Do you think Confederate Memorials should be removed?

[YPrrrr]

I know I am probably in the minority here but I do not believe it is in the best interest of our country to remove elements of history that we do not like. History is often told as the winners have framed it and I would say that in the day and age, with all the lessons of the past, we should do our very best to present the most accurate version possible and not the G-rated version of our country that sweeps former problematic events under the rug. At what point do statues of other slave owning individuals of the past come down? Our founding fathers were not exactly progressive on racial equality and they are responsible for slavery being integrated into the founding of our country. Yet without them we would not have an American history to tell. Maybe they should not necessarily be in the public spaces some currently occupy, that is true, but to destroy them entirely would be a mistake in my opinion.

Unfortunately I am at work and cannot delve into the topic further but I'd be interested in seeing other Boyagers perspectives. Some articles that also summarize more of my feels:

https://www.google.com/amp/www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/amp/opinion-why-i-feel-confederate-monuments-should-stay-n767221

http://dailysignal.com/2017/06/01/cities-shouldnt-take-confederate-statues/

[Kalahari Inkantation]

i seriously doubt you're in the minority here lol

there are strategic ways to go about addressing historical issues, and there are unstrategic ways to go about addressing historical issues

simply tearing down any and all contentious monuments of people who were products of their time would be the unstrategic way to go about it

merely sanitizing history in such an utterly superficial way wouldn't actually resolve any modern problems at all, destruction of statues of historical figures is hardly any more than a rash, instantly-gratifying emotional response to a problem that requires a reasoned, long term solution

[YPrrrr]

i seriously doubt you're in the minority here lol

there are strategic ways to go about addressing historical issues, and there are unstrategic ways to go about addressing historical issues

simply tearing down any and all contentious monuments of people who were products of their time would be the unstrategic way to go about it

merely sanitizing history in such an utterly superficial way wouldn't actually resolve any modern problems at all, destruction of statues of historical figures is hardly any more than a rash, instantly-gratifying emotional response to a problem that requires a reasoned, long term solution

Huh, I did not see us being in agreement so thoroughly.

Well this is refreshing

[Kalahari Inkantation]

now i'm wondering what sort of an answer you expected of me lol

the way i see it, there are two options: one can seek to destroy symbols that anger them for cheap emotional catharsis that doesn't actually resolve anything at all, or one can recognize those very monuments as symbols of an imperfect history and use the lessons of the past to help correct the problems of the present

maybe there is some mixed approach that could also work, but really it should be heavily in favor of preserving and learning from history, not letting off emotional steam and forgetting about it the next week

with rare few exceptions, i'm not one to appeal to emotion, because emotion itself is often the cause of irrational decision making

[YPrrrr]

now i'm wondering what sort of an answer you expected of me lol

the way i see it, there are two options: one can seek to destroy symbols that anger them for cheap emotional catharsis that doesn't actually resolve anything at all, or one can recognize those very monuments as symbols of an imperfect history and use the lessons of the past to help correct the problems of the present

maybe there is some mixed approach that could also work, but really it should be heavily in favor of preserving and learning from history, not letting off emotional steam and forgetting about it the next week

with rare few exceptions, i'm not one to appeal to emotion, because emotion itself is often the cause of irrational decision making

I suppose this does sound very consistently Tec I don't know why I should have expected differently

I mostly just expected you to disagree because you are Tec and I am YPR talking about a debatable topic in 2017

[Kalahari Inkantation]

with rare few exceptions, i'm not one to disagree for the sake of disagreeing lol

[silvertone]

most important part of confederate memorials isnt the memorials themselves, but the twin narratives [north / south] of civil war that have spawned and have yet to be reconciled. tons of mythology is floating around, some bordering on falsehoods... bullyciding one side into submission seems to be the current method .

[Mando Pandango]

I feel like they should be removed from the public places where they are right now, but still preserved and put on display in museums or something.

Honestly, I can't imagine growing up black in the south and seeing monuments to the confederacy in my everyday life. That sounds horrifying. That said, if I wanted to learn about the awful things in my country's past, I should have every right to do so, to see the evidence of it.

When I think of this debate I always think of this Warner Brothers disclaimer, which I've only ever seen support for:

[spoiler][/spoiler]

That last sentence is a powerful sentiment and totally true. Just like they still don't play those racist cartoons on the air now, we shouldn't have confederate monuments in open public spaces. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't be preserved.

