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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Isn't that a reason to just burn everything down, just in case? I mean, I guess that's fair.
But imo the best way to prevent misunderstandings in the future is to provide as much context as possible instead. Do we want them thinking MLK was a great conqueror who enslaved the Native Americans instead? Is that better?
Edited by Clarste on Mar 20th 2019 at 6:24:13 AM
The fact you keep coming up with ridiculous hypothetical situations shows that you aren't paying attention to what any of the rest of us are saying. M84 said exactly what I would have.
And how do you provide context if, according to you, the only way to make sure enough is left to be studied is to preserve everything? There's still a good chance that all that would be left, even with redundancy, is the Confederate statues, especially if we preserve them all or a very large number of them. And if we preserve equal amounts of Lost Cause and Civil Rights items, and equal amounts survive, that still doesn't provide the context which would explain which side was right, which one won, and why. The only way to provide that context would be the museums...which you just got through saying could well be gone too. So...?
Edited by Ingonyama on Mar 20th 2019 at 6:33:08 AM
The other side of the argument is "we can't afford to preserve everything, so let's preserve the things we like better." And I have repeatedly said that I am fine with that. If I had to choose between giving food stamps to a single family and keeping a dumb statue, I'd knock down the statue in a heartbeat.
All I am objecting to is the philosophical argument that these things should not be preserved at all, by appealing to a supposed lack of "historical value" from what I see as a narrow-minded, myopic view of what history is.
Edited by Clarste on Mar 20th 2019 at 6:34:18 AM
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The problem with your argument is it assumes a Post-Apocalyptic situation where we didn't pass down written records.
Rome did.
We can too.
The only point that General Lee will be remembered as a Great Savior unless we preserve his statues is if somehow we're nuked and it's been read by aliens.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Mar 20th 2019 at 6:34:49 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.I never said the statues had no historical value. I think they have no moral or ethical value, which is quite different. In that regard, yes saving the Civil Rights artifacts and not the Lost Cause ones is saving what is better and right.
Let me put it this way. If the only options are "save everything to make sure there's a chance something survives that lets others understand us, but all that ends up surviving is the Lost Cause artifacts and without context to explain them as white supremacist propaganda" and "save only the Civil Rights artifacts, and a few Lost Cause statues to show what they were fighting against and why we disagreed, and what ends up surviving is just the Civil Rights artifacts", I'd take the second one in a heartbeat.
I'd rather we weren't remembered as all racist white supremacists. If there's a good chance that it's that or nothing, I'd rather we weren't remembered at all. And I especially don't want there to be a good chance that by preserving the past, we allow white supremacy and prejudice and racism to be renewed and perpetuated; there's a good chance that could happen anyway by those who raise the next generation, we don't need to help make it easier for them by giving them historical artifacts to justify it.
If that makes me an enemy of history...oh well.
Edited by Ingonyama on Mar 20th 2019 at 6:45:58 AM
I'm sure our historical records will prove to be safer than the Library of Alexandria, so I doubt there's much need for those Confederate Statues. As stated before, they aren't really tributes to the fallen, they were erected by Confederate oligarch daughters out of spite.
ASAB: All Sponsors Are Bad.I'm kinda with Clarste in the sense that I don't believe we should go to the extent of destroying every single one of them and that we probably should preserve a small percentage of some of these statues (the ones that took actual effort to make, or exemplars of particularly common ones) for historicity's sake. But keeping them in a museum doesn't even necessarily mean they have to be maintained in the public eye with tax money. You can just stick them in the back room where a lot of other artifacts and scientific items often go for archival and study purposes, so they can exist for historians' benefit without being intrusive on the public. Quite a lot of paleontologists and archaeologists work off of back catalogs and the like. Museums often have a lot more than what's openly displayed for the public.
And again, these statues are not history. They are propaganda.
And propaganda is part of history.
The statues are not part of the history of the civil war, this is true. They are a part of the history of the civil right movement, specifically the backlash against it. The statues are history. Not the history they pretend to be part of, but the history of white resistance to black equality. To acknowledge the resistance to a righteous movement is not inherently to legitimize that resistance; it's not just important to know that the civil rights movement happened, but also to know the challenges it faced, and continues to face. It's all about the context the resistance is presented in. It's entirely possible to present such statues in a context where they are portrayals not of the nobility of the people they represent, but portrayals of the moral bankruptcy of those who built and defended them.
To show that this monstrosity
◊ is what these bigots cling to as their rallying symbol. To demonstrate just how utterly pathetic they and their position truly are.
People did and still do idolise the traitor cause, we would do a disservice to future generations to try and hide that fact from them.
Lost Cause statues are a solid reminder of what happens when you let the loosing side of a moral war continue to rule themselves with little interference and when you let them mastermind a cultural backlash to the little interference you do do.
They’re a reminder that even within our own nations we can’t just declare a military victory over the bad guys and walk away, you have to root out the toxic system that spawned the enemy, you have to burn it out root and stem.
We don’t need 90% of them, but a few should be kept as a reminder of what happens when you let the bad guys write their own history and that that mistake should never be repeated.
First rip them all down, offer them to relevant museums (the actual civil war era ones to civil war museums, the bulk of them to civil rights era museums), maybe keep a few as a reminder of what happens when you make the mistake of letting a Lost Cause narrative emerge, set the rest up on the confederate mountain in Georgia and use the area for artillery practise.
Edited by Silasw on Mar 20th 2019 at 2:21:28 PM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
There is no good argument to keeping around pieces of propaganda and treating them as if they have historical value. And that's what these statues are: propaganda.
Every second they stay up, they help perpetuate the Lost Cause bullshit.
By no means should we erase the Confederacy from our history. But we can and should erase their own attempt to whitewash and glorify their actions.
Edited by M84 on Mar 20th 2019 at 10:28:08 PM
Disgusted, but not surprisedI mean, yeah, you can teach people about something just off of notes, but I'm fairly certainty having concrete things from the time period makes getting the point across easier.
I'm not understanding equating acknowledging something's existence with glorifying it. And pretending things never existed doesn't make the problems they represent better or go away.
Edited by LSBK on Mar 20th 2019 at 9:28:26 AM
The statues themselves are an attempt to whitewash the Confederacy. If we want to preserve a more accurate picture of what the Confederacy was, we shouldn't preserve them.
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The problem is that everyone here is arguing to preserve history, when the statues aren't history but an attempt to whitewash it.
Edited by M84 on Mar 20th 2019 at 10:34:01 PM
Disgusted, but not surprisedAnd if we want to preserve an accurate picture of the attempts by opponents of civil rights to whitewash the confederacy?
You don’t think it’s worth us keeping around some Nazi propaganda so that we can see the lies they tried to spread and us know not to fall for them a second time around?
Attempts to whitewash history are themselves a part of history, a disgusting horrific part, but a part none the less.
Edited by Silasw on Mar 20th 2019 at 2:35:28 PM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
x8 Preserving the context with which they were would literally be the primary point of leaving them around for historians to study. A lot of historical and archaeological work is specifically about piecing together the context of the creation of an object, from tracing the companies/craftsmen who made a particular object to identifying their purpose based on whatever information they can find. In this case it'd be up to the historians to piece together the entire story through which they were made and preserve it for future generations.
Edited by AlleyOop on Mar 20th 2019 at 10:36:22 AM

All the more reason to get rid of those Confederate statues. We don't want future generations to think that we idolized these people for real.
Could you imagine for example if people in the future dug up a statue of Hitler that wasn't destroyed and came to the conclusion that he was a hero to the people of our time?
Edited by M84 on Mar 20th 2019 at 9:21:20 PM
Disgusted, but not surprised