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One Civil War was enough — don't risk another to erase history

The Tradition

The Tradition

HB King
Apr 23, 2002
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Imagine a time in the not-so-distant future where all the fragile souls out there have succeeded in wiping clean any trace of our country’s history and replaced it with a more fictitious version — a version they get to rewrite.

All offensive monuments have been removed (the ones that haven’t already been destroyed or defaced), the history books have been burned (in the schools that still actually have history books), and the granite faces of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln have all been blasted off of Mount Rushmore.

Recall this eerily haunting passage from George Orwell’s “1984,” written almost 70 years ago, about a fictitious future dictatorship:

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”​

People may roll their eyes and think this is just the hot topic of the moment, but what we’re seeing today has the potential to spiral into a complete Big Brother-like takeover of what we’re allowed to think, remember, and know about the country we call home.

Where exactly will the new version of “history” begin and what will it look like for the next generation?

Will “history” start with Barack Obama and the election of the first African-American president, forgetting the real history of everything our country went through to actually get to the point where we had the freedom to elect an African American as president? Or will we be permitted to go back as far as William Jefferson (scratch that, can’t say Jefferson anymore) Clinton and learn about how he, in his own way, christened the Oval Office?

In the state of Virginia, where my children go to school, fourth grade is a huge year for learning about history. Practically in our backyard are the homes of George Washington, James Madison, James Monroe, Thomas Jefferson, as well as Jamestown and Colonial Williamsburg, just to name a few. All these people and places have connections to slavery, and all of them have played a major role in making our country what it is today.

Do we just take a bulldozer to Mount Vernon and Monticello and the rest of their homes? Do we level off Jamestown and Williamsburg and build some more wineries along the Colonial Wine Trail?

The Fairfax County school board, in all it’s political correctness, recently voted to change the name of J.E.B Stuart High School in Falls Church, Va., at a cost of nearly $1 million because it’s named after a Confederate general. This was the priority of a county that has a nearly $50 million budget deficit and underpaid teachers.

There are now calls to remove Confederate statues in the U.S. Capitol. One member of Congress calling for their removal is House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Yet her father seemed to disagree, as he dedicated a statue of General Robert E. Lee when he was mayor of Baltimore.

“Today, with our nation beset by subversive groups and propaganda which seeks to destroy our national unity, we can look for inspiration to the lives of Lee and (Stonewall) Jackson to remind us to be resolute and determined in preserving our sacred institutions,” he said at the time.

Now, those Baltimore statues are removed.

In the case of Pelosi’s father, those statues were erected in the 1940s but many monuments are much older. Why, all of a sudden are we worried about statues that have been around for a century or more?

We’re so busy protesting everything that hurts our fragile little feelings that, meanwhile, North Korea is shooting missiles over Japan and threatening the U.S., people are crossing our borders who want to kill us and hardworking families are unable to afford their ever increasing health care premiums. And yet some of us can’t walk past a statue without coming completely unhinged.

In the case of these members of Congress, the irony is they want to erase from history the very people who worked to give them the power they enjoy today. Washington, Jefferson, and Madison were truly flawed and complicated men, but without them there would be no American revolution, no Declaration of Independence and no Constitution.

Just in case there’s still any doubt that people have completely lost their minds, there’s a Change.org petition to replace Confederate monuments in New Orleans with a statue of Britney Spears. And in Baltimore, the city is building a monument to a drag queen famous for eating dog feces.

Yes, that’s a thing.

As I write this, people in the great state of Texas are suffering, really suffering, in the wake of Tropical Storm Harvey. Right in the midst of their tragedy, protesters have staged a 10-day civil disobedience march from Charlottesville, Va., to Washington, D.C., to draw attention to themselves in the name of fighting white supremacy and calling for the removal of President Trump.

Because, of course they have to blame President Trump. The Russia hoax didn’t stick — there was no “there” there, so now they have to come up with another reason he’s unfit to be president. Today, with the help of the media, they’re attempting to brand him a racist. When that doesn’t work, in another few weeks they’ll try something else.

These marchers are so passionate about their cause, which started with 200 people, that after just one day the majority of them couldn’t hack a little bit of rain, and their army of 200 shrunk to 35.

