Do You Approve Of Destroying Confederate Monuments?

[Augustus]

This is mere quibbling.
To raise a recent Michael Jackson statue to the
level of significance given the Civil War, hundreds
of years of slavery, & Buddhism is deflection.

As is quibbling this instead of answering a simple question that highlights your double standards.


Would you say that every single statue of any historically important person/event, even if a terrible modern statue of a terrible person, should be kept in perpetuity, or would you say we should judge on a case by case basis?

Saddam Hussein was historically important for Iraq, but do you really expect people whose relatives he killed to retain all of the statues he put up to honour himself?

 

[Revoltingest]

As is quibbling this instead of answering a simple question that highlights your double standards.

When posters try to deflect from the issue
with mischievous distractions, I don't enable.
Less of my time is wasted.

 

[Nakosis]

In the news....
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/state/north-carolina/article264769574.html
Excerpted...
A North Carolina town watched live online as a bulldozer pushed down its Confederate monument. Mondale Robinson, the mayor of Enfield, North Carolina, took to Facebook to share a livestream as a Confederate monument in the town’s Randolph Park was demolished by a bulldozer on Sunday, Aug. 21. “Yes, sirs! Death to the Confederacy around here,” Robinson said in the video as a bulldozer knocked the monument over. “Not in my town. Not on my watch.”


If you approve of destroying Confederate themed
monuments, do you also approve of the Taliban's
destruction of statues of Buddha? If not, why?

Monuments don't mean any kind of admiration to me. I don't get inspired by a statue of George Washington for example, but it is interesting to have some idea of what he looked like.
A monument like this is historical, not really inspirational. It provides a sense of physical history. Where, when and what happened.
I don't get offended by my. If I was super offended by someone else's art/expression, I'd probably just ignore it. It having nothing really to to with me.

People have tried to make me feel offended. Doesn't really work on me. I don't like my negative feelings about things deciding my actions for me. I think there are better things to be doing than to let other people's actions offend me.

So, do I approve of it? No. I don't think people should be reacting to what people have done historically, but that is their choice to make.

 

[Revoltingest]

Monuments don't mean any kind of admiration to me. I don't get inspired by a statue of George Washington for example, but it is interesting to have some idea of what he looked like.

I always assume that their likeness is some
inaccurate idealized version of their actual
less attractive appearance.
I read plaques.
No inspiration veneration.

A monument like this is historical, not really inspirational. It provides a sense of physical history. Where, when and what happened.
I don't get offended by my. If I was super offended by someone else's art/expression, I'd probably just ignore it. It having nothing really to to with me.

People have tried to make me feel offended. Doesn't really work on me. I don't like my negative feelings about things deciding my actions for me. I think there are better things to be doing than to let other people's actions offend me.

So, do I approve of it? No. I don't think people should be reacting to what people have done historically, but that is their choice to make.

People sure do want offensive history removed
from public view. Perhaps this relates to how they
tend to perpetrate modern evils, eh.

 

[Revoltingest]

Totally this. Hey, let's remind ourselves of our dark period with a series of postage stamps showing likenesses of Goebbels, Himmler and Göring.

Would your purpose be to venerate them
or to illuminate their crimes? If the former,
then you don't understand my theme.
If the latter, then you begin to understand.

 

[Brickjectivity]

If you approve of destroying Confederate themed
monuments, do you also approve of the Taliban's
destruction of statues of Buddha? If not, why?

First of all, there are Buddhists alive today. I am not embarrassed of Buddhists and see the destruction as pointless. I don't see their statues as dangerous. Many Muslims see them as a danger to society, not merely a nuisance. It is not the same to compare the two situations for that reason.

That being said: no I don't support the Taliban's destruction of Buddhist statues, but I really don't care that much about it. I think they are a little huffy and overbearing when they do that.

Suppose someone destroys the Statue of Liberty. That will be sad. It will be a broken tie between USA and France, and it will be a lost landmark. You won't be able to visit the place that many people visited a hundred or so years ago, and people in the future won't be able to visit it. Therefore it will be a sad waste.

It will not matter much in the long run. It is only a statue.

Now these Confederate statues are built for various reasons, so the reason for the statue matters as well as the character of the persons it memorializes. Some of them I might find embarrassing, and I wouldn't miss them. If I think the statue is a symbol that means "We did nothing wrong!" then I kind of feel embarrassed and don't want to see it. If I feel its definitely something which is about not having another civil war then I feel differently about it. Then I think its a museum piece.

