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Post by mhbruin on Jun 23, 2020 9:22:51 GMT -8
When statues of Washington and Grant are being pulled down, the radicals are out of control. BLM has gained the support of the public. Here's hoping the extremists don't lose that support.
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Post by andyh64000 on Jun 23, 2020 9:55:51 GMT -8
Washington (and Jefferson) are tough. If they met Obama today would they consider him an equal?
Washington owned a lot of slaves and while he treated them well comparatively and his conscience might have bothered him from time to time (probably after discussions with Adams) he still worked them, beat them, whipped them, and hunted them down if they tried to escape.
I guess if we understand that the concept of freedom and one's right to determine their own destiny were novel concepts and should be celebrated today then he should be honored but make no mistake, to Washington "all men" meant free white (mainly landowning) men.
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Post by blindness on Jun 23, 2020 10:50:17 GMT -8
From what I understand Grant is a clearer case of keeping the statues.
I think the real problem is there is no adult leadership to guide these kids. The generation that would be in a position to do so never quite fought against these statues to be able to credibly place the ongoing effort to purge the public space of the celebration of America's dark side in context. And now the kids are excited and they are attacking the establishment without any sense of subtlety or what the overall goals are. It is certainly not the fist time that a generation started slaughtering sacred cows indiscriminately. We've been here before.
The problem has always been the way the shared narrative of the country's history and self-image has remained small c conservative and was not subject to thorough re-examination and update for as long as I have lived in this country (since 1987).
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Post by mhbruin on Jun 23, 2020 11:17:59 GMT -8
Washington (and Jefferson) are tough. If they met Obama today would they consider him an equal? Washington owned a lot of slaves and while he treated them well comparatively and his conscience might have bothered him from time to time (probably after discussions with Adams) he still worked them, beat them, whipped them, and hunted them down if they tried to escape. I guess if we understand that the concept of freedom and one's right to determine their own destiny were novel concepts and should be celebrated today then he should be honored but make no mistake, to Washington "all men" meant free white (mainly landowning) men. I don't find them that tough. I don't think our heroes need to be perfect. I think the right lesson is to appreciate the complexity of history. Washington did own slaves. By itself, that sounds awful, but people should give some consideration to the time and place. Washington wasn't a particularly good general. He lost a lot more battles than he won. But he managed to keep the army going and then built a government from scratch. Who else in history has done that? Then he gave up power. On balance, he made the world a better place, even if that may be small consolation to his slaves. Grant, on balance, was a good man who changed the course of US history for the better, including trying his best to protect blacks as President, But he was involved in killing and maiming tens of thousands of men to do it. We need to put the killing and maiming into context. Simple-minded evaluations of people are another form of bigotry.
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Post by blindness on Jun 23, 2020 11:33:38 GMT -8
About Washington and Jefferson: the best take I've seen was the whole bug vs feature thing. With a lot of those folks, the slave-owning and having participated in the racism of their time was a bug. With the confederacy, it was a feature.
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Post by TAMPATIDE on Jun 23, 2020 12:20:58 GMT -8
Seems to me that taking history out of context is never a good idea. As for the destruction going on now I suspect that the particulars of whoever the statue is are of little concern to the mob, I believe it's more generally .... you represent American history and our message is all American history is evil.
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Post by andyh64000 on Jun 23, 2020 12:47:17 GMT -8
It isn't like Slavery was universally accepted at the time and I would like to believe that Washington knew it was abhorrently wrong. I get that he was holding the new country together with bubble gum and bailing wire but it should be acknowledged that even in his personal life he didn't do black people any favors. Maybe things have changed, but when I was taught history Washington's sins were never even mentioned.
Grant technically owned a slave (maybe his wife did?) whom he freed prior to the civil war but I sort of give him a pass. He should be honored as a great leader who had a few demons and might not have always been guided by altruism but still ended up on the right side of history.
Andrew Jackson was a god damned slave trader (among other atrocities) and needs to be taken the fuck off the $20 ASAP and any remaining statues of him should be desecrated in the worst way possible.
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Post by blindness on Jun 23, 2020 13:00:22 GMT -8
Seems to me that taking history out of context is never a good idea. As for the destruction going on now I suspect that the particulars of whoever the statue is are of little concern to the mob, I believe it's more generally .... you represent American history and our message is all American history is evil. The key thing is statues and monuments are really not about history. They are about what we admire about ourselves and what we are proud of.
Statues of historical figures we are no longer proud to display in public spaces should be taken to a museum. It just so happens that if we miss the ample time we've had to do that, we should expect that the public who's disgusting by seeing those triumphant depictions take them down themselves.
The point is, we could have stepped in a long time ago and moved those statues to a museum, where they belong, but we were complacent about our understanding of our own history and resisted change. Now, we have no control over what happens next.
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Post by blublood on Jun 23, 2020 13:46:22 GMT -8
Washington wasn't a particularly good general. Actually, Washington was a pretty good general. His strategy was to fight just enough to keep the enemy engaged and chasing you. The enemy can't walk away and they can't win. What you're doing is fighting not to lose. You wait for them to make a mistake. This is how Yorktown happened. It's also how Sam Houston beat Santa Anna. And guess who's tactics North Vietnam studied? It's how you can win when you're fighting an empire.
