Thank you all for your patient explanations as I stumble about in American history!
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Originally Posted by The Batlord
It really isn't contentious anymore except for a select group of gun toting Southerners. I highly doubt anyone in this discussion has any emotional investment in the Yankee v. Rebel debate.
No, it was about slavery....
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^ Oddly enough, what I quoted about slavery
not being the prime motive for the Civil War also came from a wiki article, but if The Bat and The Chula are both telling me otherwise, I bow to your better-informed opinions :-
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Originally Posted by Chula Vista
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Originally Posted by Janszoon
The monuments aren't being smashed up, they're being moved to museums or put in storage. And just for context, many of these monuments were erected decades after the war as statements of white supremacy. Here's the plaque that was originally on a monument recently removed from New Orleans:
The descendants of Confederates always cry about how moving these statues hurts their precious little feelings, but what about the descendants of the people the Confederates enslaved? Why should they have to endure monuments to the atrocities committed against their ancestors? I say take them down and put them in a museum, they should never have been erected in the first place. |
^ Wow! That dedication is a much more explicit declaration of White Supremacy than I imagined. I'm now thinking that things so antagonistic shouldn't be on public display. I imagined we were talking about the statue of some old guy on a horse, but what amounts to civic approval of racist sentiments is very different. So I'd like to recant my earlier opinion, or at least modify it; divisive racist material and symbols shouldn't be publicly honoured even if they were a part of a country's history. (And, yes, storage, out of the public eye but available for serious research, is a good option.)
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Originally Posted by The Batlord
... France literally was demanding money for slaves until the mid-20th century? That's ****ing despicable. I'm hoping there's more to it, but... wtf?
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^ Yes, this rather undermines all their talk about liberty, fraternity and equality. What a dirty little historical detail!