HuffPo: UNC Students Topple Confederate Monument

[Fuzzy Bear]

The mob that tore down this statue were lawless punks, who accomplished nothing for any sort of good cause, and were fortunate that no one was injured by their actions.  Toppling that statue could have killed, or permanently injured, a person who was either (A) innocent, or (B) a well-intentioned lawbreaker foolish enough to be part of this illegal event.

"Silent Sam" was one of the least offensive Confederate monuments; it was a statue of a fictional figure designed to honor Confederate veterans who attended UNC.  It wasn't honoring a "slaveowner", and the sentiment behind this particular statue was far more defensible than honoring some "slaveowner".  To call the men who were not part of the Fire Eater politicians that drove secession, but served in the Confederate military (which, in their point of view, was "their" country) is a degree of honor that I view these men as worthy of as those who fought for the Union.

The Lost Cause was wrong.  On the other hand, we can argue that, to a lesser degree, our cause in Vietnam was wrong, or our cause in Iraq; do we not honor our troops that answered their Country's call?  And these young men who served in the Confederate military were, in a real way, in a no-win situation; their politicians put them in a position where their choice was to be a traitor to either USA or CSA; a classic dilemma that caused young men to have no good choices.  

I recognize the spirit in which many of these CSA monuments were erected, and I don't approve of that.  But this was a mob, breaking laws for no good reason, and endangering bystanders with no valid defense for their actions.  If they're all expelled from the University, I'm fine with that.

[Fuzzy Bear]

(The biggest difference being that this statue was genuinely destroyed by locals and not in part by foreign troops)

That's fine, but we live in a country where the rule of law prevails, where courts are open and in session, and where mobs are not supposed to rule.

These examples are not morally equivilent to Tar Heels Gone Wild, which was two steps down from a Toga Party at Faber College.

[Fuzzy Bear]

That's fine, but we live in a country where the rule of law prevails, where courts are open and in session, and where mobs are not supposed to rule.

You may have missed that this took place in North Carolina, a rather special state for "rule of law" and "courts prevailing" in the U.S. these days. The state politburo has expressly closed off all legal avenues for local communities to remove statues commemorating slaveholding and rebellion.

So be it.  I don't favor such laws, but counties and states are creations of the cities they are in.

And "Silent Sam" has absolutely NOTHING to do with slaveholding and rebellion; it has a lot to do, however, with honoring UNC alumni who served what was THEIR country at the time.

Here's some history:  North Carolina was the state that was the most reluctant to secede.  It was not the plantation state that Virginia and South Carolina were, and the western part of the state was not at all enthusiastic about secession.  Had Virginia not seceded, it is likely that North Carolina would not have seceded, but had North Carolina not seceded, it would have been surrounded by hostile neighbors, cut off from the union.  Once Virginia seceded (it took the promise of making Richmond the capital for this to happen), North Carolina's hand was arguably forced.

"Silent Sam" is not a slaveholder, he's a reminder of the gallantry and honor graduates of UNC displayed in battle during the Civil War.  They were going to be breaking someone's law, and their home was North Carolina; their choice as to which nation they were part of was made for them by Fire Eater politicians who carried the day.  This act was unfeeling, and based on ignorance of history; it dishonored gallant war dead and attaches circumstances to their service (defending slavery) that isn't entirely valid.  Silent Sam was a way to honor the dead without honoring a slaveowner.  

Instead, a bunch of ignorant punks held sway.  Punks.  

[Fuzzy Bear]

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.

[Fuzzy Bear]

... "Silent Sam" is not a slaveholder, he's a reminder of the gallantry and honor graduates of UNC displayed in battle during the Civil War.

Yes, and that is why ...

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That may be, but the idea behind Silent Sam is a reasonable one.  By your logic, Antifa's actions ought to ratify everything Trump says or does.

So what will happen when patriotic Americans topple the statue of Lenin in Seattle?  Will that be OK?  

There's a monument to Malcolm X on the campus of Columbia University.  What about all the folks who recognize Malcolm X as a person with hatred in his heart toward Jews who have to look at that monument; why should they have to look at it?  Why should Jewish students have to walk by the statue of a man who was an unapologetic anti-Semite?  

Anyone who thinks that Malcolm X didn't really hate Jews has never read The Autobiography of Malcom X edited by Alex Haley.  And any white person who held views about Jews that Malcolm X did would be an absolute pariah at Columbia University.  But he's got a statue at an Ivy League University (Obama's undergrad alma mater) and everyone's just fine with it.

https://genius.com/Malcolm-x-chapter-19-1965-annotated

I'll let Malcolm X speak for himself.  But based on that writing, why shouldn't folks outraged at Malcolm X's comments about Jews not want his statue ripped down forcibly?  Why should Jewish students at Columbia have to look at a statue that honors a person who was a flat-out HP for anti-Jewish sentiment?

I prefer, of course, for folks to live within the law.  Something the Tar Heels Gone Wild failed to do.  But if this is how it's going to go, perhaps I'll find a public statue of some HP who's a fave of the left and have at it.  Especially if no one is going to arrest me or cause me to suffer a penalty.  

[Fuzzy Bear]

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.

I will give honor where honor is due.  The right kind of honor to be sure.  I will not honor the cause of slavery, but I will honor the principle of young men doing what they believed to be their duty to their Country.  

I'm not defending the mindset that allows folks to believe that slavery is OK.  There's a lot of self-deception and willful blindness required to get to that place.  And I'm not confused about what the Southern White Establishment has traditionally been all about.  But there are a lot of less than perfect folks who showed courage when called upon.  I'm not going to urinate on their graves, literally or figuratively.  That's, in a real sense, what this mob did.

[Fuzzy Bear]

The legislature should rebuild it and post a 24-hour armed guard.  The law is the law.