Why are extremist groups trying to start another Civil War? Wasn’t the first one enough?

http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/civil-rights/348923-one-civil-war-was-enough
 
Once again, local communities such as Charlottesville and Baltimore decided for themselves to remove some statues.

Do you live in either of those places? Or New Orleans?

Why do you think those places decided to remove some memorials and statues? Is it possible the community changed and no longer wants to have things on public property that do not represent, and in fact in many cases are abhorrent to, the very people who live there?

This is not some great liberal movement. These are local communities that you and I have no right to inflict our values upon. Opinions are one thing and have at it, just like I enjoy mine. I agree and have for a long time with Robert E. Lee who said he thought that monuments and statues to the Confederacy were a bad idea. But you didn't see me crying and making crazy claims of another Civil War while these statues were erect!
 
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The overdue momentum to remove various Confederate symbols, especially about 1,500 statues, from their perches has picked up across the country in the aftermath of right-wing violence in Charlottesville, Va. In Gainesville, Fla., Durham, N.C., and Baltimore, the toppling has already begun. In some cases, state or local authorities have driven the process. In others, activists have seized the initiative to speed things up.

Yet despite the growing consensus that the “dangerous totems” (as Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings has dubbed them) must go, there is no agreement about the monuments’ fates. Ideas range from traceless destruction to warehouse storage to museum display. Some propose, to quieter applause, to keep the objects in place, accompanied by appropriate labeling.

In the cacophony of opinions, few observers and participants seem bothered by the lack of a coherent, thought-out strategy for disposing of the Confederacy’s visible traces while preserving evidence of this vitally important chapter of our past.

They should be. Not out of concern for the preposterous right-wing lament about the erasure of history, but because the task at hand is to purge the imagery in a way that guards against amnesia, while also transforming the statues from celebratory monuments to objective evidence.

The United States is not alone in confronting this dilemma. Countries across the globe routinely grapple with how to handle reminders of unsavory chapters in their history. Recently, the issue has made headlines from Ukraine to Taiwan.

But nowhere have the questions about the physical markers of unwanted pasts — first Nazi, then Communist and, lately, colonial — played out as long as they have in Germany. Over the last 70 years, the country has accepted a simple truth: Out of sight hardly means out of mind. The removal of the relics of a hateful social order is not in itself cause for celebration. It is the aftermath that matters.

The German case is exemplary not because Germans attained closure, but because they came to recognize that closure was neither tenable nor desirable. Instead, the processing of history is like an open wound that slowly heals only with careful debate about the often-explosive issues at stake. The United States can avoid making irreparable mistakes by learning from Germany’s blunders and subsequent course corrections.

Over time, Germans have moved through three distinct phases to tackle the country’s fascist legacy: erasing it, ignoring it, and consigning it to the Vergangenheitsbewältigung — German for “the enduring confrontation with the past.” The experience offers seven lessons for the fight over America’s Confederate past.

  1. There is no zero hour. After the war in occupied Germany, restraint and caution were not initially on the agenda. For nearly a decade, West German authorities followed the path of least resistance by simply eliminating the traces of Hitler’s rule.
For better or worse, wartime Allied bombing and firestorms had given them a considerable head start. In some cases, the wartime damage did 90 percent of the job. And yet this near-total destruction did little to prevent the neo-Nazis and revisionists from reorganizing. The 1952 court ban on the Nazi Party’s successor, the Socialist Reich Party, sent a much stronger message.

  1. Compromises look weak but have benefits. Soon enough, it became obvious that wiping out every structure with a whiff of Nazism was unrealistic. The traces of the Third Reich included entire city blocks constructed in the regime’s signature bombastic, boxy style. Blowing up structurally sound buildings or the highways Hitler expanded into a Reichsautobahn network would have further hurt a nation whose infrastructure lay in ruins.
East Germany, all the more parsimonious after bearing the brunt of Soviet reparations, was the first to realize that pragmatic compromise was essential. Of course, the Third Reich’s insignia had to come down and mostly did, but the structures themselves were retained for new functions and uses. Though driven by necessity, this pragmatic solution now gets credit for preserving for posterity the pathetic bleakness and soullessness of Hitler’s architectural vision. It has not aged well, turning from shades of white to brown as decades have gone by.


