"Concern you" as in "involve you" or "concern you" as in "which of these are you deeply concerned by?" Please clarify, Concerned Mother.

Wikey @ 13/1/2018 12:44

Buffy @ 13/1/2018 12:01 The confederate monuments don't serve as "lessons" for us to learn. They were erected by white supremacists as a way to assert their white supremacy. The point still stands. You can take nearly any historical monument and you'll find some ugly history behind it. All the churches in Europe were erected by Christians to assert Christian supremacy. There's a lot of ugly history there, but I don't think anybody would suggest we should tear down all churches today.

Yeah but those churches are still used, for the most part.

Confederate monuments are glorifying a rebel government that tried to break up the United States. Why would it make sense to honor that?

DR @ 13/1/2018 12:52

I'd be more forgiving of the confederate monuments if they were actually a relic of a different time when slavery was the norm and the war had just been fought, but a lot of them were put up during the civil rights movement a century later as a way of pushing a political agenda, not actually commemorating the people the monuments are supposed to stand for. I'd say move them to a museum somewhere, rather than outright tearing them down to preserve the history, but they're being torn down as a reaction to a changing social climate, just like the reason they were put up in the first place. Then being torn down by angry protesters is as much HISTORY as any of it, so "learning from history" is a fairly weak argument for leaving them up. There's no current social shift against the rulers of ancient rome that's going to tear down the coliseum. The statue thing is much more CURRENT in every sense.

I completely agree with this. The statues are history no matter what and should be preserved. A museum would provide the opportunity to display them with context underneath explaining when and why they were erected and why they were consequently taken down.

I wasn't suggesting they get their own museum, just displayed in a museum somewhere. Like a small, insignificant wing.

Wikey @ 13/1/2018 13:22

Mads @ 13/1/2018 12:51 Wikey @ 13/1/2018 12:44 Buffy @ 13/1/2018 12:01 The confederate monuments don't serve as "lessons" for us to learn. They were erected by white supremacists as a way to assert their white supremacy. The point still stands. You can take nearly any historical monument and you'll find some ugly history behind it. All the churches in Europe were erected by Christians to assert Christian supremacy. There's a lot of ugly history there, but I don't think anybody would suggest we should tear down all churches today. Yeah but those churches are still used, for the most part. Confederate monuments are glorifying a rebel government that tried to break up the United States. Why would it make sense to honor that? It is less about honouring as it is remembering. There is a tendency for people to go too far with ideas like this. The Nelson's Column example from my previous post wasn't hypothetical. Some crazy Guardian writer proposed tearing it down. On the confederate monuments though, I wasn't aware some were put up during the Civil Rights Movement. That does change the context, for sure. And I entirely agree with the idea of putting them in a museum.

I agree with you about preserving history. But I don't think having statues in American towns and cities memorializing the Confederacy is an appropriate way to do this.

Imagine being a black man in somewhere like Savannah, Georgia, with a Confederate memorial in your community and having to look at a painful reminder every day of what your ancestor's went through in this country.

Buffy @ 13/1/2018 13:20

Mads @ 13/1/2018 12:16 I wasn't suggesting they get their own museum, just displayed in a museum somewhere. Like a small, insignificant wing. "their own museum" was not meant to be literal but I don't agree the statues/monuments themselves should be preserved in a museum. Photos of them somewhere, sure. That is part of history. But, I don't think the actual statue/monument needs to be preserved. Obviously just my own opinion and many would disagree but they're a symbol of hate and destroying them is a symbol of sort of crushing that hate imo, or a step toward it.

What do you think about museums displaying pieces of the Berlin Wall, then? Or religious relics used in colonization, Nazi memorabilia from WWII, etc.? Not asking this to call you out, I'm just curious because this is an interesting perspective on the idea of a museum generally and raises some interesting questions.

KC @ 13/1/2018 14:24

Voted for: - Logan Paul bullshit - Sexual allegations - Apple slowing down phones - Trump's nuclear rant on Twitter - Trump's shithole rant - Teenagers eating Tide pods - Mass shootings - Big game hunting

These are the same ones I voted for, minus the Logan Paul shit because although what he did is really messed up and the discussion of exploiting privacy and human life for Youtube views and profit is important, I didn't even know who Logan Paul was until someone posted about him on here.