Richardson Statue Coming Down

[1of10Charnatives]

1 hour ago, Inimicus said:

You make a couple of interesting and well spoken arguments both here and your post on page 14 and forgive me for the escalation but...

Would a 20 foot statue of Hitler be appropriate at Auschwitz?  People go to that place to mourn the victims not to venerate the victimizers.

Let me ask a question in return: Are statues of confederate soldiers and generals on US battlefields rightly viewed solely as perpetrators of slavery? If you read my post on page 14, you're aware that the Confederacy followed a legal process laid out in the US Constitution for secession, yet for handling their grievances and differences with the rest of the Union with a legal, nonaggressive course of action, they were met with a declaration by Lincoln that they would not be allowed to leave peacefully and form their own nation. Subsequently they were invaded by Union armies and subject to a Union blockade of all their ports. 

Make an argument that Hitler had some redeeming quality to his idealogy and his actions, and I'll consider the notion that perhaps a statue of him if one was left should be let be. Here is my argument that Confederate participants are not worthy only of scorn and derision: They followed the proper legal path to leave without bloodshed and it was answered with invasion and crippling economic warfare. I think I've been very clear where I stand on the subject of slavery, but must we be so one dimensional in our view of history that there is no allowance to consider that the Confederacy had a right to defend itself? That the decisive battle occured in Pennsylvania owes much to the fact that Lee and other Confederate leaders were desperate for a war they didn't start to not be fought entirely on the farms and homes of their own people.

Study the story of Wilmer Mclean, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmer_McLean whose farm was decimated and devastated not once but twice in the first and second battles of Bull Run (Manassas) and who then moved his family to Appomattax Courthouse to get away from the war only to see it end in his front parlor when Lee surrendered to Grant there. Union officers illegally stole most of his furniture as souvenirs, giving him money when the items were not for sale and offering him no choice to keep them.  Since none of us now living were there, or have ever known anyone who was, none of us can say for certain how many Confederates fought to preserve slavery and how many fought merely to defend their homes from a hostile invading power. But I can say this:

I am not without human flaw or frailty and neither is anyone reading this. If we insist on reducing Confederate soldiers only to hatemongers bent on enslaving others, are we prepared for our descendants to judge us equally one dimension-ally and without mercy? It is a well known fact that only a minority of Confederate citizens actually owned slaves, so why is the notion that at least some of these men fought merely to defend their homes and their families so anathema? 

I know, this is a message board, and nuance is verboten here, but I believe that human truth is rarely simple, most often more complex, because human beings are complicated. But if you want a simple straight answer:  A statue of Hitler is appropriate nowhere, but I believe there just might be a difference between Hitler and at least some of the men who gave their lives for the Confederacy.

[1of10Charnatives]

6 minutes ago, cookinwithgas said:

Have any battlefield monuments been torn down? 

 

A monument for Confederate soldiers at Gettysburg - totally appropriate

A monument for John Calhoun in a public square telling us all the awesome things he said in defense of slavery? Not needed.

Agreed, and to the best of my knowledge no monuments at battlefields HAVE been torn down. My argument was put forward because it was suggested by other posters in this thread that perhaps they should be, and I disagree as I share your view of the meaningful distinction between the two. Let us be rid of statues of Confederate figures in day to day public places. They convey the wrong message to everyone. But let statues and monuments of soldiers on both sides remain at battlefields, places set aside so that we may learn from the past with the hope the lesson will make us better.

[cookinwithgas]

They wanted to secede so they could keep slaves. I really don't care if they followed the proper procedures.

Most Confederate soldiers were not fighting for slavery themselves. But as a whole, that is the issue their leaders needed them to give their lives to settle. Again this is why the statues of leaders need to go. Almost all of them were put up not to display history, but to cower the black population.