  1. Bad history can be put to good use. Walking around cities like Berlin, Munich, and Nuremberg today, a tourist will not often find an obvious Nazi landmark. Yet many inconspicuous remnants remain, ranging from unremarkable city squares and department store amphitheaters to more famous one-offs, among them a retired airport, an Olympic stadium, Nazi party rally grounds, and a former resort.
While the government (and, increasingly, private initiatives) pours money into conserving these places, city tour companies train their guides to peel back all of the layers of the morally complicated history for visitors. Many prominent buildings that are still in use have information boards — not tiny plaques — in front, with meticulously researched historical explanations.

Especially fraught places, where the Nazi project was most present, like the Haus der Kunst in Munich — the inaugural venue for the Nazi art exhibit organized to compete with the more popular modernist “Degenerate Art” show across the street — now commit a lion’s share of their resources to displaying the art they would have shunned during the Nazi reign. In the hallways, historical timelines lay out the turbulent past.

  1. Empty spaces can talk, but not all should. In Berlin, the Topography of Terror museum fills the space that once held the sprawling lair of Hitler’s bureaucracy. It has transformed an otherwise empty lot into a meaningful, and sobering, reminder of the horrors of the Nazi regime.
And yet some sites, Germans have decided, must remain unmarked and obscured for good reason: to prevent them from becoming shrines to the Nazi past. The Berlin bunker where Hitler killed himself, which was blown up in 1947, remains buried under a parking lot, with no signage.

  1. Erasure comes with no guarantees. Austria has a similar vision for Hitler’s birth house. In June, after protracted debates, its Constitutional Court finally authorized government seizure of the structure from its private owners. To this point, the building remains under protection as a historical monument.

As in Berlin, Austrian authorities hope to prevent the house from becoming a difficult-to-control and illicit neo-Nazi pilgrimage site. But even a razed landmark is still a spot on the map, and many concede that it, too, could become a beacon for hate groups.

  1. Preserving difficult pasts calls for civic negotiation. In the 1990s, German officials applied the lessons learned from dealing with Nazi iconography to the markings left over from the Communist era. Berlin’s Senate impaneled a special commission of experts from the city’s East and West. It concluded that celebrations of the Communist past had no place in the reunified capital-to-be, but that the distinctive history should be accessible in both parts of the city.
Other corners of former East Germany have also striven to preserve this history by allowing many statues of Communist heroes to remain standing. In some small towns, such as Königswusterhausen outside Berlin, streets named after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels run parallel to each other.

  1. Razing and replacing uncovers more than it hides. Where attempts to dismantle Communist symbols had prevailed, as in the case of the East German Palace of the Republic, which was destroyed to rebuild the shell of the Kaiser’s Berlin Palace, new issues emerged. The demolition and reconstruction have exposed additional unprocessed chapters of Germany’s past, especially its history of colonialism. Achieving a clean slate, free of historical stains, proved to be a delusion.
These lessons from Germany should serve as a cautionary tale for Americans rushing to destroy every Confederate monument within reach. Rather than rashly overcompensating for decades of inaction by haphazardly tearing down or hiding Confederate monuments, Americans should have the painful debates necessary to decide the fate of these relics of a bygone era. If German history is any indication, simply turning the page isn’t an option.

http://www.philly.com/philly/opinio...many-communists-monuments-trump-20170817.html
 
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You know what we haven't tried yet? Let's go to another country and kidnap the citizens and bring them back here and make them work for free. We can even buy and sell them, like property. Why hasn't anyone thought of this before??? I'm tired of coming-up with all the good ideas.
 
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strummingram said:
You know what we haven't tried yet? Let's go to another country and kidnap the citizens and bring them back here and make them work for free. We can even buy and sell them, like property. Why hasn't anyone thought of this before??? I'm tired of coming-up with all the good ideas.
Click to expand...

Innovater detected.
 
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The Tradition said:
Imagine a time in the not-so-distant future where all the fragile souls out there have succeeded in wiping clean any trace of our country’s history and replaced it with a more fictitious version — a version they get to rewrite.

All offensive monuments have been removed (the ones that haven’t already been destroyed or defaced), the history books have been burned (in the schools that still actually have history books), and the granite faces of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln have all been blasted off of Mount Rushmore.

