HuffPo: UNC Students Topple Confederate Monument

[Badger]

FYI, the base is still there, but the statue is gone.

In terms of comparing Malcolm X to Silent Sam. Malcolm X statue was put up despite his hatred of Jews, not because of it. Silent Sam was put up in 1913 at the height of white supremacy to send that message. If it was done to honor Confederate dead, it would have been erected soon after the end of the Civil War.

That logic is ridiculous. Since when is there be a requirement on how long after a war memorials can be erected?

For example, the World War II Memorial wasn't opened until 2004, which is a much longer time frame than it was for Silent Sam to be erected following the end of the Civil War.

Yes, but America *won* World War II.

We didn't win the Vietnam War but we still have a memorial for fallen soldiers and those who went missing in action.

We also "lost" Korea considering the war ended in an ongoing stalemate.

Nah. We save South Korea. 98% of their Nation would disagree that the war was a loss. MacArthur screwed up by not stopping a bit north of Pyongyang and triggering the Chinese Counterattack, but still a victory.

To be fair, we don't really know what Korea would look like if it had been unified. Its politics may have ended up very differently, and it could be more like Vietnam today - an authoritarian market state under one government, with a median income similar to China's, and no nuclear crisis - which some South Koreans would find preferable to the status quo. You can't really say what the alternative would be after so long.

There is absolutely zero indication under the sun that the entire Korean Peninsula United under the Kim's would be any different then North Korea is today, let alone and at least minutely evolving or authoritarian regime like Vietnam. Literally none. That's Abraham Lincoln Vampire killer level fantasy.

What's the meaning of an "indication" for something extrapolated from the birth of a country forward by 70 years? The point is you can't say with any certainty that a united Korean Peninsula would be what it is today, with Kim Jong Un in power, and the exact same policies in place. Everything about it would be different. Korea's entire strategic calculus would have been different. The entire siege mentality that North Korea has where it needs nuclear weapons in the first place wouldn't exist.

You think the Sea of Japan would change the massive paranoia endemic to the Kim regime for over half a century? Its strategic calculus as you call it, trying to Gussy up your horsesh**t baseless random ass speculation in a pantea of faux intellectualism, would still be the hermit Kingdom of the world supported by China. You can't point out one reason why absorption of the entire Korean Peninsula would change the most doctrinaire rigid ideology of the second half of the 20th century 1iota.

But why do I even waste the bandwidth? You've made it crystal clear that you've long jumped the shark as a poster and a person.

[Beet]

FYI, the base is still there, but the statue is gone.

In terms of comparing Malcolm X to Silent Sam. Malcolm X statue was put up despite his hatred of Jews, not because of it. Silent Sam was put up in 1913 at the height of white supremacy to send that message. If it was done to honor Confederate dead, it would have been erected soon after the end of the Civil War.

That logic is ridiculous. Since when is there be a requirement on how long after a war memorials can be erected?

For example, the World War II Memorial wasn't opened until 2004, which is a much longer time frame than it was for Silent Sam to be erected following the end of the Civil War.

Yes, but America *won* World War II.

We didn't win the Vietnam War but we still have a memorial for fallen soldiers and those who went missing in action.

We also "lost" Korea considering the war ended in an ongoing stalemate.

Nah. We save South Korea. 98% of their Nation would disagree that the war was a loss. MacArthur screwed up by not stopping a bit north of Pyongyang and triggering the Chinese Counterattack, but still a victory.

To be fair, we don't really know what Korea would look like if it had been unified. Its politics may have ended up very differently, and it could be more like Vietnam today - an authoritarian market state under one government, with a median income similar to China's, and no nuclear crisis - which some South Koreans would find preferable to the status quo. You can't really say what the alternative would be after so long.

There is absolutely zero indication under the sun that the entire Korean Peninsula United under the Kim's would be any different then North Korea is today, let alone and at least minutely evolving or authoritarian regime like Vietnam. Literally none. That's Abraham Lincoln Vampire killer level fantasy.

What's the meaning of an "indication" for something extrapolated from the birth of a country forward by 70 years? The point is you can't say with any certainty that a united Korean Peninsula would be what it is today, with Kim Jong Un in power, and the exact same policies in place. Everything about it would be different. Korea's entire strategic calculus would have been different. The entire siege mentality that North Korea has where it needs nuclear weapons in the first place wouldn't exist.

You think the Sea of Japan would change the massive paranoia endemic to the Kim regime for over half a century? Its strategic calculus as you call it, trying to Gussy up your horsesh**t baseless random ass speculation in a pantea of faux intellectualism, would still be the hermit Kingdom of the world supported by China. You can't point out one reason why absorption of the entire Korean Peninsula would change the most doctrinaire rigid ideology of the second half of the 20th century 1iota.

