As long as we're talking failed regimes guilty of massive war crimes I'd like to see these get toppled too:
Lenin Statues in America
Las Vegas - outside Red Square Restaurant, Mandalay Bay Hotel - Headless
Atlantic City, New Jersey - in the Tropicana Casino
New York City - on top of the Red Square apartment building, E. Houston St. in the East Village[3]
Seattle - Fremont neighborhood (See Statue of Lenin (Seattle))
Head of Lenin, Los Angeles, California - outside a branch of the Ace Gallery, the Ace Museum, on the corner of La Brea Avenue and 4th Street.
Stalin:
A bust of Stalin is displayed at the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia.
I don't know much about the other Lenin statues, but I know a lot about the Lenin Statue in Seattle, so let me explain why I think there's no comparison to be made here between it and the Confederate monuments:
- The statue was singled out for preservation because it had several unique features among Lenin statues that made it artistically significant.
- After being determined that it was not going to be destroyed, it still needed to be removed to the us from Slovakia
specifically because Lenin was seen as the symbolic antithesis to the new government, just as the Confederate monuments are in the US.- The statue has basically no meaning to local far-lefties, and despite Seattle having one of the largest Marxist blocs in the country (albeit one which is still tiny), I have never heard of any rally at the statue, it being associated specifically with Soviet Communism in their mind.
- To the rest of US, the statue is, like HisGrace noted about the statue in Vegas, essentially a symbol of Soviet kitsch. We decorate it for
Christmas, we decorate it for the
Fourth of July, and
just for fun. In that regard, it is much more a symbol of our victory in the Cold War than anything Lenin ever personally achieved. It would be similar to a Statue of Robert E. Lee being put up at the US Grant Presidential library, or one of Jefferson Davis in the White House bathroom.
- To the vast majority of Seattlites, the statue represents our ability to make light of old conflicts, bury the hatchet with the former communist countries, and generally thumb our nose at McCarthyists. The important distinction is that nobody here feels any sort of historical allegiance to Lenin and, quite the opposite, see him as something worthy of mocking and messing with. If there were any statues in the South that were treated similarly, maybe I'd feel different about them being removed.