Recall this eerily haunting passage from George Orwell’s “1984,” written almost 70 years ago, about a fictitious future dictatorship:

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”​

People may roll their eyes and think this is just the hot topic of the moment, but what we’re seeing today has the potential to spiral into a complete Big Brother-like takeover of what we’re allowed to think, remember, and know about the country we call home.

Where exactly will the new version of “history” begin and what will it look like for the next generation?

Will “history” start with Barack Obama and the election of the first African-American president, forgetting the real history of everything our country went through to actually get to the point where we had the freedom to elect an African American as president? Or will we be permitted to go back as far as William Jefferson (scratch that, can’t say Jefferson anymore) Clinton and learn about how he, in his own way, christened the Oval Office?

In the state of Virginia, where my children go to school, fourth grade is a huge year for learning about history. Practically in our backyard are the homes of George Washington, James Madison, James Monroe, Thomas Jefferson, as well as Jamestown and Colonial Williamsburg, just to name a few. All these people and places have connections to slavery, and all of them have played a major role in making our country what it is today.

Do we just take a bulldozer to Mount Vernon and Monticello and the rest of their homes? Do we level off Jamestown and Williamsburg and build some more wineries along the Colonial Wine Trail?

The Fairfax County school board, in all it’s political correctness, recently voted to change the name of J.E.B Stuart High School in Falls Church, Va., at a cost of nearly $1 million because it’s named after a Confederate general. This was the priority of a county that has a nearly $50 million budget deficit and underpaid teachers.

There are now calls to remove Confederate statues in the U.S. Capitol. One member of Congress calling for their removal is House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Yet her father seemed to disagree, as he dedicated a statue of General Robert E. Lee when he was mayor of Baltimore.

“Today, with our nation beset by subversive groups and propaganda which seeks to destroy our national unity, we can look for inspiration to the lives of Lee and (Stonewall) Jackson to remind us to be resolute and determined in preserving our sacred institutions,” he said at the time.

Now, those Baltimore statues are removed.

In the case of Pelosi’s father, those statues were erected in the 1940s but many monuments are much older. Why, all of a sudden are we worried about statues that have been around for a century or more?

We’re so busy protesting everything that hurts our fragile little feelings that, meanwhile, North Korea is shooting missiles over Japan and threatening the U.S., people are crossing our borders who want to kill us and hardworking families are unable to afford their ever increasing health care premiums. And yet some of us can’t walk past a statue without coming completely unhinged.

In the case of these members of Congress, the irony is they want to erase from history the very people who worked to give them the power they enjoy today. Washington, Jefferson, and Madison were truly flawed and complicated men, but without them there would be no American revolution, no Declaration of Independence and no Constitution.

Just in case there’s still any doubt that people have completely lost their minds, there’s a Change.org petition to replace Confederate monuments in New Orleans with a statue of Britney Spears. And in Baltimore, the city is building a monument to a drag queen famous for eating dog feces.

Yes, that’s a thing.

As I write this, people in the great state of Texas are suffering, really suffering, in the wake of Tropical Storm Harvey. Right in the midst of their tragedy, protesters have staged a 10-day civil disobedience march from Charlottesville, Va., to Washington, D.C., to draw attention to themselves in the name of fighting white supremacy and calling for the removal of President Trump.

Because, of course they have to blame President Trump. The Russia hoax didn’t stick — there was no “there” there, so now they have to come up with another reason he’s unfit to be president. Today, with the help of the media, they’re attempting to brand him a racist. When that doesn’t work, in another few weeks they’ll try something else.

These marchers are so passionate about their cause, which started with 200 people, that after just one day the majority of them couldn’t hack a little bit of rain, and their army of 200 shrunk to 35.

Why are extremist groups trying to start another Civil War? Wasn’t the first one enough?

http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/civil-rights/348923-one-civil-war-was-enough
Click to expand...

I don't see how taking these statues down is erasing history. If anything, we have erased history by not memorializing the nearly 4000 victims of lynchings that occurred in the South after the Reconstruction period. Should we put monuments up for those victims? That would seem appropriate if we don't want to erase our history.

http://billmoyers.com/story/4000-black-people-lynched-south-monuments/

Have you ever heard or read of the race riot in Tulsa in 1921 in which an entire wealthy African America community was burned to the ground?

http://www.greenwoodculturalcenter.com/tulsa-race-riot

Or maybe the Atlanta race riots of 1906 when similar destruction took place?

https://www.britannica.com/event/Atlanta-Riot-of-1906

I never learned of these, among others, in all of my years of schooling. Maybe those were the fictitious history that has actually been erased?
 
