Confederate Statues Are Going Away!!!

[jgoodguy]

We give them away and likely buy them back in a decade.

 

[O' Be Joyful]

(snip)

To repudiate an honor or dismantle a memorial, then, makes moral sense only if you intend to repudiate the specific deeds that it memorializes. In the case of Confederate monuments, that’s exactly what we should want to do. Their objective purpose was to valorize a cause that we are grateful met defeat, there is no debt we owe J.E.B. Stuart or Nathan Bedford Forrest that needs to be remembered, and if they are put away we will become more morally consistent, not less, in how we think about that chapter in our past.

Opinion | The Ghost of Woodrow Wilson

The debts our institutions owe to the problematic past can’t just be canceled.

www.nytimes.com

When it comes to hating Woodrow Wilson, I was an early adopter. Raised with the bland liberal history that hailed the 28th president as a visionary for championing the League of Nations, I picked up in college what was then a contrarian, mostly right-wing perspective — that many of Wilson’s legacies were disastrous, including an imperial understanding of the presidency that’s deformed our constitutional structure ever since, the messianic style in American foreign policy that gave us Vietnam and Iraq, and a solidification of Jim Crow under a scientific-racist guise.
Now his racism has finally prompted Princeton University, which once had Wilson as its president, to remove his name from its prominent school of public and international affairs. This move was made under pressure from left-wing activists, but it also answered conservatives who had invoked Wilson’s name to suggest that progressive racists might be unjustly spared from cancellation.
For this Wilson-despiser, his fall was a clarifying moment. I expected to be at least a little pleased and justified when the name was gone. Instead, the decision just seemed fundamentally dishonest, a case study in what goes wrong when iconoclasm moves beyond Confederates to encompass the wider American inheritance.
Our civil religion, back when it had more true believers, sometimes treated departed presidents like saints. But our monuments and honorifics exist primarily to honor deeds, not to issue canonizations — to express gratitude for some specific act, to acknowledge some specific debt, to trace a line back to some worthwhile inheritance.

Thus when you enter their Washington, D.C., memorials, you’ll see Thomas Jefferson honored as the man who expressed the founding’s highest ideals and Abraham Lincoln as the president who made good on their promise. That the first was a hypocrite slave owner and the second a pragmatist who had to be pushed into liberating the slaves is certainly relevant to our assessment of their characters. But they remain the author of the Declaration of Independence and the savior of the union, and you can’t embrace either legacy, the union or “we hold these truths …” without acknowledging that these gifts came down through them.
To repudiate an honor or dismantle a memorial, then, makes moral sense only if you intend to repudiate the specific deeds that it memorializes. In the case of Confederate monuments, that’s exactly what we should want to do. Their objective purpose was to valorize a cause that we are grateful met defeat, there is no debt we owe J.E.B. Stuart or Nathan Bedford Forrest that needs to be remembered, and if they are put away we will become more morally consistent, not less, in how we think about that chapter in our past.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/books/review/the-hardhat-riot-david-paul-kuhn.html?action=click&algo=bandit-all-surfaces_desk_filter&block=editors_picks_recirc&fellback=false&imp_id=7343021&impression_id=542662811&index=0&pgtype=Article®ion=ccolumn&req_id=570859439&surface=home-featured

 

[jgoodguy]

Hmmmm

SAGE Journals: Your gateway to world-class research journals

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journals.sagepub.com

Abstract
Do attitudes of elected officials toward racial issues change when the issues are portrayed as economic? Traditionally, scholars have presented Confederate symbols as primarily a racial issue: elites supporting their eradication from public life tend to emphasize the association of Confederate symbols with slavery and institutionalized racism, while those elected officials who oppose the removal of Confederate symbols often cite the heritage of white southerners. In addition to these racial explanations, we argue that there is an economic component underlying support for removal of Confederate symbols among political elites. Racial issues can also be economic issues, and framing a racial issue as an economic issue can change elite attitudes. In the case of removal of Confederate symbols, the presence of such imagery is considered harmful to business. Two survey experiments of elected officials in eleven U.S. southern states show that framing the decision to remove Confederate symbols as good for business causes those elected officials to favor removing the Confederate flag from public spaces. Elected officials can be susceptible to framing, just like regular citizens.

 

[Jim Klag]

I would say this to my friends who are descended from Confederates. It is possible to remember your heritage and the history associated with it without erecting monuments to men whose rebellious acts led to the deaths of three quarters of a million Americans.

To those who want to smash all things associated with the antebellum south I would say many southerners who owned slaves were literally born to it. Their families owned slaves for generations before they were born and they grew up with slavery as an ordinary factor of life in the southern United States. Great wealth was tied up in the institution of slavery and destroying the institution would destroy the economy of half of the United States. Asking these people to give up all that wealth and the way of life that went with it would be asking humans to do something fatal to themselves as they saw it just because it was the right thing to do. In fact, up until the war did the destroying, it was probably impossible for universal emancipation to happen without causing a huge catastrophic tectonic event nationwide. This is why there were many who believed colonization would have to accompany emancipation. No one, certainly not the most radical abolitionists, or even the Lincoln administration, had any idea what to do with 4,000,000 freed slaves.

 

[jgoodguy]

I would say this to my friends who are descended from Confederates. It is possible to remember your heritage and the history associated with it without erecting monuments to men whose rebellious acts led to the deaths of three quarters of a million Americans.