[Inimicus]

6 minutes ago, 1of10Charnatives said:

Let me ask a question in return: Are statues of confederate soldiers and generals on US battlefields rightly viewed solely as perpetrators of slavery? If you read my post on page 14, you're aware that the Confederacy followed a legal process laid out in the US Constitution for secession, yet for handling their grievances and differences with the rest of the Union with a legal, nonaggressive course of action, they were met with a declaration by Lincoln that they would not be allowed to leave peacefully and form their own nation. Subsequently they were invaded by Union armies and subject to a Union blockade of all their ports. 

Make an argument that Hitler had some redeeming quality to his idealogy and his actions, and I'll consider the notion that perhaps a statue of him if one was left should be let be. Here is my argument that Confederate participants are not worthy only of scorn and derision: They followed the proper legal path to leave without bloodshed and it was answered with invasion and crippling economic warfare. I think I've been very clear where I stand on the subject of slavery, but must we be so one dimensional in our view of history that there is no allowance to consider that the Confederacy had a right to defend itself? That the decisive battle occured in Pennsylvania owes much to the fact that Lee and other Confederate leaders were desperate for a war they didn't start to not be fought entirely on the farms and homes of their own people.

Study the story of Wilmer Mclean, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmer_McLean whose farm was decimated and devastated not once but twice in the first and second battles of Bull Run (Manassas) and who then moved his family to Appomattax Courthouse to get away from the war only to see it end in his front parlor when Lee surrendered to Grant there. Union officers illegally stole most of his furniture as souvenirs, giving him money when the items were not for sale and offering him no choice to keep them.  Since none of us now living were there, or have ever known anyone who was, none of us can say for certain how many Confederates fought to preserve slavery and how many fought merely to defend their homes from a hostile invading power. But I can say this:

I am not without human flaw or frailty and neither is anyone reading this. If we insist on reducing Confederate soldiers only to hatemongers bent on enslaving others, are we prepared for our descendants to judge us equally one dimension-ally and without mercy? It is a well known fact that only a minority of Confederate citizens actually owned slaves, so why is the notion that at least some of these men fought merely to defend their homes and their families so anathema? 

I know, this is a message board, and nuance is verboten here, but I believe that human truth is rarely simple, most often more complex, because human beings are complicated. But if you want a simple straight answer:  A statue of Hitler is appropriate nowhere, but I believe there just might be a difference between Hitler and at least some of the men who gave their lives for the Confederacy.

To be clear, I asked about a leading general of a movement and not the rank and file ground pounders that did their bidding.  You are blurring that line.

Also to be clear, Im not accusing you of anything.  You made some interesting points and Im asking followup questions.

Entertain me for a moment and lets assume that Obergruppenfuhrer Himmler and General Lee had the same duty of executing the orders passed down from their respective leaders.  They were not the ideologues that dreamt up the foundational beliefs but the soldiers tasked with getting it done.

Both thought they were on the right side of history.

 

They were wrong and there shouldn't be statues to either man now.

[1of10Charnatives]

9 minutes ago, cookinwithgas said:

They wanted to secede so they could keep slaves. I really don't care if they followed the proper procedures.

Most Confederate soldiers were not fighting for slavery themselves. But as a whole, that is the issue their leaders needed them to give their lives to settle. Again this is why the statues of leaders need to go. Almost all of them were put up not to display history, but to cower the black population.

And you were there and spoke regularly with many Confederate citizens so you can speak authoritatively on your assertion that "They" meaning ALL of them, fought for this reason? You don't have to care if they followed proper procedure, but you cannot possibly know how many men cared about the issue of slavery and how many merely fought to defend their homes. Such information is unknowable, but since you seem uncomfortable with nuance, you're making an obvious attempt to whitewash this by making an unsupportable blanket declaration.

I agree that statues not on battlefields need to go, and they were most certainly put up to cower the black population. If you think I've been arguing otherwise, you haven't paid close enough attention to what I've said.

[mav1234]

48 minutes ago, Inimicus said:

So acknowledging that the Hitler escalation is "for effect" where do we draw the line?

We recognize Robert E Lee was a reluctant leader for the south and as such there is honor in his sense of duty but the cause he fought for was so abhorrent to modern society that he almost becomes the perfect test case.

