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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Just don't tell them what is or isn't important to them, because you don't know.
You're being ridiculous, I see no reason to believe that Historians seriously need shoddy mass-produced monuments to White Supremacy.
Is this truly a hill worth dying on?
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang![]()
I think you are completely ignoring what I am saying.
I'm not saying that we need to keep the statues. I'm only saying that the argument that they have "no historical value" is possibly the most arrogant way of thinking I've ever heard, as if you are the absolute arbiter of value. As if history has stopped right here, and only what you value right now will ever be important.
If it's impractical to keep them, then sure, it's impractical. But don't drag "history" into this as if it cares what you think.
Edited by Clarste on Mar 20th 2019 at 4:05:48 AM
They're relics of the 60s that indicate how people thought of the Civil Rights movement. I can see a museum putting them next to Martin Luther King Jr. with a sign saying "not everyone supported him though" or whatever.
Why the fuck does it matter if they're from the Confederacy or not? Everything is history.
Frankly, with the current "actually, King won and racism is dead" rhetoric going on with the right, I'd say that knowing the history of the statues is even more important right now than ever.
Edited by Clarste on Mar 20th 2019 at 4:08:26 AM
Are you saying it's a bad thing to know that the Civil Rights movement was actually resisted by a large segment of the population? How is knowing that people hated King so much that they put up these dumb statues hurting you?
History is history! Even the bad parts!
Edited by Clarste on Mar 20th 2019 at 4:10:46 AM
Statues that made while there was a Confederacy would be worth preserving because they are some sort of evidence from that period,the ones hundreds of years after like in the 60s and 70s aren't worth preserving in the same way,least that's how I see it
Edited by Ultimatum on Mar 20th 2019 at 11:12:55 AM
have a listen and have a link to my discord serverIf you're destroying the statues not just because it's impractical to preserve them, but because seeing them disgusts you and you'd like to pretend they never existed, then that's literally the definition of whitewashing history.
Why is the history of the anti-Civil Rights movement any less worth preserving than the history of the Civil War? Because it's more recent? That makes no sense, from a historical perspective.
Edited by Clarste on Mar 20th 2019 at 4:14:46 AM
Best compromise I can think of between the 'Destroy them all' crowd and the 'Put them in Museums' crowd (Ignoring the 'Preserve History' Crowd because those Statues aren't History); Take a lot of Photos of the Statues, with the best pictures going to Museums to be a part of a 'Confederate Monument' plaque dedicated to how those Statues were propaganda that do not symbolize real history, and are only historical to the Lost Cause movement. Then destroy all the Monuments.
You could also put all the photos online so that the Lost Causer's have something to remember them by.
The thing is,those statues were purposefully made to resemble the ones erected during during the civil war as a camouflage,they intentionally mislead people as propaganda ,which of course can deceive some historians as well,removing them means preserving actual history and not narrative they were trying to create
have a listen and have a link to my discord serverYou just label them as propaganda in the museum of propaganda. Why is this difficult?
Putting something in a museum doesn't mean you respect it, it means you acknowledge it exists. "Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it." Museums aren't churches, and we don't worship the artifacts in them.
Edited by Clarste on Mar 20th 2019 at 4:20:48 AM
I agree that at least some of the statues should be preserved in museums as a way to illustrate how hated the Civil Rights movement was at the time (something a lot of people nowadays forget about, especially when MLK Day rolls around). Hell, them being in a museum could even be notable for illustrating that they stayed in place until the early 2020s, when people finally came to their senses and removed them from the public.
It's important to remember the bad parts of history, even recent history and history as it's being written today.
Well the easiest answer as to why they shouldn't be in museums?
Because museums have to choose what they keep and what they don't. Given there's many museums full of amazing art, heroic artifacts of war, Native American items, and so on—what are we going to toss out for a BIG ASS piece of 1000 pound stone or steel or so on...and what does it replace?
Versus, say, a mannequin of General Lee listing him as a dead traitor?
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
Exactly my position, keeping them in Museums is not and cannot be free. It will cost money and space, and spending those things on Confederate propaganda just isn't something that I feel the need to tolerate. If we can we should destroy them all.
To use a weird sideways example, take the famous Moai statues of Easter Island. They were supposedly built to honor great ancestors. But many of them were destroyed shortly after the Europeans arrived, either by the Europeans themselves or the natives during a period of political unrest. And nowadays we think that's a shame and are trying to piece them back together.
But do we know if all these ancestors they were honoring were good people or not? Did some of them commit atrocities or keep slaves? Probably! But the archaeologists don't care, they just want to know that the islanders built statues. The archaeologists aren't celebrating the ideologies these statues stand for, what they care about is the intellectual and cultural fact that people were building statues at all, and what they were thinking when they did so.
Edited by Clarste on Mar 20th 2019 at 4:31:26 AM
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That's the best argument I've seen yet for just destroying them.
I do think this period of time is notable, though. A time where a ton of Confederacy statues were built as a racist response to the Civil Rights movement, and it took until the early 2020s for those statues to finally be destroyed. It's pretty illustrative of how racism never really went away, and still had a stranglehold on American culture for decades after the Civil Rights movement.
Edited by PushoverMediaCritic on Mar 20th 2019 at 4:32:30 AM
IE: If we destroy the statues now, future archaeologists won't be going "good thing they destroyed all these ugly statues built to whitewash an ugly period of history." They'll be thinking "wow, the people in this time period really hated statues for some reason. What a shame, we could've learned so much about the mythical 1960s."
Edited by Clarste on Mar 20th 2019 at 4:37:27 AM

You're assuming that every little thing we write down today will actually be preserved, as opposed to lost forever when the company owning the server decides to shut it down. I mean, none of this stuff is "historical" right? Which is exactly what I'm saying.
People in the past wrote plenty of stuff down anyway. They just didn't keep most of it because they weren't thinking of future historians, they were thinking of their own lives. The vast majority of everything humanity has ever made was destroyed by people who didn't think it was important.
Then we should use the money that would be spent on maintaining those statues in Museums on making sure historically relevant data is properly saved. This isn't really a good reason to avoid scrapping those statues.
There is just isn't a strong historical argument for keeping them.
Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Mar 20th 2019 at 3:57:57 AM
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang