whatever.

That way history remains untouched, monuments with more modern relevance can replace the old, and we can go on with our lives.

 

[Autopsy]

This is the information age, and the internet has taught us many things, but apparently we forgot the difference between savagery and civility. Modern objections should be handled by adding new monuments and fixtures as response pieces, not by a return to iconoclasm. You could even purpose spaces specifically to give multiple sides of an argument, leading to a menagerie of art representing each generation's views on any particular topic.

Picture this: A Confederate General memorial is met with a stunningly well depicted scene of a black Unionist pulling a white compatriot off to safety, one who was presumably injured in battle. That statue itself is combated by a dramatic representation of the Tariff of of Abominations, addressing the nature of the war, and that is met with a political cartoon engraved on a shiny plaque placed nearby. They all sit in the same garden or street-corner, a portal through time for every pedestrian or commuter who happens to pass by. You've got four chunks of history, each clearly contextualizing the others.

Now think of our dismal reality: Any and all relics of bygone eras must be destroyed because of the thought-crimes of their creators and thereby purged from the public memory. If you have monuments, you are automatically honoring the people depicted within (because I can read the mind of every present and future observer and know this to be true), so if those people are ones I don't like, the monuments must be destroyed. Context? What's a 'Context'?

It's depressing that anyone would consider the latter a valid option at all. Surely after what amounts to decades of forum banter people would finally realize that making fun of shit opinions is far more persuasive than just deleting them, right?
That's entirely on the grounds of morals and ideals, though. If you make a financial case, that communities shouldn't foot the bill for 'propaganda' of any kind, I have no real disagreement. I'd personally be happy to proffer up my pennies to live in a place where every town square looks like Skopje on steroids- especially considering how little return I see on the rest of my tax-money. Maybe that's just me.

 

[Implacable Birch]

they are all tacky blocks of garbage erected by white supremacist failsons in the 60's who were butthurt about school desegregation.

replace every single one of them with a statue of Flavor Flav.

 

[Morose_Obesity]

Let us rednecks keep our shit.
If we become too unhappy , well....we’ve all been handling guns since kindergarten and it’s not gonna be too pleasant. Some of my dumber cousins are praying for civil war.
We want the General Lee and Daisy Duke back on tv, too. Not that stupid cunt Jessica Simpson either, the real Daisy Duke.
Just watch your tranny shit, we’ll be off being cishet scum as God intended.

 

[Doug_Hitzel]

Let them keep their participation trophies.
The South should be proud of being a silver medal winner of the Civil War.
Second place ain’t that bad.

 

[Clownfish]

The key to fighting spergs in the left is one upmanship. They want to edit history. The proper response is destroy all history. They want to limit free speech, the proper response is ban all speech.

 

[Caesare]

they are all tacky blocks of garbage erected by white supremacist failsons in the 60's who were butthurt about school desegregation.

replace every single one of them with a statue of Flavor Flav.

You should feel extremely bad for everything that you just said. Eat a bullet, scumbag.

 

[Slamerella]

I've seen more white people call for the removal of them, and like, maybe two or three black people. Doesn't help they are in a state that was confederate. Part of the reason that they don't want to see it gone is because, and I quote, "It's there to tell me why I'm here and able to do things here."

The other reason is because it's their taxpayer dollars that funds this. Not even kidding.

 

[Crunchy Leaf]

I am reminded of what a number of individuals, many of whom were from the South, said after the 2016 presidential election..."You lost, get over it".

Anyway, I don't see a big issue with infantryman statues with list of names of people that died, the same thing every small town in the North has. But statues put up well after the end of the war clearly meant to glorify a lost cause, well, maybe not. And Confederate memorials in non-former-Confederacy states are just dumb.

 

[Caesare]

But statues put up well after the end of the war clearly meant to glorify a lost cause, well, maybe not.

They weren't though. And in America we honor the dead, especially those who performed military service.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

It's important to remember why many of the monuments are there in the first place. Around the turn of the 20th century, the Southern Democrats (Redeemers) were threatened by the Populist Party, the Republican Party, and other parties which were relatively progressive on workers' rights (Southern workers had far less success than Northern workers in gaining labor rights) and even civil rights were threatening their dominance in many states. Around this time, a bunch of Civil War monuments were built (the majority were built between 1895 and 1915) which was to remind the common white man about their Southern heritage in order to maintain control over the South. Remember, even if the white man is poor, he knows that at least he isn't a black man since he can take pride in that Southern heritage--that's how the South worked even while the white man suffered immensely in the horrifying conditions of sharecropping or the cotton mills that were the main part of the Southern economy after the Civil War.

Seriously, go read up on the "New South" concept and how the post-Civil War South relied on a distorted historiography of the Civil War to maintain control over both white man and black man alike and build itself. This isn't some political bullshit, this is simple historical truth according to the very words of the people involved. Monuments were just one part of the New South system.