But why do I even waste the bandwidth? You've made it crystal clear that you've long jumped the shark as a poster and a person.

Personal attacks are against the rules. Badger, this is a political forum. People are going to disagree with you on political topics. Even though I have a thick skin and don't take things personally, I'm still human, and your insults against me still hurt, and I'd ask that you cut it out.

All I'm pointing out is that if the most important event on the Korean peninsula in the past 70 years had turned out differently, we can't say for sure what would have happened 70 years down the road, and to assume that we can is foolish. I don't see why that is so controversial.

North Korea's nuclear ambitions began when John Foster Dulles refused to sign a peace treaty in 1954 and then the U.S. moved nuclear weapons into South Korea. So there's your indication for one major difference. The casual factor for their nuclear program wouldn't exist.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

(whataboutism deleted)

Neither the campus nor the local government want the monument to slavery there, but NC’s autocratic government has banned local governments from removing statues. When you shut down democracy, you get extralegal violence.

What are you famed tough guys going to do?

Neither one of us lives in NC but I imagine putting independent redistricting on the ballot so they never get a 50/50 state drawn to have an artificial supermajority of one party that refuses to work with a governor of a different party whom they stripped of powers ever again would be a good place to start

This x 100

The only people who can put something on the NC ballot, is the NC State legislature.

NC's legislative supremacy is also a product of the Jim Crow era.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

So it’s cool for Seattle to have a statue of a butcher like Vladimir Lenin but not for a former confederate state to have a statue commemorating the war?

To lenin’s credit, he never declared war on America. The same cannot be said of the Conferate baboons whose descendants like to fancy themselves as the REAL MURICAN PATRIOTS as they unironically fly the Confederate flag from the back of their rusted out Fords.

He called for global revolution though.

Also cars don't tend to rust in most of the South, because unlike the North, they are not exposed to much salt on the roads during the winter.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Only rabid Southern reactionaries care about the "honor" of these statues. Those people are already locked into the GOP.

My wife and sons are direct descendants of General John Bell Hood, and in the family tree of Robert E. Lee.  My wife and I grew up in the North, and are Northerners by birth and by rearing. 

I'm not a CSA guy, but I consider honoring Confederate veterans to be a different issue than honoring Confederate leaders.  Silent Sam was a low key way to appropriately do that.

There is no difference between the two. The Confederate veterans were all virulent racists who believed black people were feral animals who deserved the status of slave. Stop trying to romanticize it and pretending that they were doing anything other than ensuring they had a permanent underclass that they could have to make themselves feel better about their own miserable lives.

While I stand by the post that is quoted in Truman's signature 100% about the reason why Lincoln is honored is because he advanced the ball while Lee played defense, it is important to remember the context of that post as well. Most everyone had racist views in this time period.

Ironically, among the union supporters, the most oppressive racists would be the most fervent abolitionists, many of whom wanted to abolish slavery because Black codes were standing in the way of slaves being "civilized" and "Christianized". These were also many of the same people who supported public schools as a means to force Catholics to learn the King James bible.

Also among union soldiers who likely had a number of people who didn't have a problem with slavery but hated secession. Sherman lived in the South before the war, was fine with slavery and had a fondness for Southerners. His motivation was militant opposition to secession.

It requires the suspension of disbelief to say that every single draftee (South instituted the Draft in 1862) even from the Mountain counties of East Tennessee and Western NC/VA, were all militant racists who wanted the salves kept in bondage so they could have a permanent underclass.... Many of these people hated the Plantation elites because they often dominated politics to their detriment, many of them were Whigs while the rest of the state had been Democrats, and a number of them became Republicans after the war (East TN has been Republican since the 1880's). At the same time, these areas remained under Confederate Control the longest (except for West Virginia obviously), because they were closer to the interior of the Confederacy while Union advance followed the rivers.

There is a scene in the movie Saving Private Ryan, towards the beginning in fact where two Americans come across two "Germans" trying to surrender and unable to understand them proceed to shoot both of them. Adding to layers of the movie is that fact that unknown to both the American soldiers on screen and the audience watching (since it is not subtitled), the two were speaking Czech and were trying to tell them that they were Czech and not German. The point of the scene is to convey that war is both unfair and war is hell.

I guess it could be considered to some extent fridge horror but you realize from watching these types of scenes play out or a slightly different example being Play Dirty, where two allied soldiers were killed because they were mistaken for Germans, that these things can and did happen all the time in war in real life. It is for these as well as for the missing, that we have things like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

If someone comes into your town and points a gun to your face and says join or we will kill you (and in the case of those Czechs, probably their family as well), and if you are poor and lacking the means to escape before this confrontation comes, it is hard to say no.

I am not saying either of these two scenarios would justify a statue, but I think they definitely justify not being labeled with such a broad brush. I have celebrated more than any other the death of extreme lost cause mythology as a force in education and media, but if we go to the opposite extreme we are doing just as much a disservice to a fair understanding of the period and the history.