Either way it seems smarter to simply move the statues into storage rather than destroy them. We have machines which can do it, and they will only appreciate in value. Why not put them into a tomb or something rather than crush them?

Similarly I suppose it seems like the Taliban would be smarter to simply bury the statues that they don't wish to see, but maybe they aren't all that smart.

 

[Twilight Hue]

I'm OK with destroying monuments. Most of them are monuments to greed, stupidity, bigotry, ego, and a host of other unflattering social ideals that the makers were too stupid to recognize as being less than ideal. I not only approve of removing them, but of the public defacing them for a while before removing them. The whole point of those damn things is to stop society from growing beyond them, and moving forward. Most of them have outlived their relevance in only a decade or two.

Maybe we could collect them all up in a big outdoor museum: called, "The Museum of Monuments To What We Once Thought Was So Important, But Now Hopefully Know Better".

That would be just about every monument in history. Everything has some dark history attached to it. Its the good stuff that ought to be memorialized past the bad.

 

[ChristineM]

I would rather remove the statues that celebrate things that we as a society do not believe in anymore and fight the battle to preserve history. Monuments to civil war battles and such are ok, they commemorate an event, statues of Robert Lee are there to celebrate him.

It doesn't really matter if you believe any more, they happened. Destruction of monuments is seen as the green flag to start revising history.

I see no problems in moving the monuments to a different location but destruction smacks of book burning to me

 

[Augustus]

When posters try to deflect from the issue
with mischievous distractions, I don't enable.
Less of my time is wasted.

When people find trivialities to quibble and ignore most of the post, rather than answering simple questions that are directly relevant to their hypocritical arguments, it usually is a waste of time to expect them to engage in rational discussion.

The "mischievous distractions" in question that you repeatedly refused to address:

Would you say that every single statue of any historically important person/event, even if a terrible modern statue of a terrible person, should be kept in perpetuity, or would you say we should judge on a case by case basis?

Saddam Hussein was historically important for Iraq, but do you really expect people whose relatives he killed to retain all of the statues he put up to honour himself?

 

[Yerda]

I would not.
I'd even want the memorial enhanced
with an explanatory plaque.

What if the racists of raciststown USA want a plaque saying "slavery is a grand idea, the blacks are too stupid to not be property"?

It's history.
Don't erase it.

It might have historical value, but history is the study of documents and the evils of slavery and fighting to preserve it are well documented. We didn't forget who Lenin was or what the crusades were when people destroyed statues. They stopped commerating monsters and atrocities is all.

 

[The Hammer]

In the news....
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/state/north-carolina/article264769574.html
Excerpted...
A North Carolina town watched live online as a bulldozer pushed down its Confederate monument. Mondale Robinson, the mayor of Enfield, North Carolina, took to Facebook to share a livestream as a Confederate monument in the town’s Randolph Park was demolished by a bulldozer on Sunday, Aug. 21. “Yes, sirs! Death to the Confederacy around here,” Robinson said in the video as a bulldozer knocked the monument over. “Not in my town. Not on my watch.”


If you approve of destroying Confederate themed
monuments, do you also approve of the Taliban's
destruction of statues of Buddha? If not, why?

While I wouldn't compare Buddha and the Confederacy in terms of importance or impact, I don't think the statues or monuments should be destroyed. If people have decided that they don't want them displayed in public anymore, put them in a museum where they can remain a piece of our history and serve as a reminder.

 

[sun rise]

I think monuments to "the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition"* belong at best in a museum.

*Confederate Vice President Stevens.

Bingo. That's my position as well. Put them in a museum with added historical context.

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

In the news....
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/state/north-carolina/article264769574.html
Excerpted...
A North Carolina town watched live online as a bulldozer pushed down its Confederate monument. Mondale Robinson, the mayor of Enfield, North Carolina, took to Facebook to share a livestream as a Confederate monument in the town’s Randolph Park was demolished by a bulldozer on Sunday, Aug. 21. “Yes, sirs! Death to the Confederacy around here,” Robinson said in the video as a bulldozer knocked the monument over. “Not in my town. Not on my watch.”


