Leave The Statues Alone!

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Jun 27, 2011
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In the wake of Charlottesville, a chorus of media outlets, political activists, and random people on the Internet have called for the removal or destruction of Confederate statues in cities across the country. They say we shouldn’t honor a bunch of racists who fought to preserve slavery, and that it’s long past time for these painful reminders of our past to come down—stow them away in a museum or smash them to pieces, just get them off the streets.

This iconoclastic impulse is a mistake, even after the harrowing events in Charlottesville last weekend. It’s a mistake not because there was anything noble about the Confederacy or its raison d’être, which was slavery, but because there is something noble—and, for a free people, necessary—about preserving our history so we can understand who we are and how we should live.

For all the tough talk this week about the problems with these historical monuments, there hasn’t been nearly enough discussion of their history. Most of them were built a half-century after the war, as the Civil War generation was beginning to die off. Before the turn of the century, Confederate graves had for the most part not been cared for in federal cemeteries, and erecting a Confederate monument was considered treasonous.

But as the veterans of the war began to die, there was a renewed push for reconciliation between North and South, and with it an outpouring of filial piety. Of course, the monument boom across the South during the first two decades of the twentieth century came at a time of terrible race relations, mass immigration, and the pernicious influence of the Lost Cause mythos, which poisoned the South.

So the monuments reflect more than one current of early twentieth-century America. They served to venerate Confederate heroes like Robert E. Lee, thereby cementing the narrative of the Lost Cause and all its misty-eyed nostalgia about the South. But they were also an outpouring of grief and remembrance for the hundreds of thousands who had died in the war. Nearly a quarter of Southern white men in their twenties were killed or died from disease. Is it any wonder that decades later, as families began to bury Confederate veterans in greater numbers, there would be a push to erect memorials to that generation?

And for as much as Lost Cause mythology adorns so many of these monuments, their purpose was also to convey to future generations why so many people kept fighting, for years and in the face of staggering casualties. For the ordinary soldiers who fought and died, devotion to the Confederate army did not arise primarily from a devotion to the institution of slavery (just as most Union soldiers were not fighting primarily to end slavery) but from a devotion to their home states and a sense of honor and duty to defend them from what they considered to be an invading army.

That they were wrong about slavery does not excuse us today from the burden of trying to understand what motivated them to fight—and what motivated them and their families to undertake a flurry of monument-building decades later as the surviving veterans began to die off.

Speaking on Memorial Day in 1884, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., a Union veteran who saw a great deal of action, talked about the importance of transmitting the emotional weight of the war from one generation to the next, and he specifically mentions the role of monuments: “I believe from the bottom of my heart that our memorial halls and statues and tablets, the tattered flags of our regiments gathered in the Statehouses, are worth more to our young men by way of chastening and inspiration than the monuments of another hundred years of peaceful life could be.”

For Holmes, it was also the duty of Civil War veterans themselves to convey the significance of the war to posterity. He said, “the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire… we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after.”

Read more at: Why We Should Keep The Confederate Monuments Where They Are
 
Do you feel that cities/towns/counties/states don't have the right to vote to remove the statues they are responsible for?
Of course, we haven't seen cities/towns/counties/states vote on the statue issue, so we'll never know, will we?

We have, however, seen leftist terrorists destroying community property. Do you feel they should go to jail?
 
According to the rightie "logic", Oklahoma City needs a statue of Tim McVeigh to properly document history, and anyone opposing such a thing is a SJW.
 
In the wake of Charlottesville, a chorus of media outlets, political activists, and random people on the Internet have called for the removal or destruction of Confederate statues in cities across the country. They say we shouldn’t honor a bunch of racists who fought to preserve slavery, and that it’s long past time for these painful reminders of our past to come down—stow them away in a museum or smash them to pieces, just get them off the streets.

This iconoclastic impulse is a mistake, even after the harrowing events in Charlottesville last weekend. It’s a mistake not because there was anything noble about the Confederacy or its raison d’être, which was slavery, but because there is something noble—and, for a free people, necessary—about preserving our history so we can understand who we are and how we should live.

For all the tough talk this week about the problems with these historical monuments, there hasn’t been nearly enough discussion of their history. Most of them were built a half-century after the war, as the Civil War generation was beginning to die off. Before the turn of the century, Confederate graves had for the most part not been cared for in federal cemeteries, and erecting a Confederate monument was considered treasonous.

But as the veterans of the war began to die, there was a renewed push for reconciliation between North and South, and with it an outpouring of filial piety. Of course, the monument boom across the South during the first two decades of the twentieth century came at a time of terrible race relations, mass immigration, and the pernicious influence of the Lost Cause mythos, which poisoned the South.

So the monuments reflect more than one current of early twentieth-century America. They served to venerate Confederate heroes like Robert E. Lee, thereby cementing the narrative of the Lost Cause and all its misty-eyed nostalgia about the South. But they were also an outpouring of grief and remembrance for the hundreds of thousands who had died in the war. Nearly a quarter of Southern white men in their twenties were killed or died from disease. Is it any wonder that decades later, as families began to bury Confederate veterans in greater numbers, there would be a push to erect memorials to that generation?

And for as much as Lost Cause mythology adorns so many of these monuments, their purpose was also to convey to future generations why so many people kept fighting, for years and in the face of staggering casualties. For the ordinary soldiers who fought and died, devotion to the Confederate army did not arise primarily from a devotion to the institution of slavery (just as most Union soldiers were not fighting primarily to end slavery) but from a devotion to their home states and a sense of honor and duty to defend them from what they considered to be an invading army.

