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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
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I mean, I wouldn't mind statues like that going to museums, with full context descriptions of course. Except that monument to the racist riot, that should be publicly smashed, and replaced with a plaque celebrating the troops who suppressed them.
Rommel would be reviled alongside the likes of Himmler had he won (unlikely because of his habit of ignoring supply lines, plus Royal Navy>Axis), as his troops would have been tasked with exterminating Jews and other minorities in the Middle East (the SS was too busy in Europe). Lee, while not the worst of his peers, did oversee an army that enslaved runaway slaves and even free blacks when it went North. And I think that all Confederate units routinely massacred black refugees, especially if they were serving the US in a military capacity.
edited 20th May '17 8:06:30 AM by Rationalinsanity
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.Right wing sources are painting the whole event as "desecrating war memorials" while failing to mention that one ones being removed were erected by and dedicated to while supremacists well after the civil war. One of them was dedicated to white supremacists who staged an insurrection in 1874
.
Personally I'd be find with leaving a few here and there, but changing the plaques to remember them as memorials/warnings to future generations of fools and their folly that lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of their kinsmen and the suffering of millions more.
edited 20th May '17 8:12:38 AM by carbon-mantis
Plus, relocating such monuments to museums will hopefully avoid making martyrs of the statues - as much as inanimate objects could be considered martyrs, anyway.
"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"One thing I've seen is the people against the removal of the statues are trying to claim that it's an attempt to erase the Confederacy completely. Uh, no. No one's trying to claim the Confederacy never existed. Just that it was awful.
On a related note, I have a really distant cousin who lives in West Virginia, and he's lived there his whole life. I got a mass e-mailing (because my grandmother is obsessed with connecting everyone on that side of the family together. There's a lot of crazy people so I usually don't engage, I can only hear so much Flat-earth stuff before I just give up) from him asking for people to protest the removal of the memorials with him, to "preserve the history of the state in the Confederacy". He's from West Virginia aka, the state that left Virginia to join the Union. The specific memorial he wants to protect is for General George Mc Clellan, the guy who drove off Robert E. Lee. The memorial isn't going to be removed.
Well, provided they were British, Australian or New Zealanders. Anyone else was treated fairly in the POW camps before they were introduced to these nice Einsatzgruppen lads.
Rommel was just as rotten as the rest of the Wehrmacht, it's just postwar propaganda (pushed extensively by the British and Americans in particular) that makes him seem like an ace.
edited 20th May '17 8:59:49 AM by math792d
Still not embarrassing enough to stan billionaires or tech companies.The romanticization of guys like Lee and Rommel is one of those things that absolutely needs to stop. The notion of the Sainted Lee in particular has done irrevocable damage to the USA's culture, especially since it tends to be paired with denigrating Grant, Sherman, and the other Union leaders. One day, after I get my PHD, I am going to write a hatchet job on Lee, and I'm going to enjoy every moment of it. In the meantime, anyone who wants to hold Lee up as some sort of hero should go read Lee, Considered or The Marble Man to see just how bad most of the scholarship on him is.
I showed this comment to my fiancee and she laughed for five minutes straight.
edited 20th May '17 9:48:37 AM by AmbarSonofDeshar
Trump scores an arms deal in Saudi Arabia
.
The arms deal, plus other investments that U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said could total up to $350 billion, was the central achievement of Trump's first day in Riyadh, first stop on a nine-day journey the Middle East and Europe.
Both he and Tillerson made clear the arms deal was aimed at countering Iran on a day that Hassan Rouhani was re-elected as Iran's president.
Tillerson said Rouhani should use his second term to end Iran's ballistic missile testing and stop promoting extremism in a volatile region.
It figures that Trump would get along well with the Saudis. They like stuff with lots of gold plating all over it, too. (Difference is, the Saudi oil sheikhs can actually afford diamond-studded Rolls-Royces and other such gaudy things. Trump only pretends to be that rich...)
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Quite possibly ISIS itself.
. . .
Does this mean we can nail him for treason for arming ISIS?
edited 20th May '17 11:10:16 AM by TrashJack
"Cynic, n. — A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be." - The Devil's Dictionary![]()
Damn you Tony Stark!
edited 20th May '17 11:21:05 AM by RAlexa21th
Continue writing our story of peace.Not as long as there is so much as a shred of Plausible Deniability. Probably not even when it goes implausible, frankly.
Seriously, don't get your hopes up about impeachment. The odds of it happening are astronomical, and it'll probably take years before it's ready to go through anyway.
Trump’s in a weak position, in large part because he weakened what should have been a strong one, but that doesn't mean he can be easily kicked out of it.
edited 20th May '17 11:31:17 AM by TheWanderer
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |

Well, the one of Davis at least - the other guy I'm not familiar with, and I genuinely hope that the statue of Lee does get treated decently, as he has a reputation for being the Confederacy's equivalent of Erwin Rommel - a Worthy Opponent who was engaging primarily in My Country, Right or Wrong.
Except, as I recall anyway, the Afrika Korps had a reputation of treating POW's fairly regardless of ethnicity.
edited 20th May '17 8:19:50 AM by ironballs16
"Why would I inflict myself on somebody else?"