A man that did his duty despite whatever moral compass he possessed.

But we collectively decided at Nuremberg that "just following orders" was no defense.

Lee becomes our political litmus test.  Support him (irrespective of why) and you are on the side of slavery, oppose him and you claim the moral high ground.

 

So when it comes to his statue it turns into a black and white issue(the irony of using that phrase is not lost on me).

 

Lee lost.  He failed.  His army was defeated.

 

In 2020 why does he deserve to be venerated in the towns common market or on the battlefields where he was defeated?

I think if you are presenting aspects of a battle - as commonly occurs at a battlefield - depictions of the combatants there are acceptable. It is important to reflect what occurred there. This does include depictions of the soldiers and leaders on both sides, sometimes as statues.  Does this mean they are being venerated?  Only if the accompanying information suggests he should be. Taking a break from the Confederacy, it is not uncommon to see statues of enemy leaders at battlefields and in museums.  But, it would be weird to place statues of them in towns, etc. 

Statues in town squares and the like are about honoring individuals, reflecting values, and inspiring others.  Statues in museums - and battlefields ARE museums - are not the same.  Not at all.  They are not about honoring people, they are about reflecting & depicting the past so that we can learn from it, and ideally, never repeat it.  I've been to many battlefields - although none as far as south as I now am - and I never felt that the losing leaders / soldiers were being *venerated.*  That is true of the handful of Civil War battlefields I have been to.  But that may be a Southern thing. I don't know.  The reality is veneration doesn't require a statue.  It is well-known that until recently, plantation tours didn't need statues to venerate the awful people that used to own them. 

So Lee does not deserve to be venerated.  But, the part he played in battles should be reflected.  The part he played in the War should be reflected.  FWIW Lee had slaves, so fug him on that front too, beyond his decision to serve the Confederacy.

[1of10Charnatives]

2 minutes ago, Inimicus said:

To be clear, I asked about a leading general of a movement and not the rank and file ground pounders that did their bidding.  You are blurring that line.

Also to be clear, Im not accusing you of anything.  You made some interesting points and Im asking followup questions.

Entertain me for a moment and lets assume that Obergruppenfuhrer Himmler and General Lee had the same duty of executing the orders passed down from their respective leaders.  They were not the ideologues that dreamt up the foundational beliefs but the soldiers tasked with getting it done.

Both thought they were on the right side of history.

 

They were wrong and there shouldn't be statues to either man now.

Your original question to me mentioned only Hitler as a specific individual, not Lee as a specific leader of the Confederacy. The wider conversation had already included not just leaders but all soldiers, since battlefield statues and monuments include both. 

I don't agree that pointing out that saying both men thought they were on the right side of history puts Lee on a moral equivalency with Himmler. Lee was a commissioned officer in the US Army and it is well documented that he wrestled long and hard with his decision to resign his commission. It is also well documented that he did so only because he felt he could not fight against Virginia and Virginia had seceded. Himmler faced no such similar difficult dilemma in his career and to the best of my knowledge there is no evidence to support the notion that Himmler served the Third Reich only because he felt a duty to preserve and defend his homeland from outside aggressors. In fact it is well documented he was one of the prime architects of the Holocaust. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Himmler

Lee, by contrast was no fan of the institution of slavery, having freed slaves in 1862. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Lee#:~:text=In 1862%2C Lee freed the,an everyday institution to run. His reasons in regarding it as more an affliction on white people than blacks we may rightly regard as embarrassingly less than enlightened, but let's not pretend he was anywhere near the driver or advocate for slavery that Himmler was of the Holocaust. I reject your implied moral equivalency of the two men on this basis as not supportable by the weight of evidence.  

I agree that public statues of Lee as a leader of the Confederacy are painful and unnecessary, but comparing him to Himmler oversimplifies and unjustly vilifies a complicated man faced with a difficult choice. I would argue instead that Lee is a perhaps a perfect example of the southerner who fought not primarily to sustain slavery, but to defend his home. We cannot know this about every southerner, but there is extensive well documented evidence of this particular man to make such an assertion supportable.