That they were wrong about slavery does not excuse us today from the burden of trying to understand what motivated them to fight—and what motivated them and their families to undertake a flurry of monument-building decades later as the surviving veterans began to die off.

Speaking on Memorial Day in 1884, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., a Union veteran who saw a great deal of action, talked about the importance of transmitting the emotional weight of the war from one generation to the next, and he specifically mentions the role of monuments: “I believe from the bottom of my heart that our memorial halls and statues and tablets, the tattered flags of our regiments gathered in the Statehouses, are worth more to our young men by way of chastening and inspiration than the monuments of another hundred years of peaceful life could be.”

For Holmes, it was also the duty of Civil War veterans themselves to convey the significance of the war to posterity. He said, “the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire… we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after.”

Read more at: Why We Should Keep The Confederate Monuments Where They Are
I am so with you on all this......this makes no sense to me. These statues are not the reason black people are dropping out of high schools at alarming rates, these statues aren't stopping black people from succeeding in life, these statues, god bless thier meanings, bears no responsibility for any body in this country from moving around, getting jobs and working. I don't understand why now all of a sudden people got issues with these fuckin statues...this shit is crazy and I agree with Trump, you, the rednecks anybody that finds this shit fucked up. A woman is dead over this shit!!

Leave the fuckin statues alone.....race in this country will always be an issue, always. And not one generation now, yesterday or 2mar is gonna change those facts...because gotta hate somebody when thier lives are fucked up, its called being human!!
 
Do you feel that cities/towns/counties/states don't have the right to vote to remove the statues they are responsible for?
Of course, we haven't seen cities/towns/counties/states vote on the statue issue, so we'll never know, will we?

We have, however, seen leftist terrorists destroying community property. Do you feel they should go to jail?

Charlottesville's duly elected City Council made the decision. Do you think the Union should have an obligation to protect State funded statues devoted to the Confederates?

Yes those who illegally destroyed property should be charged with a crime.
 
Do you feel that cities/towns/counties/states don't have the right to vote to remove the statues they are responsible for?
If race relations sour to the point we vote to remove the MLK memorial in DC, you would be ok with that? Or is voting sacrosanct depending on whose ox is being gored?
 
Do you feel that cities/towns/counties/states don't have the right to vote to remove the statues they are responsible for?
If race relations sour to the point we vote to remove the MLK memorial in DC, you would be ok with that? Or is voting sacrosanct depending on whose ox is being gored?
Federal vote on a federal monument? Sure, why not. Wouldn't those kinds of things in Washington be the job of Congress anyways? And we vote for those guys. All on the up and up.
 
Do you feel that cities/towns/counties/states don't have the right to vote to remove the statues they are responsible for?

Do you think it's fair to deny future generations knowledge of history?
Do we need a statue in a part in order to avoid denying future generations their knowledge of history? What's wrong with History BOOKS? And History VIDEOS? And History MUSEUMS?

Seems to me the only ones who should mourn over the removal of a statue are the pigeons.
 
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Do you feel that cities/towns/counties/states don't have the right to vote to remove the statues they are responsible for?

Do you think it's fair to deny future generations knowledge of history?
Do we need a statue in a part in order to avoid denying future generations their knowledge of history? What's wrong with History BOOKS? And History VIDEOS? And History MUSEUMS?

Seems to me the only ones who should mourn over the removal of a statue are the pigeons.
Are you talking about American History? You know ... the kind they don't even teach any more?
 
Do you feel that cities/towns/counties/states don't have the right to vote to remove the statues they are responsible for?

Do you think it's fair to deny future generations knowledge of history?
Do we need a statue in a part in order to avoid denying future generations their knowledge of history? What's wrong with History BOOKS? And History VIDEOS? And History MUSEUMS?

Seems to me the only ones who should mourn over the removal of a statue are the pigeons.
Are you talking about American History? You know ... the kind they don't even teach any more?
Where did you go to school where they don't teach American History anymore?
 
Do you feel that cities/towns/counties/states don't have the right to vote to remove the statues they are responsible for?

Do you think it's fair to deny future generations knowledge of history?
Do we need a statue in a part in order to avoid denying future generations their knowledge of history? What's wrong with History BOOKS? And History VIDEOS? And History MUSEUMS?

Seems to me the only ones who should mourn over the removal of a statue are the pigeons.
So you were ok, then, with the Taliban blowing up the Buddhist statues in the Hazarajat region of central Afghanistan in March, 2001?
 
Do you feel that cities/towns/counties/states don't have the right to vote to remove the statues they are responsible for?

Do you think it's fair to deny future generations knowledge of history?
Do we need a statue in a part in order to avoid denying future generations their knowledge of history? What's wrong with History BOOKS? And History VIDEOS? And History MUSEUMS?

Seems to me the only ones who should mourn over the removal of a statue are the pigeons.
Are you talking about American History? You know ... the kind they don't even teach any more?
Apparently U.S. students are unfamiliar with the famous paraphrased aphorism, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” That’s because a new report shows that students anywhere from high school to fourth grade are solely lacking in their knowledge of American history.

Results from the 2010 gold standard of testing, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 13 percent of the nation’s high school seniors showed proficiency in their knowledge of American history, and only 18 percent of eighth grades and 22 percent of fourth graders scoring as well.

The Decline of American History in Public Schools

The numbers are shocking. Just 20 percent of fourth graders, 17 percent of eighth graders and 12 percent of 12th graders are at grade-level proficiency in American history, according to the Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress.

https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2014/10/31/american-schools-are-failing-at-history

... and the beat goes on. Don't even bother looking for a US Civics class anymore.
 

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