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TheCainer said:
I don't see how taking these statues down is erasing history. If anything, we have erased history by not memorializing the nearly 4000 victims of lynchings that occurred in the South after the Reconstruction period. Should we put monuments up for those victims? That would seem appropriate if we don't want to erase our history.

http://billmoyers.com/story/4000-black-people-lynched-south-monuments/

Have you ever heard or read of the race riot in Tulsa in 1921 in which an entire wealthy African America community was burned to the ground?

http://www.greenwoodculturalcenter.com/tulsa-race-riot

Or maybe the Atlanta race riots of 1906 when similar destruction took place?

https://www.britannica.com/event/Atlanta-Riot-of-1906

I never learned of these, among others, in all of my years of schooling. Maybe those were the fictitious history that has actually been erased?
Click to expand...

Build monuments to remind us of those tragedies. I have no problem with that.
 
The Tradition said:
Not.

The.

Point.

Add context and perspective to the old statues and other monuments. Don't tear them down.
Click to expand...
If these cities, states, and communities want to remove them, then it's up to them to do that. The history is not being erased at all.

The one thing from the OP that struck me as typical American stupidity is changing the name of a school isn't cost effective. Their teachers are underpaid, and they're worried about the name of the school. I also think it's funny that Nancy Pelosi's father is in opposition with her.
 
THE_DEVIL said:
Holy Crap! That dude has to be around 130 years old.
Click to expand...
Probably why he said this:
“Today, with our nation beset by subversive groups and propaganda which seeks to destroy our national unity, we can look for inspiration to the lives of Lee and (Stonewall) Jackson to remind us to be resolute and determined in preserving our sacred institutions,” he said at the time.
 
The Tradition said:
The overdue momentum to remove various Confederate symbols, especially about 1,500 statues, from their perches has picked up across the country in the aftermath of right-wing violence in Charlottesville, Va. In Gainesville, Fla., Durham, N.C., and Baltimore, the toppling has already begun. In some cases, state or local authorities have driven the process. In others, activists have seized the initiative to speed things up.

Yet despite the growing consensus that the “dangerous totems” (as Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings has dubbed them) must go, there is no agreement about the monuments’ fates. Ideas range from traceless destruction to warehouse storage to museum display. Some propose, to quieter applause, to keep the objects in place, accompanied by appropriate labeling.

In the cacophony of opinions, few observers and participants seem bothered by the lack of a coherent, thought-out strategy for disposing of the Confederacy’s visible traces while preserving evidence of this vitally important chapter of our past.

They should be. Not out of concern for the preposterous right-wing lament about the erasure of history, but because the task at hand is to purge the imagery in a way that guards against amnesia, while also transforming the statues from celebratory monuments to objective evidence.

The United States is not alone in confronting this dilemma. Countries across the globe routinely grapple with how to handle reminders of unsavory chapters in their history. Recently, the issue has made headlines from Ukraine to Taiwan.

But nowhere have the questions about the physical markers of unwanted pasts — first Nazi, then Communist and, lately, colonial — played out as long as they have in Germany. Over the last 70 years, the country has accepted a simple truth: Out of sight hardly means out of mind. The removal of the relics of a hateful social order is not in itself cause for celebration. It is the aftermath that matters.

The German case is exemplary not because Germans attained closure, but because they came to recognize that closure was neither tenable nor desirable. Instead, the processing of history is like an open wound that slowly heals only with careful debate about the often-explosive issues at stake. The United States can avoid making irreparable mistakes by learning from Germany’s blunders and subsequent course corrections.

Over time, Germans have moved through three distinct phases to tackle the country’s fascist legacy: erasing it, ignoring it, and consigning it to the Vergangenheitsbewältigung — German for “the enduring confrontation with the past.” The experience offers seven lessons for the fight over America’s Confederate past.

  1. There is no zero hour. After the war in occupied Germany, restraint and caution were not initially on the agenda. For nearly a decade, West German authorities followed the path of least resistance by simply eliminating the traces of Hitler’s rule.
For better or worse, wartime Allied bombing and firestorms had given them a considerable head start. In some cases, the wartime damage did 90 percent of the job. And yet this near-total destruction did little to prevent the neo-Nazis and revisionists from reorganizing. The 1952 court ban on the Nazi Party’s successor, the Socialist Reich Party, sent a much stronger message.