If you approve of destroying Confederate themed
monuments, do you also approve of the Taliban's
destruction of statues of Buddha? If not, why?

I don't approve the the destruction of any work of art, or of commemoration. Art talks about our dreams, our hopes, our way of seeing the world, and the arts of other cultures and beliefs do the same. The fact that people and cultures differ does not frighten or offend me.

Our works of commemoration speak of our history: where we came from, who we were, who we are. And the people that were honored once were honored for reasons that made sense to those honoring them at the time, even if they no longer do. No one is perfect -- a great man of science could also have been a slave owner at a time when slavery was accepted; a talented musician might have been a homosexual infatuated with his nephew. Okay, not perfect, not what we would approve of today.

It's the same with works of art that depict views of other cultures in ways we might today consider wrong -- the Chinese Dance in Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker, for example. But would I cut that dance out of the ballet? Of course not.

I can still honor the good things that our honorees did, I can still admire the artifacts produced by other cultures and religions (and I do, even as an atheist). I can do that because I can understand that I am not the model for all humanity, past, present and future.

Oh, sorry...went on a bit long. Short answers to your OP -- NO.

 

[PureX]

The monuments are not "history". No one is suggesting that we erase history, or refuse to document it. We're just talking about getting rid of a lot of stupid and usually ugly monuments to stupid ideals paid for by stupid people who thought they were more important than they were.

 

[Twilight Hue]

I kind of think of the Volkswagen. A Nazi car.

I kind of think of Fanta. Nazi soda.

Should people stop drinking Fanta and destroy Volkswagen cars?

 

[Revoltingest]

First of all, there are Buddhists alive today. I am not embarrassed of Buddhists and see the destruction as pointless. I don't see their statues as dangerous. Many Muslims see them as a danger to society, not merely a nuisance. It is not the same to compare the two situations for that reason.

You just compared them.
(Beat you to the punch, @Audie.)
Where you see nothing in common, I see this...
Both the Taliban & the ACS (Anti-Confederate-Statue) types
see historical monuments that greatly offend them. Rather
than provide modern interpretive displays of the history,
they prefer to erase them from public view.

That being said: no I don't support the Taliban's destruction of Buddhist statues, but I really don't care that much about it. I think they are a little huffy and overbearing when they do that.

There's the crux of the double standard, ie, people
care about their own senses being offended, but
don't about other people's. They lack a universal
standard of dealing with offensive history.

Suppose someone destroys the Statue of Liberty. That will be sad. It will be a broken tie between USA and France, and it will be a lost landmark. You won't be able to visit the place that many people visited a hundred or so years ago, and people in the future won't be able to visit it. Therefore it will be a sad waste.

It will not matter much in the long run. It is only a statue.

It doesn't feel like it matters when someone walks
past a place where there's no memory of a memorial.
They're unaware.
But it does matter when history is forgotten.

Either way it seems smarter to simply move the statues into storage rather than destroy them.

Storage is erasure of history.
If only historians know history, this is insufficient.
The masses should know it, because they are
the ones who vote for leaders.

 

[Revoltingest]

When people find trivialities to quibble...

Interest in answering wanes.

 

[PureX]

I don't approve the the destruction of any work of art, or of commemoration. Art talks about our dreams, our hopes, our way of seeing the world, and the arts of other cultures and beliefs do the same. The fact that people and cultures differ does not frighten or offend me.

It all ends up in the dumpster of history, eventually. And that's perfectly OK so long as we keep making more of it. I love art, and I am an artist, but I'm fine with the fact that none of it lasts forever. And even if it did, it's relevance would be lost, anyway. Even now people stand in long lines to view ancient statues that they have no idea what they meant or even what they actually looked like back when they were created. Their time would have been far better spent going to a modern art museum and looking at the art of their own time and culture.

Time edits out everything sooner or later. Change is inevitable. As it should be.

 

[Revoltingest]

What if the racists of raciststown USA want a plaque saying "slavery is a grand idea, the blacks are too stupid to not be property"?

I've been addressing historical (as in created long ago).
If you want to discuss what kind of memorials to create
today, this is a different issue.

 

[PureX]

I kind of think of the Volkswagen. A Nazi car.

I kind of think of Fanta. Nazi soda.

Should people stop drinking Fanta and destroy Volkswagen cars?

Are those monuments to Nazi ideology?