[R0CKnR0LLA]

8 hours ago, The NFL Shield At Midfield said:

You'd think statues are the primary way humans preserve and transfer knowledge reading this thread.

i only know advanced calculus, coding and graphic design because there are giant statues everywhere teaching me these things

books? those are for fuging nerds

[Inimicus]

7 minutes ago, 1of10Charnatives said:

Your original question to me mentioned only Hitler as a specific individual, not Lee as a specific leader of the Confederacy. The wider conversation had already included not just leaders but all soldiers, since battlefield statues and monuments include both. 

I don't agree that pointing out that saying both men thought they were on the right side of history puts Lee on a moral equivalency with Himmler. Lee was a commissioned officer in the US Army and it is well documented that he wrestled long and hard with his decision to resign his commission. It is also well documented that he did so only because he felt he could not fight against Virginia and Virginia had seceded. Himmler faced no such similar difficult dilemma in his career and to the best of my knowledge there is no evidence to support the notion that Himmler served the Third Reich only because he felt a duty to preserve and defend his homeland from outside aggressors. In fact it is well documented he was one of the prime architects of the Holocaust. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Himmler

Lee, by contrast was no fan of the institution of slavery, having freed slaves in 1862. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Lee#:~:text=In 1862%2C Lee freed the,an everyday institution to run. His reasons in regarding it as more an affliction on white people than blacks we may rightly regard as embarrassingly less than enlightened, but let's not pretend he was anywhere near the driver or advocate for slavery that Himmler was of the Holocaust. I reject your implied moral equivalency of the two men on this basis as not supportable by the weight of evidence.  

I agree that public statues of Lee as a leader of the Confederacy are painful and unnecessary, but comparing him to Himmler oversimplifies and unjustly vilifies a complicated man faced with a difficult choice. I would argue instead that Lee is a perhaps a perfect example of the southerner who fought not primarily to sustain slavery, but to defend his home. We cannot know this about every southerner, but there is extensive well documented evidence of this particular man to make such an assertion supportable.

I need to give this some thought.

Thanks for your thoughts.

[1of10Charnatives]

29 minutes ago, Inimicus said:

I need to give this some thought.

Thanks for your thoughts.

You're welcome, and for the record I didn't feel accused of anything and I appreciate your thoughtful approach and respectful tone. Reasonable people may disagree without being disagreeable.

Also, Lee got punished pretty good for his role in the Confederacy. Whose farm do you think the Union took to bury their dead at what has become Arlington National Cemetery? Personally I think that was a pretty fitting punishment. Also as John Oliver pointed out in his brilliant takedown of Confederate statues, Lee himself was opposed to statues of people like him. Direct quote addressed at 17:50

https://www.bunkhistory.org/exhibits/17/30/1163

[PhillyB]

16 hours ago, 1of10Charnatives said:

...leaving BATTLEFIELDS specifically untouched. The distinction is meaningful because people must and do go by their public buildings every day, but no one is required to go to Gettysburg and visit the battlefield.

I happen to agree with him. Take down statues in public places people cannot avoid that glorify morally repugnant causes, but leave historic battlefields untouched so that those who want to study the lessons of history in the places they happened may go there OF THEIR OWN CHOOSING and contemplate the past.

This is such an astoundingly bullshit take I had to hop out of my bed and turn on the computer so I could type out a response.