  1. Compromises look weak but have benefits. Soon enough, it became obvious that wiping out every structure with a whiff of Nazism was unrealistic. The traces of the Third Reich included entire city blocks constructed in the regime’s signature bombastic, boxy style. Blowing up structurally sound buildings or the highways Hitler expanded into a Reichsautobahn network would have further hurt a nation whose infrastructure lay in ruins.
East Germany, all the more parsimonious after bearing the brunt of Soviet reparations, was the first to realize that pragmatic compromise was essential. Of course, the Third Reich’s insignia had to come down and mostly did, but the structures themselves were retained for new functions and uses. Though driven by necessity, this pragmatic solution now gets credit for preserving for posterity the pathetic bleakness and soullessness of Hitler’s architectural vision. It has not aged well, turning from shades of white to brown as decades have gone by.


  1. Bad history can be put to good use. Walking around cities like Berlin, Munich, and Nuremberg today, a tourist will not often find an obvious Nazi landmark. Yet many inconspicuous remnants remain, ranging from unremarkable city squares and department store amphitheaters to more famous one-offs, among them a retired airport, an Olympic stadium, Nazi party rally grounds, and a former resort.
While the government (and, increasingly, private initiatives) pours money into conserving these places, city tour companies train their guides to peel back all of the layers of the morally complicated history for visitors. Many prominent buildings that are still in use have information boards — not tiny plaques — in front, with meticulously researched historical explanations.

Especially fraught places, where the Nazi project was most present, like the Haus der Kunst in Munich — the inaugural venue for the Nazi art exhibit organized to compete with the more popular modernist “Degenerate Art” show across the street — now commit a lion’s share of their resources to displaying the art they would have shunned during the Nazi reign. In the hallways, historical timelines lay out the turbulent past.

  1. Empty spaces can talk, but not all should. In Berlin, the Topography of Terror museum fills the space that once held the sprawling lair of Hitler’s bureaucracy. It has transformed an otherwise empty lot into a meaningful, and sobering, reminder of the horrors of the Nazi regime.
And yet some sites, Germans have decided, must remain unmarked and obscured for good reason: to prevent them from becoming shrines to the Nazi past. The Berlin bunker where Hitler killed himself, which was blown up in 1947, remains buried under a parking lot, with no signage.

  1. Erasure comes with no guarantees. Austria has a similar vision for Hitler’s birth house. In June, after protracted debates, its Constitutional Court finally authorized government seizure of the structure from its private owners. To this point, the building remains under protection as a historical monument.

As in Berlin, Austrian authorities hope to prevent the house from becoming a difficult-to-control and illicit neo-Nazi pilgrimage site. But even a razed landmark is still a spot on the map, and many concede that it, too, could become a beacon for hate groups.

  1. Preserving difficult pasts calls for civic negotiation. In the 1990s, German officials applied the lessons learned from dealing with Nazi iconography to the markings left over from the Communist era. Berlin’s Senate impaneled a special commission of experts from the city’s East and West. It concluded that celebrations of the Communist past had no place in the reunified capital-to-be, but that the distinctive history should be accessible in both parts of the city.
Other corners of former East Germany have also striven to preserve this history by allowing many statues of Communist heroes to remain standing. In some small towns, such as Königswusterhausen outside Berlin, streets named after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels run parallel to each other.

  1. Razing and replacing uncovers more than it hides. Where attempts to dismantle Communist symbols had prevailed, as in the case of the East German Palace of the Republic, which was destroyed to rebuild the shell of the Kaiser’s Berlin Palace, new issues emerged. The demolition and reconstruction have exposed additional unprocessed chapters of Germany’s past, especially its history of colonialism. Achieving a clean slate, free of historical stains, proved to be a delusion.
These lessons from Germany should serve as a cautionary tale for Americans rushing to destroy every Confederate monument within reach. Rather than rashly overcompensating for decades of inaction by haphazardly tearing down or hiding Confederate monuments, Americans should have the painful debates necessary to decide the fate of these relics of a bygone era. If German history is any indication, simply turning the page isn’t an option.

http://www.philly.com/philly/opinio...many-communists-monuments-trump-20170817.html
Click to expand...
That's both more interesting and more reasonable.
 
