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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
I mean, a holocaust museum I went did keep a lot of Nazi propaganda on hand for a reason.
Leviticus 19:34![]()
Yeah, but were they statues of prominent Nazis like Hitler? One doesn't need to go that far to keep a record of propaganda.
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Sometimes it's just not possible to get value out of something. Some things are just not worth preserving.
The thing about a statue is that its very existence implies that whoever it was modeled after was someone who deserved to be memorialized. And these people did not deserve that.
Edited by M84 on Mar 20th 2019 at 10:40:24 PM
Disgusted, but not surprisedOff the top of my head I imagine some are worth keeping around to study whether they altered his features relative to availabble photographs of him at the time for glorification purposes similar to what they did with some Roman emperors. Or to study the cultural contexts of fascist iconography and contemporary propaganda.
Edited by AlleyOop on Mar 20th 2019 at 10:40:31 AM
In the context of showing people how the Nazis tried to falsely present strength and used giant states to try and intimidate people into cowering before them, sure.
I’d also like one preserved as a part of an exhibit on the destruction of the statues, because that was also a part of history.
Shit that giant Saddam statue that got torn down after the invasion of Iraq? There’s some worth in putting it (or mor likely a small scale replica) in a museum somewhere to note both how he tried to intimidate people during his dictatorship and how the US invasion of Iraq lead to the destruction of his false attempts to present strength.
Edited by Silasw on Mar 20th 2019 at 2:41:18 PM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranEvery second they stay up, they help perpetuate the Lost Cause bullshit.
Hence why I said the context is what's important. No one here is suggesting leaving them up, because that leaves them in the context their builders wanted: standing in places of respect, being literally looked up to.
Take them down, and relocate some to the proper context: a museum where they are surrounded by explanations calling them out as racist propaganda exemplifying the lengths to which bigots went to oppose the civil rights movement, and an example of how racism becomes institutionalized by successive generations not questioning or rejecting racist monuments, laws, etc. just because they were already around.
Oh dear...
Uh, so, as Wryte pointed out, propaganda is part of history. No one here is advocating for them to stay up, and everyone here agrees they're bad and should be removed.
As much as my gut reaction tells me to smelt them down and let them be forgotten, I can't help but think that having hard examples would be a help to any historian wanting to demonstrate the power of the Lost Cause narrative in the USA. Regardless if they should even be in public museums or not (I'm rather skeptical of the value these particular statues hold to causal museum goers outside of the usual bad faith actors), saving a handful for the historical archives isn't necessarily bad in and of itself.
The awful things he says and does are burned into our cultural consciousness like a CRT display left on the same picture too long. -FighteerThere are better ways to preserve a record of historical propaganda, such as keeping their posters. It'd be less risky to keep them around at least, since it'd be a tad more obvious to future generations that the posters are propaganda.
Edited by M84 on Mar 20th 2019 at 10:43:40 PM
Disgusted, but not surprisedTo use a more abstract example I'd also think it's worth preserving some of the portraits and propaganda that was made of Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution as a testament to the extreme cult of personality he held over the nation at the time. My history textbooks brought it up as an example and I think it's a lesson worth having primary evidence for.
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Between posters, paintings, and statues I'm not really seeing why a distinction should be made. It's not my place whether to evaluate one form of artistic expression (to use it loosely) over another. Even if your reason is physical space it seems very arbitrary. Likewise whether to preserve recordings of speeches from noted dictators while discarding recordings of propaganda music made to celebrate them.
Edited by AlleyOop on Mar 20th 2019 at 10:45:12 AM
This isn't really a "Would you keep a statue of Hitler from Nazi Germany?" discussion.
This is "Would you keep a statue of Hitler erected last week by Bob, the local Neo-Nazi. He heard there was a Jewish congregation meeting nearby so he built this statue in his backyard of Hitler glaring angrily and pointing at their meeting place."
That's not history. That's hate speech.
And the "It's history of hate speech" argument doesn't hold a lot of weight when the hate speech in question is, itself, not history but an active political force that is alive and well today.
Edited by TobiasDrake on Mar 20th 2019 at 8:46:24 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.
x5 Better than keeping the actual originals? If you're already dumping the statues in the archives, they'd hopefully be labeled. And if future historians found it, they'd also find enough random other historical artifacts that they'd realize they were at the site of an archive.
The Civil Rights movement was just a bit more important than that...]
Edited by AzurePaladin on Mar 20th 2019 at 10:47:32 AM
The awful things he says and does are burned into our cultural consciousness like a CRT display left on the same picture too long. -FighteerIs. The Civil Rights movement is a bit more important than that. Because it's not history, it's current events.
A Confederate statue sits in the Oval Office. This isn't about historical preservation, it's a culture war.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.That's another reason I want Confederate statues gone entirely.
They aren't just historical propaganda. They are actively propaganda.
That's one of the differences between these statues and say, an actual Civil War era recruitment poster.
Edited by M84 on Mar 20th 2019 at 10:49:57 PM
Disgusted, but not surprisedOn top of the context of when they were put up they may well be useful for demonstrating the context in which they are finally taken down, an exhibit on the “2022 lost cause statue purge” where they show a real broken Lost cause statue with a caption like “here is the Lost Cause statue of Conferate slaver General Lee, erected in 196? to oppose the enfranchisement of African Americans, it was torn down in 2022, here stands the original plinth that the statue was on and in the dirt around it are the broken pieces of the statue after it was pulled from its plinth by [names of heroic people] and smashed”.
X5 If Bob was the governor of a US state and erected multiple statues I think it might be worth keeping one, just so we never forget that Bob was a fucking Nazi that we should all hate.
Edited by Silasw on Mar 20th 2019 at 2:53:56 PM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranThis is "Would you keep a statue of Hitler erected last week by Bob, the local Neo-Nazi. He heard there was a Jewish congregation meeting nearby so he built this statue in his backyard of Hitler glaring angrily and pointing at their meeting place."
These statues do not represent an isolated statement by a single individual. They represent a concerted campaign by an ideological group to resist a political movement and oppress an an entire ethnicity. And the 60s and 70s are hardly "last week;" they're half a century in the past.
I'm not exactly thrilled by the possibility that these statues somehow survive the test of time. While I'll be long dead by then, it still makes me feel a bit queasy to imagine that some future archaeologist will dig up one of the statues of Robert E. Lee and think this means he was a great American hero.
At least these statues are cheaply made enough that there's a chance they won't survive the test of time and succumb to wear and tear.
Edited by M84 on Mar 20th 2019 at 10:57:01 PM
Disgusted, but not surprised
That. Hundreds or thousands of years from now, I'd prefer if the takeaway from American History classes wasn't, "And on your left, you'll see our collection of Robert E. Lee artwork. The brave general defined the nation for generations!"

I mean, the monuments never should have existed in the first place, but since they do, I don't see the issue with trying to get some value out of some of them.
Using them to fight against what they were created to represent sounds pretty good to me.
Edited by LSBK on Mar 20th 2019 at 9:36:45 AM