The statue debate just keeps rolling with more and more historical figures getting caught up in it.
I certainly hope no one here condones vandalism. I despise it. If Confederate statues come down, it should be through lawful means: public referendum or a vote of an elected body. The statues should be placed in a museum. I don’t think the statues of Confederates should be removed in battlefield parks (where they add to the historical understanding) or in cemeteries (where defacing or removing memorials to the dead is just wrong).
But… now the activists are coming for Abraham Lincoln! . See the controversy at UW-Madison.
Fresno State has a statue of Gandhi that some students are petitioning to be removed.
U. S. Grant’s statue was torn down by vandals in San Francisco. Who do they think was responsible for winning the war to free the slaves? Who freed the only slave he was gifted when he himself was very poor?
Protesters in St. Louis want the statue of King Louis IX (St. Louis) taken off Art Hill. They also want the city renamed Confluence or Scott. And they beat up those who were trying to protect the statue.
An innocent elk statue was burned in Portland. It’s unclear what politically incorrect thing the elk did.
I worry for historic homes like Monticello where security measures have been stepped up.
This is just violence for the sake of violence and shows true historical ignorance and intolerance.
First you need to understand the history of the Confederate statues in the USA. The majority of them were set up long after the war, and were in response to the civil rights movement and to desegregation.
Beside, by all rights, every Confederate general was a traitor fighting for the ability to treat human beings as though they were animals. There should be no discussion. Every Confederate statue should be pulled down.
Saying that we should consider history is saying that we should be proud that millions of Americans were willing to kill and to die to protect the ability to commit human rights violations on a massive scale. Keeping those statues is saying that people who believe that Blacks are no better than animals are heroes who should be glorified with statues.
Calling those statues “history” is like calling the KKK a “civic organization who should be provided government support”.
Maybe we should put a heroic statue of Santa Ana at the Alamo? Maybe we should put a heroic statute of Chūichi Nagumo next to the Arizona in Pearl Harbor? Maybe we should have a heroic statue of Benedict Arnold at West Point? Maybe we should have some statues of Nazi Officers at the cemeteries on the beaches of Normandy?
After all, history.
Those monuments to racism and slavery and have stood for decades and no peaceful means to remove them worked. Enough was enough.
Maybe the protesters have gone too far. If the White majorities had done anything at all for the past half-century, none of this would have happened. You tell a large group of people that their opinion doesn’t matter, that their pain doesn’t matter, that their lives don’t matter, they will end up acting violent.
Maybe you don’t understand them. I do, because I see Lithuania putting up statues to people who helped the Nazis march my relatives into Ponar. I see Ukraine treating Bohdan Khmelnytsky as a national hero. I deal with people treating the Crusades as though this were a great event.
So I understand the anger and see the point of the actions.
When the Confederate statues come down it should be by lawful means, as I said in the first post. Not by violence and vandalism.
But as for statues of Washington , Lincoln, Grant, Jefferson, the vandals who deface and destroy need to understand history. A person need not be perfect to be great.
I don’t like vandalism or violence either, but If lawful means worked, these statues (and the terrible inequalities that persist to the present day) would have come down and put into a museum (such as a holocaust museum) a long time ago. How long should people wait to be considered fully human?
I speak as a white woman who was born and raised in Alabama, and whose ancestors (spanning from Georgia to Mississippi) probably all fought for the Confederacy.
My husband’s parents fled Nazi Germany as children, and my daughter (of Chinese decent) is considered by some to be somehow responsible for Covid-19 even though she became a US citizen as an infant. Enough is enough! People are not “evolving” fast enough. How many people have died while being patient and deferential?
Maybe if equality had been achieved, or at least we were progressing faster toward it, if these statutes were truly relics of the past, they could be tolerated as part of history. The problem is, …too many people seems to view them as altars to inspire their present odious behavior.
Two years ago a local confederate statue was toppled by protesters. That night I was at a celebratory party with white southerners, most of whom have family roots in the area going back 200 plus years. Some had children and grandchildren at the protest, supporting the toppling
Everyone was contributing to legal defense fund for arrested protesters. .
The next week an extremely liberal and progressive white friend, born in the Midwest, lived in CA most of her adult life, and retired to this southern community about ten years ago, sat in my parlor absolutely livid the statue hadn’t been removed by lawful means. She had been out of the country when it happened. If she’d been here , as a community organizer, she would have arranged more public meetings to debate removal. There hadn’t been enough discussion.
My ill considered, automatic respose, was that we’d been talking about this in the south for decades. The statues were controversial even before they went up. I wish she’d been in town to see all the parents bring their young children to the site the next day for solemn impromptu history lessons.
She said (loudly) “No one asked me what I thought. I wasn’t around for all that discussion. This just wasn’t right. Everyone didn’t have a voice in this decision”
I understood and sympathized with her point of view, but don’t find it very practical. Even before considering whose voice really matters with regard to these monuments.
Still good friends. She’s still mad about the monuments.
After a speech by a certain failed-artist-turned-politician last night, can we still pretend that preserving the monuments is about “respect for our history”?
If we were a truly lawful nation we would have respected the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1878 or at least the Supreme Court decision of 1980 that recognized that the United States unlawfully seized the Black Hills from the Sioux nation. If we were a lawful nation, the Black Hills of North Dakota would have been returned to the Lakota (with profuse apologies) as the ancient sacred ground that they are.
Also, “extremely liberal and progressive” on some issues does not necessarily mean that on all issues. Also, some parts of the Midwest and California are (or were) racially conservative.
The problem with ad hoc pulling down monuments is that once we decide populist action is ok, all monuments are fair game. The monuments to MLK, Lincoln, etc, can also be defaced and pulled down using the very same rationale, by any group. Either we have a lawful process for this, or we don’t. I would like to think we would get rid of offensive monuments promptly by popular accord, but that isn’t what is happening, hence Grant gets pulled down too.
In theory, I agree, @roycroftmom, I really do. But if we cared…truly cared more about PEOPLE being pulled down violently, we wouldn’t have reason to fear monuments (Inanimate objects) being pulled down unlawfully.
Did you have the same concerns when Iraqi citizens toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad?
"The United States has been dismantling statues since its very foundation.
One of the earliest recorded instances came in 1776, just five days after the Declaration of Independence was ratified. In a moment that was immortalized in a mid-19th-century painting, soldiers and civilians tore down a gilded statue of Britain’s King George III in Manhattan."
I am a lawyer, @doschicos. I believe in and support the rule of law, and the Supreme Court’s job in protecting the Constitution and interpreting the law. That applies for laws I disagree with, and free speech I dislike. Today of all days is a good time to remember “I disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it”.
Be careful what mob rule you accept, for they may come after you next.
It would be a good time to remember the problem of selective enforcement-if we do not prosecute those who pulled down Lee, we won’t prosecute those who pull down Lincoln, either. Maybe the answer is to have statues erected to no one, but is this how adults would decide that result-by mobs running around pulling down everything in sight?