I respect the opinions of the various posters in this sub and I think a reasonable discussion on this matter would be appropriate. My opinion is that the Civil War is an important and integral part of American history. A statue of General Robert E. Lee is not akin to Germany having a statue of Adolph Hitler. Its just not an apples to apples comparison for a million different reasons. If you ascribe to this logic, should we not take down all military statues? What about all the Union's generals that participated in battles waged against Native Americans? Where does one draw the line(?); because we certainly f'd them over. In a big way. Aren't all those National Parks a living tribute to this atrocity? If Lee should be removed, then imo.... shut it all down. All the battlefields. Deny history. The far left is doing nothing but ruining and dividing our country with this bs. Its disgusting really. We have much bigger fish to fry. These people need to get a life. And the extreme right that are going out to do battle with them... imo are just as stupid. But the media loves it. 24 hour news and sensationalism. We are that bored, we crave the drama. Its a slippery slope... and people are too f'ing stupid to see it for what it really is. America is being so dumbed down, and I suspect Russia and China just sit back and quietly chuckle as they see a great republic slowly get weaker and weaker from irrelevant internal strife.
I am pretty sure that after that statue of Robert E. Lee comes down that they will want to put up a statue of Chelsea Manning.
Of course memorials/statues of people who fought to keep human beings as slaves should be taken down and it is akin to Germany having statues of Adolph Hitler up.Germany got rid of Nazism and Russia had De-Stalinization and the confederacy was more evil than both.
Yup, as I said, you will have that statue to Chelsea Manning up by the end of next year. A soldier who lost his balls while in service to his country. Oh wait, did I say "he." What was I thinking? Most likely I will be banned from the forum- maybe even the country.
In retaliation we should change the name of every MLK Blvd and Barrack Obama Middle School. My only hesitation is the MLK street name serves as a universally understood alert that you are in a dangerous part of a city.
The statues that are contemporary and relevant should be preserved as history good or bad. However it is fair and reasonable to make some space in public spaces, like a museum curator does for other important events and figures. The civil war was not the beginning and end of history in the South. I remember looking at a statue in a small Namibian town celebrating the great victory by the Germans... quite a lot of Maxim machine guns against spears and shields involved in this one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Waterberg I asked a local who was Hereros descended, of the surviving few, what he made of this ridiculous OTT memorial inscribed with silly virtues. "It happened, the memorial was of it's time so we need to preserve it." His call, seems fair. An uneducated black cow farmer put the behavior of certain spoiled whites to shame.
Tony... come on bro... the Confederacy was not worse than Stalin or Hitler. Thats ridiculous and I'm surprised you wrote that. Ordinarily I respect your opinion even if it doesn't fit mine. But that one is a tad off the charts. Lee did not lead the Confederate Army because he believed in the right to own slaves. He took the position, after much soul searching, because he was loyal to his beloved state of Virginia. Was the Civil War about slavery, or was it really about States' rights? The hundreds of thousands of soldiers that fought and died for the South never owned a slave. I think there's a lot more to it than just a handful (relatively) of wealthy plantation owners desiring to own another human being. They were fighting against centralized government rule from afar.
Sorry to bring the T man up but I have decided that yes, I will be supporting Ron Perlman for 2020. Reading through his tweets..