Devoting all that money and manpower to protecting a statue 24/7 doesn't sound very fiscally conservative.

It's more fiscally conservative than allowing lawlessness.

But my solution is more simple- the statue should be re-erected and the students involved expelled.

[Fuzzy Bear]

As for people who are citing lawlessness, the statue itself was illegal as it violated anti-discrimination codes.

Are you spandex? Because that's one heck of a stretch.

Which ones?  And exactly how does the mere presence of "Silent Sam" rise to the level of such a violation?

I would also suggest that the demonstrator's vandalous actions are illegal on their face.  That statue violating "anti-discrimination" codes would have to be determined by a Court for that individual case, would it not?  There is no Court finding to that effect to date regarding "Silent Sam".

In first grade, I (and my peers) were evaluated on "Respects the rights and property of others".  That criteria wasn't dependent on the political views of the "others".  These are college students that can't live up to the standards of first graders in terms of personal conduct.  They are a mob more self-righteous than the Religious Right so many despise here.

[Fuzzy Bear]

I know this post is pointless and Fuzzy will never respond to it (or if he does, it will be some 10,000 character digression that doesn't address my point), but it's extremely well-documented that Malcolm X had some problematic racial beliefs, but repented from them after going on the Hajj to Mecca. The passages that Fuzzy linked were written before the repentance.

I just don't think that someone could be familiar enough about Malcolm X to cite words from the autobiography without knowing about how he disavowed racism (remember, he was assassinated by a black supremacist, not a white supremacist), so I don't see how Fuzzy posted that in good faith.

First off, that quote was from the LAST chapter of Malcolm X's autobiography, a chapter AFTER his pilgrimage to Mecca.  

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/malcolmx/section5/

Chapter 10 of the book talks about Nation of Islam theology (rejected by the Muslims of the East) that speaks of Mr. Yacub, an evil scientist that unleashed a race of white people on the Earth 6,000 years ago.  

https://genius.com/Malcolm-x-chapter-17-mecca-annotated

At no time did Malcolm X renounce his hatred of Jews.  His views on white people changed when he met when he traveled to Europe and when he met with other Muslims who were white.  His racism racial hatred toward other Muslims disappeared, but his hatred toward American white persons and Jews did not.

Malcolm X was who he was.  And part of his being was as aspect of hostility and resentment toward Jews that he never overcame, and never really sought to overcome, once it set in.  His words speak for themselves.  My question is why Jewish students at Columbia shouldn't feel free to destroy the statue of him on Columbia's campus like the THBs (Tar Heel Brats) did to Silent Sam.  After all, many of them are aggrieved by its presence.  After all, Malcolm X was anti-Jewish.  Why shouldn't Jewish students upset with Malcolm X's statue be able to take matters into their own hands?

The right answer to that is, "Because that statue isn't theirs to destroy."  

As for 2,868,691, I know I've posted in good faith.  I've been familiar with The Autobiography of Malcolm X probably longer than you've been alive.  I found myself admiring him to a degree when I first read the book, but I couldn't get around the fact that (A) he truly disliked Jews and wasn't shy about expressing that, and (B) at the time I was reading this, my girlfriend was Jewish, most of my BEST friends were Jewish, and I could not square the idea of him being this heroic figure with his expressed beliefs toward Jews.  And as for me . . . I concluded that he could not possibly be capable of rendering justice to me, especially in a dispute against someone who was a racial minority or another Muslim.  That his life experiences may have given him a basis for his opinions did not make him a Just man.

If someone can tell me that being upset with that makes it OK to yank his statue down, I'll listen.  If someone thinks it's not OK, I'm curious to understand why one is and one isn't when no one posting owns either statue.

[Fuzzy Bear]

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.

I would put that question on the statue-smashers:  Why not let the statues be and work with working people to bring about better working conditions, and address the issues you raise?  In such an instance, one might actually win converts to your point of view.

Why not let folks have their Confederate Hero statues and convince them that they'd be better off joining a union, or convincing them that their water is toxic?  It's a lot easier to do when you haven't alienated the listener with your own vanity issue.

The THBs (Tar Heel Brats) don't care about those issues because they don't work.  They don't have to deal with an undemocratic workplace.  They don't have to deal with paying bills, raising kids, etc.  Most of them, at least, and especially the THBs.  The Tar Heels that actually do those things weren't at the Destructionfest; they probably realized that the criminal record they might incur in committing vandalism might work against their goals to better their lives and the lives of their families.  THOSE Tar Heels have borne the sort of burdens that relieves them of the burden of being full of themselves.

[Fuzzy Bear]

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.

So hating Jews is something one's reputation can overcome without the hatred being eliminatet?  Is that what you're saying?  Or are you saying that overt hatred of Jews is less abhorrent than overt hatred of blacks?

At a certain level, your argument raises these questions.

Monuments placed to honor the Confederate dead were scarce during reconstruction.  James Swanson's Bloody Crimes: The Chase for Jefferson Davis and the Death Pageant for Lincoln's Corpse details Jefferson Davis's role as a revivalist of sorts for the Southern Cause.  A good many of the monuments began in the 1880s, and, yes, I agree that these monuments were a political statement that the Confederate Cause was right.  There's no question that Jefferson Davis was an uncompromising racist who believed in more than White Supremacy; he believed in a caste system, and there is evidence to support this.

But to say that the Confederate soldiers themselves were all fighting for "White Supremacy" is to say that all of our troops in Vietnam were "fighting for freedom for South Vietnam".  Many were fighting because they were drafted, period.  Some fought because they were professional soldiers.  Our war monuments honor our troops' virtue, not the virtue of the cause.

Silent Sam was that kind of monument.  Unlike a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, it was giving honor where honor was due.

[Fuzzy Bear]

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.