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Post by mhbruin on Jun 14, 2020 8:33:28 GMT -8
Monuments are not history. No historian studies a statue of Robert E Lee when doing research. It is to honor someone thought to have accomplished something important and good.
You don't build monuments to bad people. We have holocaust museums to educate us about evil. You can learn and remember by visiting Dachau or Auschwitz, but we don't put up statues of Hitler or name schools after Joseph Mengele.
All humans are flawed. Washington and Jefferson owned slaves. Lincoln wanted to ship blacks back to Africa when he took office. Yet we (rightly) judge that their achievements heavily outweigh their faults.
Which bring us to the good actions and excesses of activists today. I am fine with renaming Fort Bragg and tearing down statues of Jeff Davis.
I am not happy with destroying a bust of John McDonogh in New Orleans. He may have owned slaves, but he was honored for building schools.
And I think attacking a statue of Winston Churchill is flat out nuts. He was certainly racist, particularly about India, but his lifetime of achievement far outweighs his faults.
Ad there is no better way to your voice totally ignored than by attacking Churchill in England.
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Post by blindness on Jun 14, 2020 10:51:33 GMT -8
Someone once stated slave-ownership of historical figures as a "bug vs feature" thing (was it Dr J?), which I think is the essence of the discussion here. Don't know anything about John McDonogh, but Churchill makes the point: he was a little more than a racist... He has a fairly dark and disturbing pre-WWII history around brutal colonialism. His heroic status is something that solidified in WWII mostly, but he was more than that.
So the question is what happens if you are an ex-empire who is supposedly integrating people from the old colonies and want to be remembered for things other than colonialism? Ans how should the descendants of those brutalized people reconcile with the lionization of a man who is responsible for devastating their ancestral homelands, someone who perhaps even accelerated the diaspora that brought them to England?
We choose to focus on certain aspects of historical names and undervalue their darker sides. With some people the balance is far more obviously tilted for the good, relative to contemporary values (Jefferson, Washington), with others and with shifting values over time, others become more ambiguous (Churchill, I suppose).
And then there are people like Leopold II -- which brings the Churchill question in an even darker terms.
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Post by mhbruin on Jun 14, 2020 12:09:14 GMT -8
I agree, Blindness.
Few historical figures are totally good or evil. They are subject to values of their time, their own flaws, and the things one must do to get into a position of authority. Many people evolve or devolve over their lives.
But we seem to have a need for idols and heroes. We are always going to have statues.
I think the point is to remember what we are commemorating. The statue honor Churchill's war leadership, not Gallipoli, colonialism, or his drinking.
Getting rid of Confederate generals is easy. After that we shouldn't have knee-jerk reactions to any associations with racism or slavery, and we need to consider whole lives.
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Post by blindness on Jun 14, 2020 13:00:49 GMT -8
I've always wondered why we don't see monuments to the unnamed slaves. Maybr we should erect a bunch of those surrounding these controversial monuments. Some kind of counter programming if you will.
Maybe Churchill needs a monument next to his statue commemorating some of the crap hs pulled in the colonies. That may dampen the anger.
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Post by Floppy Johnson on Jun 14, 2020 13:27:32 GMT -8
The are very few leaders of countries that don't have a significant stain. Certainly every president of the United States up through Eisenhower presided over the taking of lands from native peoples, Washington and Jefferson included. LBJ and Nixon had Vietnam. W had Iraq. The list of statue worth Presidents is getting short. I'm not saying any of this to defend naming anything after a Confederate treasonist. But, when Churchill is being attacked, well let's apply that level of scrutiny evenly. And, like I said, we were taking land from native peoples through Eisenhower. I don't think Europe would be happy with that standard. Don't think the Parisians would be very happy to pull down the Arc de Triumph. Or, to bulldoze Versailles. There are a whole lot of tourist attractions in Europe that were built by serf labor. Are we going to bulldoze Rome and start over? I would guess a whole bunch of the statues all over the world, not just the United States and Europe are built to honor someone who defeated someone else who thought that whatever they were fighting over was rightfully theirs. Here is the Wikipedia article on Jefferson and Native Americans: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_and_Native_Americans |
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Post by Born2BBruin on Jun 14, 2020 16:06:37 GMT -8
To play devil's advocate, monuments and statues obviously ARE both history and historical. They existed before today, so they are part of the past, and history by any definition of the word. Beyond that, they are historical because they represent people and events that helped shape history.
That is not to say that history in and of itself gives them inherent significance or value.
But I do think it's a mistake to erase them from the present, just as it would be a mistake to try to erase what they represent from history.
Just a few years ago, they world was up in arms when the Taliban blew up and destroyed the Buddhas of Bamyan; two statues.
Now, even I would argue they're not necessarily the same thing; but you have to tread a very fine line to make that argument consistent.
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Post by mhbruin on Jun 14, 2020 16:55:23 GMT -8
I've always wondered why we don't see monuments to the unnamed slaves. Maybr we should erect a bunch of those surrounding these controversial monuments. Some kind of counter programming if you will. Maybe Churchill needs a monument next to his statue commemorating some of the crap hs pulled in the colonies. That may dampen the anger. A statue isn't meant to educate. And it is a damned poor means of education. Museums are typically VASTLY better at it. It simply say "This guy or group was great." No nuance. As for history, the only thing Civil War statues commemorate is Jim Crow. |
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Post by Born2BBruin on Jun 14, 2020 20:58:09 GMT -8
A better response than mine, from someone with both more experience and wisdom.  |
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dsc
Resident Member
Posts: 759
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Post by dsc on Jun 14, 2020 21:07:13 GMT -8
One can argue that the South erected Confederate monuments in order to erase their past of the humiliating defeat in the civil war and also of slavery and that African Americans and others are fighting to bring to light the past and present realities of racism.
In other words, they are trying to erase the erasure of the past, not the past itself.
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Post by Born2BBruin on Jun 14, 2020 21:16:25 GMT -8
One can argue that the South erected Confederate monuments in order to erase their past of the humiliating defeat in the civil war and also of slavery and that African Americans and others are fighting to bring to light the past and present realities of racism. In other words, they are trying to erase the erasure of the past, not the past itself. So, you in turn, would erase the erasure, and also erase any indication there was ever any desire to erase something, which therefore erases it. Well done. You are now a white supremacist!  |
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Post by blindness on Jun 14, 2020 22:31:28 GMT -8
A statue isn't meant to educate. And it is a damned poor means of education. Museums are typically VASTLY better at it. It simply say "This guy or group was great." No nuance. As for history, the only thing Civil War statues commemorate is Jim Crow. Placing alternative monuments would not be for the purposes of educating. The goal would be to acknowledge and contextualize.
The alternative is to take the monument down, which you don't want to do.
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Post by blindness on Jun 14, 2020 22:34:13 GMT -8
A better response than mine, from someone with both more experience and wisdom. I wouldn't call it erasing it. It's more like refusing to perpetuate a narrative.
If you take the knowledge of the person out of history books, libraries, documents etc, then you would be erasing them.
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