The Tradition said:
Imagine a time in the not-so-distant future where all the fragile souls out there have succeeded in wiping clean any trace of our country’s history and replaced it with a more fictitious version — a version they get to rewrite.
Click to expand...
My concern with this post (the first in this thread) is that it fails to recognize that the dangerous history revisionists in this country are those who are trying to rewrite history textbooks. Texas, for example. Soft-pedaling the significance of slavery is just one of those reprehensible efforts.

Like many whites, I haven't felt strongly about pulling down these monuments . . . until now.

Now they are a focus of attention. As such I think I have to pick a side.

The monuments need to go.

The best and most interesting of them should probably find homes in museums. But how many confederate flags do we really need to store (or display), even relegated to museums?
 
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What Would Jesus Do? said:
My concern with this post (the first in this thread) is that it fails to recognize that the dangerous history revisionists in this country are those who are trying to rewrite history textbooks. Texas, for example. Soft-pedaling the significance of slavery is just one of those reprehensible efforts.

Like many whites, I haven't felt strongly about pulling down these monuments . . . until now.

Now they are a focus of attention. As such I think I have to pick a side.

The monuments need to go.

The best and most interesting of them should probably find homes in museums. But how many confederate flags do we really need to store (or display), even relegated to museums?
Click to expand...

Liberals are usually completely against destroying "art" but not so in this case.
 
Huey Grey said:
Erasing history? We don't have statues of Hitler yet everyone still knows who he is. I think the OP is confusing history with idolizing.
Click to expand...

This, this, a thousand times this.

It is beyond stupid to try to claim that removing statues is "erasing history." The statues were erected to idolize the men depicted, not to provided an education.

As for adding plaques that provide context, that's fine. But so is simply removing the statues. And I have news for you, in Richmond there is a process in place to "add context" to their confederate statues, and the protestations are loud. Think about it -- most of the people who don't want statues removed also don't want context added. Why? Because they simply want to celebrate the "achievements" of these traitors.
 
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The Tradition said:
Imagine a time in the not-so-distant future where all the fragile souls out there have succeeded in wiping clean any trace of our country’s history and replaced it with a more fictitious version — a version they get to rewrite.

All offensive monuments have been removed (the ones that haven’t already been destroyed or defaced), the history books have been burned (in the schools that still actually have history books), and the granite faces of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln have all been blasted off of Mount Rushmore.

Recall this eerily haunting passage from George Orwell’s “1984,” written almost 70 years ago, about a fictitious future dictatorship:

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”​

People may roll their eyes and think this is just the hot topic of the moment, but what we’re seeing today has the potential to spiral into a complete Big Brother-like takeover of what we’re allowed to think, remember, and know about the country we call home.

Where exactly will the new version of “history” begin and what will it look like for the next generation?

Will “history” start with Barack Obama and the election of the first African-American president, forgetting the real history of everything our country went through to actually get to the point where we had the freedom to elect an African American as president? Or will we be permitted to go back as far as William Jefferson (scratch that, can’t say Jefferson anymore) Clinton and learn about how he, in his own way, christened the Oval Office?

In the state of Virginia, where my children go to school, fourth grade is a huge year for learning about history. Practically in our backyard are the homes of George Washington, James Madison, James Monroe, Thomas Jefferson, as well as Jamestown and Colonial Williamsburg, just to name a few. All these people and places have connections to slavery, and all of them have played a major role in making our country what it is today.

Do we just take a bulldozer to Mount Vernon and Monticello and the rest of their homes? Do we level off Jamestown and Williamsburg and build some more wineries along the Colonial Wine Trail?

The Fairfax County school board, in all it’s political correctness, recently voted to change the name of J.E.B Stuart High School in Falls Church, Va., at a cost of nearly $1 million because it’s named after a Confederate general. This was the priority of a county that has a nearly $50 million budget deficit and underpaid teachers.

There are now calls to remove Confederate statues in the U.S. Capitol. One member of Congress calling for their removal is House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Yet her father seemed to disagree, as he dedicated a statue of General Robert E. Lee when he was mayor of Baltimore.