Historic battlefields have NEVER been left untouched. You're fetishizing some fantastic, airtight, unadulterated version of public memory that DOESN'T EXIST and never has. Public spaces of representation and memory have ALWAYS been subject to power and politics. I will explain why this is a profoundly stupid take with three examples across 150 years and a variety of dynamics:

(1) Antietam Battlefield, site of a critical civil war battle in 1862. People erected memorials a decade or so after the battle's end - mostly locals memorializing the dead - and then it cascaded on after that. Pretty soon you had cavalry groups having reunions, putting up monuments, the works. When the country started getting money dumped into parks and historical preservation became a priority, different societies started putting together plans to turn the battlefield into a walkable park. And there was fuging OUTRAGE. Who are YOU, mister commissioner so-and-so, to disrupt a memorial put there by the ILLINOIS 63rd fuging CAVALRY YOU PIECE OF poo? Movements to "freeze" the battlefield in time became popular, so there were huge fights over whether there should be even be an interpretive center. "Y'all just wanna control the narrative," shitheads bawled, usually from NASCAR states, and insisted people walk into the park with their own interpretations. (Of course they lost, again)

Takeaway: there is no such thing as an "untouched battlefield."

 

(2) The War Remnants Museum in HCMC, Vietnam. This museum and memorial to the American War in Vietnam popped up in 1975 by the name "Exhibition House for U.S. and Puppet Crimes," a real kick in the ol' ballsack for Americans. The narrative more or less painted us as horrible, imperial invaders without shred of nuance. It remained that way for a couple decades. The Doi Moi reformations gave the West a toehold there for manufacturing and in '95 diplomatic relations with the USA were normalized. As part of the package though we told them they had to do something about that pesky museum, so they changed the name. Over the decades anthropologists have tracked changes in how the museum has curated public memory. The narrative has largely shifted to a reconciliatory tone - while there's still floors of horrifying violence (American war crimes, walls of Agent Orange victims, etc.) there's a new multinational narrative that's intruded very noticeably. Hell, in 2015 they literally had an exhibition space for victims of Agent Orange that had "overcome their difficulties to live beautiful, transcendent lives" and was basically a real pretty room with pastel thatching and tasteful frames, a stark contrast to the neon orange permeating the walls full of bulging eyes and cleft palates and "fug you America" a floor above.

The museum utilizes impression books, a uniquely western feature of museum "democratization" and allows visitors to pen their thoughts on the museum, making opinion an exhibit unto itself. Here visitors interact with the exhibitions, offering synchronic commentaries and meta-analyses of representation. They are often combative. In the battlefield monuments at the Khe Sanh perimeter a few miles from the DMZ, the impression books have become battlefields of their own: they're chock full of U.S. veterans disparaging the official accounts. "I was here and WE WON," one said. "This is bullshit," was another eloquent response, possibly to the low-budget diorama of screaming American soldiers running through a plaster-of-paris jungle behind him.

One-legged old men sold spent shell casings to veterans walking around these locations. "I fought for the South," they'd whisper, conspiratorially. Total bullshit, of course, just selling themselves to an audience eager to hear the "real" side of a contested history and pay for it.

Takeaway: history is contested in public spaces and battlefields present specific narratives based on political dynamics and power structures.

 

(3) The Enola Gay exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum. This one's fun because some dumb shits on this forum were probably around for this. In the late 80s the Smithsonian decided they should do an exhibit on the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It was a gigantic B29 that they couldn't possibly fit in that space, so they took the front end of the fuselage and put it in a display room. A couple of historians were tasked with drawing up some interpretive material surrounding it. They came up with a thoughtful presentation of perspectives: the airmen in the plane, information about the bomb itself, and then on the walls surrounding the plane were Japanese citizens and commentary by survivors who'd been bombed. Sounds pretty reasonable, right?

NOPE. Focus groups poo their collective pants. Reagan had just gotten the nation pumped about about getting rid of the Vietnam malaise from the 60s and reinstilling a sense of patriotism in America, and now Dick Cheney and Nancy Bush were grabbing the reigns. Absolutely no way this fugin country was gonna have a buncha goddamn yellow bastards getting SYMPATHY on OUR SOIL GODDAMMIT. The guy that headed it up almost got fired. A committee came in and made them retool the entire thing. The graphics with the Japanese were yanked entirely and the display was sanitized, with reference to moral ambiguity made only through the perspective of the good-hearted bombers.

