Take the Statues Down

[struggle4progress]

YONI APPELBAUM
3:17 PM ET

... As of August 2016, there were still more than 1,500 public commemorations of the Confederacy, even excluding the battlefields and cemeteries ...

... one sits in the center of Charlottesville. It was commissioned exactly 100 years ago ...

It was less a dedication than a canonization. The master of ceremonies called Lee “the greatest man who ever lived.” The president of Washington and Lee proclaimed him “a Christian saint.” Lee, he explained, embodied “the moral greatness of the Old South,” with its “unusual combination of manly courage and womanly tenderness, its habitual tenderness toward the weak and helpless.” (When three slaves escaped, Lee had them tied to posts and whipped — 50 lashes for the men, 20 for the woman — and then had their backs washed with stinging brine.) ...

... Lee’s army ... chose to regard the blacks it encountered as contraband — to be seized and returned to the South, whether born free, manumitted, or escaped. The army seized scores of their fellow Americans as slaves, actions sanctioned at the highest level of command ...

... For the crime of refusing to cross back to Virginia, one boy was horribly mutilated, doused in turpentine, his genitals sliced off, and left to die in a barn by his Confederate captors. If there is no evidence that Lee, the living embodiment of womanly tenderness, sanctioned such crimes, neither is there evidence he acted to stop them ...

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/take-the-statues-down/536727/

[Gothmog]

1. These statutes need to go

[raccoon]

2. Yeah, and while we're at it, take down the statue of whoever

Yeah, and while we're at it, take down the statue of whoever said "the only good Indian is a dead Indian."

[MosheFeingold]

3. I don't know

It's a thin line between not glorifying and forgetting.

When I was a young teen (in the 1930s), a Confederate veteran and a Union veteran came to speak at our school in NYC. They had laid a wreath on Grant's tomb together and dedicated many a statue together. A lot of these statues were to recognize some complex men, who were both good and evil, and to encourage us to remember the good. Also to bring healing to a country that was still dis-unified even in the 1930s.

It made a real impression on me, and I thought about it often when I saw Dachau after the war. (It was used to hold German prisoners, ironically -- as an MP and German speaker, I went there often.)

I sooooo wanted it burned to the ground and then the ground salted.

Much later, I went there with my grandchildren, and was "happy" (happy is not exactly the right word, perhaps "content" is better) that it remained intact, as it serves as a constant reminder to not forget about such things.