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Post by blindness on Jun 23, 2020 14:41:03 GMT -8
Washington wasn't a particularly good general. Actually, Washington was a pretty good general. His strategy was to fight just enough to keep the enemy engaged and chasing you. The enemy can't walk away and they can't win. What you're doing is fighting not to lose. You wait for them to make a mistake. This is how Yorktown happened. It's also how Sam Houston beat Santa Anna. And guess who's tactics North Vietnam studied? It's how you can win when you're fighting an empire. In his Revolutions podcast Mike Duncan regards Washington's uncanny ability to get out of any kind of jam as his strongest point.
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Post by andyh64000 on Jun 23, 2020 15:36:31 GMT -8
Actually, Washington was a pretty good general. His strategy was to fight just enough to keep the enemy engaged and chasing you. The enemy can't walk away and they can't win. What you're doing is fighting not to lose. You wait for them to make a mistake. This is how Yorktown happened. It's also how Sam Houston beat Santa Anna. And guess who's tactics North Vietnam studied? It's how you can win when you're fighting an empire. In his Revolutions podcast Mike Duncan regards Washington's uncanny ability to get out of any kind of jam as his strongest point. He did the classic Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game tactic of kiting...keep your enemy chasing you while causing him damage and tiring him out.
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Post by grant73 on Jun 23, 2020 17:10:01 GMT -8
I was not named for Ulyss, his nickname -- enemies changed that a little bit to "Useless Grant." They picked my name out of a book of boys' names. The slave was a wedding gift from Julia's Missouri slave-holding family and they freed him 27 years before Ulyss' death in 1885. Grant's own entire family, his parents and their forbears were all ardent Ohio/Illinois Abolitionists.
That said, here's a little more, lol. I went to Grant High (Van Nuys) and have made a study of his life. The Chernow bio from 2017 is highly recommended. Technically, under Grant as General of the Army and more importantly as Commander of the five Federal Districts of the defeated South, Grant freed 40,000 slaves for every one that Lincoln, shot down as he was, had been able to do in his lifetime. Grant enforced the right to vote and marshaled federal troops to enforce it. For that he was hated in the South almost more, and for a longer period (forever!) than he was hated for defeating the Confederacy in the war.
Grant's Presidency was marred by too much trust in underlings whom he had successfully trusted before his election and he did not earn a penny from the graft; in fact businessmen whom he trusted before and after his two terms effectively bankrupted him and Julia in their retirement.
Grant really served the hell out of his country, and he devoted most of his life to that service. He was in the middle of his West Point class, not the bottom as the "Lost Cause" Southern writers claimed for decades. He became the Demostration Cavalry Rider at the Acadamy as a Jr. and Sr., having been one of the first of the now well-respected "horse whisperers" as a youth in Ohio. During the Mexican War under Zachary Taylor he took fearless initiatives and succeeded in heroic individual cavalry exploits, covered in the Chernow book.
For his service as Lt. Grant, before retiring early to enter the family leather works business in Illinois, and then when Lincoln personally pulled him back to active duty via the Illinois Battalion, for his 5 years as General, for his 4 years as Commandant of the South and for his 8 years as President, Grant, in the context of the era, earned not one penny of retirement pension. With Ulyss suffering from terminal cancer, Samuel Clemens sponsored and encouraged and eventually published the Grant memoirs, which kept Julia out of the poor house as long as she lived. That book has gone on to be lauded everywhere as the finest memoirs of any military commander in the history of the world.
Grant liked his whiskey, but as a military officer he never drank while his men were engaged in conflict, i.e., he would go weeks without a drink. Some Generals were jealous of him, obviously, but many would walk on coals to be under his command. The soldiers loved Grant, his disdain for fancy dress, lack of haught and his personal bravery. His third nickname was "Unconditional Surrender" (U.S.) Grant.
For the last twenty years of his life, as by miles the most famous American alive, he habitually turned his glass upside down at the bevy of banquets. Despite knowing of his drinking problem, Lincoln eventually had promoted Grant over about 23 more senior Generals and was very close personally with Grant in terms of trust and confidence. Grant's military career included some defeats and miscalculations, and Grant was known to go to tears when, on both sides, horrible bloodshed happened. He hated war. When it became clear that the South was near total defeat, when personally accepting the surrendering Confederate officers and men, he was known for letting them go home WITH their side arms.
In sum readers will discover that U. S. Grant was perhaps the most modest individual to have ever achieved such positive fame or notoriety, a soul who never shouted or descended to ballyhoo about himself. His biggest sin was smoking the 75 cigars a week which eventually killed him.
Now you don't have to read the book, but I loved every one of the 1,100 pages! He certainly shouldn't be pulled down from a monument or removed from my favorite bill, the $50.
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Post by TAMPATIDE on Jun 23, 2020 17:33:16 GMT -8
Perhaps a little far fetched but I could see the rationalization take place that if I can destroy the stone creation of someone I hate or disagree with then I can make a stronger statement and do the same thing to a live human being.
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Post by blindness on Jun 23, 2020 17:46:30 GMT -8
Perhaps a little far fetched but I could see the rationalization take place that if I can destroy the stone creation of someone I hate or disagree with then I can make a stronger statement and do the same thing to a live human being. Yep. Really far fetched.
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Post by andyh64000 on Jun 23, 2020 18:57:52 GMT -8
Perhaps a little far fetched but I could see the rationalization take place that if I can destroy the stone creation of someone I hate or disagree with then I can make a stronger statement and do the same thing to a live human being. Yep. Really far fetched. Yeah, I also completely disagree. Destroying an object glorifying an evil dead person is not even close.
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