(There's an interesting corollary here to the Vietnam memorial erected around the same time. A Chinese-American student at some university in Ohio won a contest to design the memorial and made it this really low profile, reflective wall. Americans saw it lost their absolute fuging minds. They wanted a giant towering memorial, not this "gash of shame," and they had insane meetings screaming about the nerve of some Chinese gal trying to make America look shameful. The design did win out, unlike the Enola Gay, but only if they also added statues of soldiers to appease everyone's fee-fees. Boomers are the real snowflakes.)

Takeaway: you won't "learn the lessons of history" because institutions of public memory and historical representation are reflections of the institution's constituent values.

 

CONCLUSION: there is no such thing as objectivity in museums, on memorials, across battlefields, or in city squares. Institutions produce displays of public memory that reflect their values. The public grapples with them and contests their veracity, as we are seeing now, and with enough pressure, leverages the institutions into changing how history is represented. By ripping the head off of Robert E. Lee's statue we aren't performing some ignoble desecration of virgin history, we're moving as actors on a stage and reshaping the way we view, remember, and memorialize our past, as we always have for thousands of years and how we will continue to do.

Drag Robert E. Lee's bitch ass into a harbor, no one with a brain gives a poo.

[PhillyB]

ok i just caught up on the thread and all of 10charnatives takes are utter trash. this person has no knowledge whatsoever of the politics of representation and is speaking out of his ass with nice sounding words. he's spouting pseudointellectual bullshit and can be safely ignored by anyone actually trying to grapple with this question 

[Vagrant]

16 hours ago, 1of10Charnatives said:

So going to war against the Nazis to bring an end to the holocaust was a "needless, terrible event"? Your words. Feel free to backtrack and claim that wasn't what you meant and wasn't the war you were referring to, but you didn't take care to be more precise and thoughtful in your original wording. Experience tells me that lack of care in choosing one's words often goes hand in hand with lack of careful thinking. 

I agree that statues and memorials commemorating leaders and soldiers of a losing side which were fighting to preserve a horrific institution should be taken down and left to the dust bin of history. Let these things be remembered in museums and classrooms, where they more rightly belong in the context of cautionary tales, rather than glorified in the public arena. I don't see a single statue of Hitler anywhere, yet no one makes the argument that we should put some up so that "we don't forget".

However, the american civil war was a unique and terrible event in our nation's history, a time when we grappled with unfinished questions and moral dilemmas the founding father chose to leave unresolved in the interest of founding a cohesive nation. While slavery is terrible and rightly has been abolished, the confederacy was not without a leg to stand on. Morally wrong though slavery may have been, the Constitution specifically outlines a legal process under which states may secede from the Union, and all of the Confederate states followed this process properly. Lincoln defied the Constitution he had taken an oath to uphold in declaring he would not allow the Confederate states to withdraw from the Union peacefully. 

In an age when the NSA spies illegally daily on it's own citizens, the FBI has it's own kangaroo court to rubber stamp surveillance requests, Congress circumvents the limitations imposed by the Constitution in which they are granted only specific enumerated powers (please find for me the Constitutional basis justifying the existence of a federal Department of Education, there is none) by putting states at the end of a funding string on which they must dance to a federal tune, and our President himself seems to be barely aware of or hold any regard for Constitutional limitations on his power, can anyone say that walking the battlefields of the Civil War might not yet provide more than one lesson beyond just the struggle to end slavery?

I am southern born and bred and abhore not just slavery and segregation and racism in all it's forms, but I have walked the fields of Gettysburg Pennsylvania, looked out across the peach orchards from Little Round Top, and the ghosts who whispered to me there from across time were not just Union soldiers who shed blood so that other men might be free, but Confederate soldiers cautioning me against the overreach of federal power, however pure the motives might be.

However you might feel about that, men died there, for reasons both good and bad, but no matter what they were our countrymen, and in this one place outside museums, it is not inappropriate to let those flags fly, so that we might stand and look out not just from a classroom, but over the fields where the trees have been watered by the blood of our ancestors and soak in both the lessons of sacrifice and folly. 

i wasn't going to address this post because it's full of obviously fallacious thoughts but the concept that people are quoting it for relevance and acting like it's diminishing to my case got me. so there's that. let's break down a few of the things you discussed. 