Now, I don't think these statues should be smashed by Antifa vandals or shit. A lot are in rural towns and are just memorials to Civil War dead--which we should remember the average Confederate soldier was a poor man fighting a rich man's war (that's why poor people in Appalachia and elsewhere revolted against the Confederacy). If some city doesn't want a Confederacy memorial, then they should democratically remove the memorial and should probably replace it with a more honest Civil War memorial.

The best way of dealing with these memorials is to put them in their proper historical context (which is both the Civil War they celebrate and the New South which commissioned them) and having better history education. Sadly, history education is far too politicized in this country and the South has a particularly poor education system. If people knew their history better (everything I quoted above is based on what I learned in college, and it wasn't taught by some dumb SJW soyboy commie professor either, the guy had a Southern accent and was an ex-Marine) maybe they'd have more understanding of why things are.

 

[Organic Fapcup]

The act of destroying a perfectly good piece of art is nothing but an act of vandalism and people making up justifications for it are idiots for validating the angry tantrums of overly-emotional adult children. If you absolutely have to get rid of a statue, sell it to a private collector or shove it in a museum. For the Confederate example in particular, the Civil War's been over for a long time, and nobody who wants the statues to be removed wants it for any sort of sense of patriotism so much as because they want to stick it to le Drumpf and le ebil southerners.

 

[UnclePhil]

Nay. Leave historical monuments alone. Bulldozing history isn't going to magically make it go away. Tearing down monuments is pissing on the memories and legacies of real people who spilled blood on American soil. You may not agree with why they were fighting or care about them because they're 150 years removed from The Current Year, but they were people. Many of them didn't have a choice about fighting.

 

[Andrew Neiman]

I like the Memento Park approach. The meaning of something like a statue depends on its context. You can retain the physical artifact for study or artistic appreciation while recontextualizing it in a way that eliminates the negative message it might otherwise convey.

 

[Pop-Tart]

If you decide to take down Confederate monuments then you better take down all Cherokee monuments. After all several tribes owned slaves (especially the Cherokee) and they also disproportionately fought for the Confederacy out of spite to the Union.



The last Confederate unit of major note to surrender was a Cherokee Calvary unit. I know they got some hard shit that happened to them with the trail of tears and all, but fuck it they are losers right? So no 2nd place monument for them.



I mean by this same logic Sherman should not have statues as he really did hate blacks to an insane degree, and did everything he could to stop them from serving under him. Heck Grant even order all the Jews out of the areas he occupied in the west in General order 11 (a decision that would haunt him later in the presidency).

Hey also since Abraham Lincoln did see service during the Black Foot Wars (he never saw combat thou), should we take down his shit? After all he did help genocide the natives. Or what about the Buffalo Soldiers? I mean they helped commit genocide against those loser native tribes? Should they still get statues n shit?

But hey knowing this would require people to understand a vast conflict. Its hard to do that when your entire understanding of that is vague recollections from middle school and news stories by the same media that thought Lee and Washington had nothing in common at all (despite being distant relatives, from Virginia, military commanders, etc.) Don't forget this shit never just stops at the stuff you don't like.

I have had no where else to fit this in, so here yah go some extra random trivia.

This is a war that was seen to a degree as a rich man's war (akin to how Vietnam was seen) and many a Irish immigrant did everything they could to prevent being sent to fight and die. Heck there is a reason why there was the nation's largest race riot in 1863 because the Irish didn't want to be drafted, and lynched a lot of blacks, before being shot down by federal troops. Heck if you want a decent representation of this go watch Gangs of New York.

 

[Red Hood]

I feel like the more they try to force the issue, the more angry and hostile people are going to get about it. No one cared about this before the middle of last year. It would be more cost effective to add plaques explaining the historical context of the monuments.

Of course, people will ignore those like they typically ignore the statues in their day to day lives.

 

[Joan Nyan]

There aren't enough monuments to the heroes of the South who valiantly fought to protect their homeland from the Northern imperialist pigs.

 

[SeaPancake]

Removing the statues isn't going to remove the people they represent from history. The South's history books will likely more than make up for it. The statues were created to intimidate black folk, plain and simple. If they truly wanted to honor history, they would add a sign or some such that'd give context to who the person was and what they did.

Preservation of history is very important to me. If the statues MUST remain intact, then they should be shipped off to a museum. I really don't know how people can say "oh it's just the left erasing history" when they're more than willing to replace the statues with figures of the era who triumphed in the face of adversity that they faced in that region of the country at the time. If you're worried about those generals and such being generalized as "evil meanies" then maybe do the intelligent thing and offer courses that contain a nuanced approach to history. Oh but I forgot, that's too hard. Higher critical thinking skills is only a superpower that autistic people possess.