Politics drove the erection of most of these statues. A bunch of up and coming politicians in the Bilbo Generation (Born 1865 to 1890) wanted to wrap the Confederate legacy around their necks and since they couldn't gain the same glory their parents had actually fighting in the war, they went on a statue building spree. They also made movies and wrote books (Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind). They helped to meld the Lost Cause mythology into a little man struggling against the powerful, the former Confederate officer goes west and ends up battling a corrupt land/rail/bank baron, who is typically in cahoots with a corrupt US Army officer. This is essentially the retelling of reconstruction.

[Atlas Force]

I'm sure there are legions of neo Confederate voters that were considering voting for Kamala Harris but will now vote for Trump instead because some students at a university they've never been to or heard of vandalized a statue.

[JA]

The statue was literally erected to commemorate a rebel, traitor, and White supremacist who proudly boasted about whipping an African American woman. The state of North Carolina obstructed the ability for local communities to make decisions regarding Confederate statues, thereby deliberately blocking any legal avenues that could've resulted in peaceful resolution. The students at that university had been vocal for a long time, demanding that it be removed. It was simply out of place and confrontational to the people and culture of that place; its presence forcefully imposed by legislators hailing from areas wherein the culture is strikingly different from that of UNC and Chapel Hill.

What did anyone expect to come of this? And what could be the point of so ardently defending such monuments, particularly in areas wherein the local population is opposed to their presence? The only explanation I can see is that it was intended to provoke or "trigger teh libs," to act as a reminder to the local minority population of the state's history of violence against them, and to serve as a symbol of the continuation of White power.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Because the erasing of history makes us doomed to repeat it.

Why the hell do any of y'all care about this.

You're getting your labor laws smashed, your kids's school funding cut, your air and water polluted, your pensions gambled on risk-free by a bunch of vultures, and money that should go into your public services funneled instead into the hands of rich people who think y'all are a bunch of dumbass rubes. And based on the amount of mental energy you people spend talking about kids knocking over a statue instead of any of the above, I'd say they're probably right.

Uh, what? So Confederate statues are the only reason a new Civil War hasn't happened?

[IndustrialJustice]

The "erasing history" zombies don't seem to realize that we're much more likely to "repeat history" in this specific context by literally honoring the same white supremacists that this country defeated and denounced. It's laughably backward.

[fhtagn]

The "erasing history" zombies don't seem to realize that we're much more likely to "repeat history" in this specific context by literally honoring the same white supremacists that this country defeated and denounced. It's laughably backward.

Honoring fallen soldiers that were alumni of the university does not make it more likely to "repeat history".

[Badger]

The "erasing history" zombies don't seem to realize that we're much more likely to "repeat history" in this specific context by literally honoring the same white supremacists that this country defeated and denounced. It's laughably backward.

Honoring fallen soldiers that were alumni of the university does not make it more likely to "repeat history".

It's quite clear that statue had a much greater and broader point by those that erected it.

[Sol]

Some white nationalists came through today, and quite a few counterprotestors were arrested.

[Progressive Pessimist]

The "erasing history" zombies don't seem to realize that we're much more likely to "repeat history" in this specific context by literally honoring the same white supremacists that this country defeated and denounced. It's laughably backward.

"Laughably backward" is the very core of the Republican Party and everything it stands for.

[Fuzzy Bear Loves Christian Missionaries]

You cannot compare the soldiers of the Confederacy, to soldiers of the Vietnam War or WWII.
Soldiers of Vietnam or WWII represented the United States of America.
Soldiers of the Confederate States of America were rebels and traitors to our nation. They represented a thuggish State that wanted to continue the inhumane and Deplorable practice of enslaving other human beings.

Per US Code, Confederate veterans are US Veterans.
Sorry buddy, better luck next time.

Did I say anything about "code" or "US Veterans?"
No, I did not.
I said that they did not represent The United States of America.
So, sorry, but try a little harder next time.

US Code is all that matters in this context. Your precious feelings (or the feelings of anyone else, for that matter) on whether or not they should be compared to veterans of any other war are irrelevant. They're US Veterans, just like those who fought in every other war we have been involved in.

My apologies to Ms KnowItAll, WhatISayMattersMore, Ex-Atlas-president.
I bow to your greatness that you know "what matters in this context."

And just in case you haven't noticed ... your puffed up, big-head is on display once again. Your true pompous, arrogant attitude, is out there for everyone to see.
Some things never change.

I suggest looking in the mirror before saying that next time.
All I did was point out why you were wrong. If you can't handle that, I suggest taking some time off for a breather, maybe go get laid or something. 

I suggested that to him once and it earned me my first moderated post.  And I wasn't even as forward as this, lol.