1. "so going to war against the Nazis to bring an end to the holocaust was a needless, terrible event?" - HELL YES. that was a war created by a megalomaniac with only bad intentions. his agenda was dumb and he cost the world countless lives in horrific fashion. needless is the perfect word to describe the precipitating events that culminated in that military action. there is absolutely no need for me to be more careful with my wording or to be chided like you've made a salient point because that is precisely what was meant. your cognition failure here is recognizing where to pinpoint the origin of the problem instead of how to address the problem once it was already problematic. just the same as you may view the civil war as needed because there needed to be an end to slavery, if the institution had been thwarted in its infancy by right minded people there would have been no reason for all that bloodshed either. that makes it both.... *drumroll* needless and terrible. pretty much all global conflicts are the product of someone's rationality failing them or that entity being cajoled and encouraged where they should have been corrected and disposed by their people for inhuman concepts. that is why these events are national embarrassments. not even entirely because it ended in war, but because of the ethical failures that proceeded them are owned by not just the perpetrators themselves, but the citizens that thrust these people into power and those that were indifferent to the wrongdoing despite clear signs. so yes, right back at you with the lack of careful thinking. your line of thought is results oriented and made in evaluation after the biggest mistakes had already been made, necessitating conflict that need not have been. 

2. if you want to talk about semantics with wording "morally wrong though slavery MAY have been" should be right up there in the hall of fame. your intent with this phrasing was clearly not to leave it ambiguous that it "may" have been wrong, but rather utilizing a common turn of phrase as a transition into another thought. but if we're being pedantic as you were with my "needless and terrible" comment, there's two sides to that coin. i find that lack of care with one's words often goes hand in hand with lack of careful thinking. *jerking off emoji* 

3. as far as government overreach is concerned, if those battlefields were providing the appropriate lessons regarding historical perspective, they have already failed us as you delineated later in the same sentence. you quite literally countered your own point by illuminating how ineffectual these places have been in regards to being instructive for future generations. additionally, perhaps the bigger mistake was placating southern states with the idea of secession at the outset. you know why that little omission was made? because a ton of the framers of the constitution were also slave owners and fought for that omission vehemently. as far as pinpointing the actions that precipitated the events of the civil war, we can go back even further to the advent of the practice in this ideological departure from the tyrannical abuse from the power brokers in England.... but what did we go and do in response? commit an equally egregious crime against humanity. 

4. if you seek "whispers from the past," I have some fantastic news for you. those self-same voices you go to hear in many cases actually recorded their experience on parchment and some places later bound those thoughts into leather and had them replicated by way of the printing press so that you might not have to rely upon something as vague as walking through a battlefield to hear the lessons they have to offer you across time. i can only imagine the heaps of time you will save not having to go to a battlefield for perspective on that anymore. there's no need to thank me and the better news is that there's probably a building in your town that has all of them on file already for your consumption. it's preposterously convenient. now what can we do with that funding and land that's a better utilization of resources? 

5. again, we need not memorialize the death of racists by standing upon the same land they once stood. we do that every day. the place in which they died for those poorly held beliefs is no more sacred than the hospital that millions of other racists died in for unrelated reasons. there is no need for preservation of the physical space in which they occupied in order to learn from their foolishness. it's pointless symbolism. 

 

[1of10Charnatives]

3 hours ago, PhillyB said:

ok i just caught up on the thread and all of 10charnatives takes are utter trash. this person has no knowledge whatsoever of the politics of representation and is speaking out of his ass with nice sounding words. he's spouting pseudointellectual bullshit and can be safely ignored by anyone actually trying to grapple with this question 

Since your preference is to hurl insults instead of sticking to the merits of the debate, I’m going to decline to engage you. Obviously we have differing opinions here, but I’m not going to waste my time going back and forth with you.