“Today, with our nation beset by subversive groups and propaganda which seeks to destroy our national unity, we can look for inspiration to the lives of Lee and (Stonewall) Jackson to remind us to be resolute and determined in preserving our sacred institutions,” he said at the time.

Now, those Baltimore statues are removed.

In the case of Pelosi’s father, those statues were erected in the 1940s but many monuments are much older. Why, all of a sudden are we worried about statues that have been around for a century or more?

We’re so busy protesting everything that hurts our fragile little feelings that, meanwhile, North Korea is shooting missiles over Japan and threatening the U.S., people are crossing our borders who want to kill us and hardworking families are unable to afford their ever increasing health care premiums. And yet some of us can’t walk past a statue without coming completely unhinged.

In the case of these members of Congress, the irony is they want to erase from history the very people who worked to give them the power they enjoy today. Washington, Jefferson, and Madison were truly flawed and complicated men, but without them there would be no American revolution, no Declaration of Independence and no Constitution.

Just in case there’s still any doubt that people have completely lost their minds, there’s a Change.org petition to replace Confederate monuments in New Orleans with a statue of Britney Spears. And in Baltimore, the city is building a monument to a drag queen famous for eating dog feces.

Yes, that’s a thing.

As I write this, people in the great state of Texas are suffering, really suffering, in the wake of Tropical Storm Harvey. Right in the midst of their tragedy, protesters have staged a 10-day civil disobedience march from Charlottesville, Va., to Washington, D.C., to draw attention to themselves in the name of fighting white supremacy and calling for the removal of President Trump.

Because, of course they have to blame President Trump. The Russia hoax didn’t stick — there was no “there” there, so now they have to come up with another reason he’s unfit to be president. Today, with the help of the media, they’re attempting to brand him a racist. When that doesn’t work, in another few weeks they’ll try something else.

These marchers are so passionate about their cause, which started with 200 people, that after just one day the majority of them couldn’t hack a little bit of rain, and their army of 200 shrunk to 35.

Why are extremist groups trying to start another Civil War? Wasn’t the first one enough?

http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/civil-rights/348923-one-civil-war-was-enough
Click to expand...

Go Home, Losers.

Losers don't GET to put statues up. WINNERS do. Deal with it, you silly southern snowflakes.
 
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Reactions: JWolf74
Joes Place said:
No, it's not.

You LOSE, you DON'T GET STATUE idols.
MOST of them were put up during the Jim Crow Era, NOT after the war.

That's "sour grapes" and "intimidation", not "memorials".
Click to expand...

You're such an idiot. The vast majority were donated by legacy groups, the sons and daughters of those who fought and died defending their states and hometowns.
 
Joes Place said:
No, it's not.

You LOSE, you DON'T GET STATUE idols.
MOST of them were put up during the Jim Crow Era, NOT after the war.

That's "sour grapes" and "intimidation", not "memorials".
Click to expand...
The Tradition said:
You're such an idiot. The vast majority were donated by legacy groups, the sons and daughters of those who fought and died defending their states and hometowns.
Click to expand...
You're both "right", actually. That's why it's complex!
 
Joes Place said:
No, it's not.

You LOSE, you DON'T GET STATUE idols.
MOST of them were put up during the Jim Crow Era, NOT after the war.

That's "sour grapes" and "intimidation", not "memorials".
Click to expand...
It really is more complex and complicated than that. But... I totally understand how you would disagree with that and come to the conclusion you have above. What you stated was part of the motivation for the statues and memorials!
 
The Tradition said:
You're such an idiot. The vast majority were donated by legacy groups, the sons and daughters of those who fought and died defending their states and hometowns.
Click to expand...

"Donated" to erect during Jim Crow eras. To intimidate people. That's why they're used off and on over the decades as magnets for KKKers and Nazis to parade around.

Protecting monuments that attract bigots and racists is like keeping a big pile of shit in your house and wondering why you have so many flies around.....
 
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Reactions: JWolf74
strummingram said:
It really is more complex and complicated than that. But... I totally understand how you would disagree with that and come to the conclusion you have above. What you stated was part of the motivation for the statues and memorials!
Click to expand...

"Part of" the motivation, as in the hidden motivation. Fake memorials were the PC reason at the time.

If you want to keep the flies out of your house, don't leave big piles of shit laying around....
 
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