To those who want to smash all things associated with the antebellum south I would say many southerners who owned slaves were literally born to it. Their families owned slaves for generations before they were born and they grew up with slavery as an ordinary factor of life in the southern United States. Great wealth was tied up in the institution of slavery and destroying the institution would destroy the economy of half of the United States. Asking these people to give up all that wealth and the way of life that went with it would be asking humans to do something fatal to themselves as they saw it just because it was the right thing to do. In fact, up until the war did the destroying, it was probably impossible for universal emancipation to happen without causing a huge catastrophic tectonic event nationwide. This is why there were many who believed colonization would have to accompany emancipation. No one, certainly not the most radical abolitionists, or even the Lincoln administration, had any idea what to do with 4,000,000 freed slaves.

Not that many of us really care. Those that do, will not be swayed by logic.

 

[jgoodguy]

Cheyenne River Sioux Chair offers to rip down Mount Rushmore— 'Free of charge... by myself if I must'

Describing the iconic South Dakota mountain carving that depicts the heads of famous U.S presidents as nothing but a monument to "our molesters," the chairman of the Cheyenne River Sioux Nation Harold Frazier this week said he would willingly tear down Mount Rushmore if given the chance—with or...

www.rawstory.com

 

[O' Be Joyful]

Cheyenne River Sioux Chair offers to rip down Mount Rushmore— 'Free of charge... by myself if I must'

Describing the iconic South Dakota mountain carving that depicts the heads of famous U.S presidents as nothing but a monument to "our molesters," the chairman of the Cheyenne River Sioux Nation Harold Frazier this week said he would willingly tear down Mount Rushmore if given the chance—with or...

www.rawstory.com

Plant poison ivy on top instead, as I proposed be done w/ Stone Mountain

Far less cost would be involved and the ever growing creeping poisonious vines would be symbolic.

 

[5fish]

Here is another article on the tax dollars to maintain Confederate monuments... 40 million dollar spent...

The Costs of the Confederacy

In the last decade alone, American taxpayers have spent at least $40 million on Confederate monuments and groups that perpetuate racist ideology

www.smithsonianmag.com

 

[jgoodguy]

Here is another article on the tax dollars to maintain Confederate monuments... 40 million dollar spent...

The Costs of the Confederacy

In the last decade alone, American taxpayers have spent at least $40 million on Confederate monuments and groups that perpetuate racist ideology

www.smithsonianmag.com

40 million in 10 years is an insignificant rounding error.

 

[jgoodguy]

Denmark's Little Mermaid vandalized

The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen, the city's most famous monument, was vandalised Friday but police and commentators were puzzled as to who might have done it and what their message really is."We can confirm that The Little Mermaid has been vandalised some time before 9:00 am this...

www.rawstory.com

 

[O' Be Joyful]

Denmark's Little Mermaid vandalized

The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen, the city's most famous monument, was vandalised Friday but police and commentators were puzzled as to who might have done it and what their message really is."We can confirm that The Little Mermaid has been vandalised some time before 9:00 am this...

www.rawstory.com

My #1 suspect is Tom Hanks.

 

[Rss Feed]

I came across this poll recently. Here are some results:

43. Do you support or oppose removing Confederate statues from public spaces around the country?


WHITE........
4 YR COLL DEG
Tot Rep Dem Ind Men Wom Yes No

Support 52% 14% 85% 50% 47% 56% 63% 32%
Oppose 44 80 11 46 49 39 34 61
DK/NA 5 6 4 5 4 5 3 6

AGE IN YRS.............. WHITE.....
18-34 35-49 50-64 65+ Men Wom Wht Blk Hsp

Support 67% 51% 48% 44% 43% 46% 44% 84% 58%
Oppose 30 43 48 51 53 49 51 11 39
DK/NA 3 6 4 5 4 6 5 5 3

REGION................... DENSITY............ Mltry
NEast MWest South West City Suburb Rural HsHld

Support 55% 51% 45% 60% 60% 56% 32% 40%
Oppose 37 43 52 36 35 39 64 54
DK/NA 8 6 3 4 5 5 3 6

TREND: Do you support or oppose removing Confederate statues from public spaces around the country?


Sup Opp DK/NA

Jun 17, 2020 52 44 5
Aug 23, 2017 39 50 10

44. Do you support or oppose renaming military bases that were named after Confederate generals?

Continue reading...

 

[jgoodguy]

WATCH: Huge group of armed Black protesters march on Confederate monument in Georgia

Armed black protesters marched in Georgia on Independence Day to protest one of the largest Confederate monuments in the world."Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial, a nine-story-high bas-relief sculpture carved into a sprawling rock face northeast of Atlanta, is perhaps the South’s most...

www.rawstory.com

 

[5fish]

List to monuments torn down.... or other...

List of monuments and memorials removed during the George Floyd protests - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Here is this link...

A list of the statues across the US toppled, vandalized or officially removed amid protests

Protests over the killing of George Floyd have led to the removal of historical statues across the U.S.Many of the monuments and statues, most of which depict Confederate leaders or Christopher Col…

thehill.com

 

[jgoodguy]

Frederick Douglass Statue Ripped From Its Base In Rochester, New York

ROCHESTER, N.Y. (AP) — A statue of abolitionist Frederick Douglass was ripped from its base in Rochester on the anniversary of one of his most famous speeches, delivered in that city in 1852.

talkingpointsmemo.com