[The Hand That Fisted Everyone]

75% of the people on my Facebook who are complaining about the statues being taken down probably had no idea the statues were even there to begin with.

Regarding the history aspect of it, I recently read an article that detailed North Carolinas role in the Civil War. The article said that NC was torn in the war, a lot of NC soldiers who were drafted ended up abandoning the Confederacy or defecting to the union. Gov. Vance (governor during that time) said something to the affect of "it's a rich man's war but a poor man's battle" (what war isn't anyway lol). After the war there was a group called The fusionists who were made up of white populists and black  Republicans. They won both house and Senate of NC and two US Senate seats. The article even says they never lost an honest election. It wasn't until a string of violent crimes and political threats happened in the early 1900s did the fusionists lose an election. And that's when Jim Crow laws began.

None of this was really covered in my state history classes. I always thought the union just bulldozed over NC but NC deeply divided over the war (so was Tennessee but idk shit about them)

I bring this up because there aren't any monuments to the slaves that helped build NC, nor are there any monuments to the fusionists. IDK how to word this right, but I think there's been too much Confederate history in the South, and there should be more monuments and information out there about the people who objected and fought against the war.

I would also add that if the South is ever gonna rise again, it would need to stop being so damn prideful of the Confederacy.

[Hiro]

i wouldn't say monuments glorifying the confederacy built in the jim crow era or as a response to the civil rights movement qualifies as history.
also aubrey note that you're saying some of the same things trump said yesterday in his defense of the nazi protestors.
nobody wants to tear them down to pretend that stuff never happened or "clean up" history. they should not have been built in the first place, are not that old, and do not help give any kind of historical context.
moving them to a museum would be perfectly fine.
basically i'm with popsi and corey on this

[Travis]

i fully agree with everything ypr said

[Mando Pandango]

I bring this up because there aren't any monuments to the slaves that helped build NC, nor are there any monuments to the fusionists. IDK how to word this right, but I think there's been too much Confederate history in the South, and there should be more monuments and information out there about the people who objected and fought against the war.

This is actually something I had never considered. If we were able to replace the monuments of Confederate leaders with monuments dedicated to slaves and people who gave their lives fighting slavery in those states, I thought that would be a near-perfect solution. It would shine the glory onto the right targets while still acknowledging the country's ugly past.

[Kalahari Inkantation]

having done more reading on the matter, i have to revise my original opinion

many of those monuments are younger than i thought, and were erected at questionable times

and honestly, there probably are better ways of "preserving history" than glorifying the leaders of the losing side of a secessionist war, especially considering that the "history" preserved by those monuments is quite one-sided

i think some combination of strategically relocating the bulk of them to museums, and notsid's idea of commemorating the many other relevant actors of the war aside from just confederate generals/politicians, would be the ideal approach

like ypr said, we should be doing our best to "present the most accurate version possible", which means that the representation of civil war protagonists and antagonists should certainly be more balanced than it currently is

it's disproportionately the antagonists who have monuments in their honor in the south, when if anything the balance should favor the protagonists

[Hiro]

[C.Mongler]

yeah confederate monuments are fucking stupid because they don't exist to explain history and they largely weren't built during a period of post-war wound licking either; they were built during the jim crow era as big ole' fuck you to "niggers". that's their actual historical context, not some shoe-shined version of 'the war was bad let us look at this man on a horse and reflect upon how it is good we are ultimately unified. also hoorah, the south'. if you want to pretend the latter is true, you've been duped by the racists who put the things up in the first place, sorry.

i agree with YPR in the fact that we should present history with context and in the most accurate way possible. i disagree in that most confederate monuments in no way shape or form do that. you can teach kids about how the confederacy and the civil war were a dark time of our history without a statue, and you almost certainly are going to more productively going to be able to do that when you're not at the Robert E. Lee statue on Jefferson Davis Road right next to Stonewall Jackson High School.

These dudes are quite literally idolized as war heroes in their current forms. But what are they heroes of exactly? What did they do that positively impacted social, political, and economic progress? As said, give those dudes the monuments.


Even at Mt. Vernon (George Washington's house) they give a detailed, contextual, analysis of his role as a slave owner for fucks sake. A street named after the US version of Himmler doesn't.