Alabama acting to make sure cities don't remove confederate monuments
- Thread starter iu_a_att
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When stationed in Germany, my German landlord after several cognacs revealed a sense of pride in having served in the German military during WWII. To prove his point regarding Nazi military physical fitness he did about thirty pushups and walked around the apartment on his hands. Not feeling a willingness to compete, I conceded to his superior physical abilities.
My point being that Herr Fogel was proud to have been a member of a fighting force along with buddies who fought for his homeland. I don't think Fogel was proud of fighting for Hitler or gave a darn about Hitler. However once engaged in fighting for your country and fellow soldiers, the cause gets lost in the shuffle.
So the South giving tribute to a gallant effort by General Lee and the Confederate soldiers isn't an endorsement for slavery anymore than my landlord's pride as German soldier endorses Hitler.
My point being that Herr Fogel was proud to have been a member of a fighting force along with buddies who fought for his homeland. I don't think Fogel was proud of fighting for Hitler or gave a darn about Hitler. However once engaged in fighting for your country and fellow soldiers, the cause gets lost in the shuffle.
So the South giving tribute to a gallant effort by General Lee and the Confederate soldiers isn't an endorsement for slavery anymore than my landlord's pride as German soldier endorses Hitler.
Also, Gettysburg serves as sort of a memorial for the entire war, and all the death and destruction that came with it. Only an abject idiot would think that Lee's statue there somehow is meant to honor or endorse the Confederate cause. Rather, it's part of a larger collection meant to induce meditation on the terrible price paid when we allow our society to be torn apart by civil war.
So Herr Fogel treats you to a drunken demonstration of Aryan superiority, and you see this as a misty water color memory? Oh my.
In some contexts, perhaps, but many of the statues we are talking about here were erected specifically for the purpose of celebrating white southern heritage in the face of increasing agitation for civil rights for blacks. The context of their erection absolutely cannot be ignored.
Butler County Kentucky presents a unique problem to the purging. On the Courthouse square is a monument to the Civil War, the North facing side has the names of the boys who fought for the Union on the south facing side the boys who went for the Confederacy.
Doesn't seem like a problem to me at all. It's a memorial to the war, not to the Lost Cause.
I have seen it but I didn't stop.
The south facing wall honors those who fought to preserve slavery. Why shouldn't the names be sand blasted off.
Because it's in remembrance of the war, not a gigantic celebration of the confederacy specifically.
Because you can't provide a reason they should be. You need a reason to do things, not a reason to not do them.
the closest analogy i can think of is the numerous Stalin statues in various former soviet republic. Many have been taken down in recent years with huge controversy resulting
As a general rule, we should remember all war dead with respectful solemnity, especially front line soldiers. I don't see what that has to do with what this thread is about, unless you are incapable of understanding the difference between memorializing the dead and embracing/endorsing a shameful cause.
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anon_mlxxvlbug9dpa
Guest
So did Herr Fogel want a statue of Himmler or Goebels built in his town's platz?
No offense, but your story about Fogel (albeit a nice one), doesn't allow your conclusion.
This may be a tad off topic and perhaps naive but should those opposed to the things being discussed in this thread feel the same about movies which glorified the confederacy? Movies like Gone with the Wind for example. A documentary type film generally shows how it was, the cause and effect etc, but many movies actually glorify the south and their cause. Are they equally offensive?
But what exactly do you want done with Gone with the Wind? It's not going to be banned. People can see that, just like people can see Birth of a Nation if they really want to. There's a difference between that stuff, and glorifying specific members of the confederacy as heroes and literally placing them on a pedestal.
Gone with the Wind is a product of its time, and as such, it does whitewash certain aspects of plantation life. But it's a novel and a film, not a monument. Its purpose isn't to glorify anything. There's nothing wrong with a honest critical evaluation of its depiction of certain characters and events, but to lump it in with monuments erected for the sole purpose of celebrating white supremacy is as much a folly as dismissing The Merchant of Venice as no more worthy than The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Perhaps...I was simply asking the question to see if perhaps people felt as strongly about movies of this nature as they do monuments. I do think that many of the movies of this nature do glorify specific individuals and put them on a pedestal and it isn't much different than staring at a monument of the same character(s) portrayed in movie.
Oh well......
One of the conspicuous things I noticed about the Gettysburg battlefield is the difference between the monuments built by the Confederate states as compared to the Union state monuments. The Southern monuments emphasize much more recognizing and honoring the individual officers and soldiers. The Union ones emphasize the states and the units which fought there. For example:
State of Virginia Monument.
State of Pennsylvania monument.
I don't think there is any question that the State of Virginia monument is meant to honor Robert E. Lee. Moreover, I don't view the Southern monuments at Gettysburg, other battlefields, or the court house squares as endorsing slavery. Maybe it is a Southern culture thing. In the South, there seem to be many more statues in public places showing people than in the North.
Alabama monument:
Indiana monument:
FWIW, John Chivington was indeed a commander in the Civil War, commanding the Union troops, (Colorado Volunteers) at the Battle of Glorietta Pass. There is now considerable dispute about Chivington's actual role in the battle. Years ago, I read an account of the battle written by one of the Colorado cavalrymen who was there. That account differs from what we see today about that history.
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Wish I could like this +1000.I think CoH conveniently forgets that in an era when Black people were being lynched for Looking at a white woman,it probably didn't seem too prudent to "complain" about whatever statues/monuments old Jim Crow chose to erect...
Seriously My, that "argument" about the historical GOP is the one that I see made in every comments section of practically any online article on Race.Not saying it's true of you,but it certainly seems below you.It;s usually made by the closet rascists who neglect to realize that THEY would likely have been a Democrat in 1860s Amerika...
Are saying the southern democrats didn't become the southern republicans and have remained so? Yes, the dixiecrats were extremely racist and the civil rights act was the last straw for a lot of them in terms of staying with the democratic party
That is common. There is a good debate on whether or not a major component of Shiloh, the Hornets Nest, actually happened. At Gettysburg, Oates believed the 20th Maine story we all know was a total fabrication. And Pickett's Charge may be grossly exaggerated, the vast majority of confederates probably never advanced beyond the fence row staying there for cover.
For my part all of this, movies, monuments are part of the historical record but also part of our cultural heritage. Think of a movie like Triumph of the Will by Reifensthal. It is a propaganda film to one of the vilest characters in history. But it is also a work of art. The movie is deservedly still screened but it is considerably different from a public monument that intends to signal a foundational common value. Those monuments to the confederacy were erected mostly during two periods, first immediately after the end of reconstruction and then again during the civil rights movement. In both periods the meaning was absolutely clear--the southern states and localities meant to proclaim white supremacy as core common value.
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anon_mlxxvlbug9dpa
Guest
That's always the problem with history. It's extremely subjective and very error prone.Fake news? Things haven't changed much.
Amazingly it turns out the people who were at these events often exaggerated the part they played. It may not be intentional. I heard a guy compare it to his days playing left guard. The only action he could follow was that in his immediate area, so from his view it was the most important action on every play.
history is written by the winners.
Oh, and it's "his story". We dont hear much from historical females
o
The first part is conventional wisdom, but our Civil War history is written mostly by confederate. Part of that was their fanatical devotion to the lost cause, part is Texas's oversized role in textbook adoption.history is written by the winners.
Oh, and it's "his story". We dont hear much from historical females
I lived in Germany for 6 yrs,while working with the Army in the 80s.An ex-GI friend of mine married into a German family.His wife had a son of 20 (about 6 yrs younger than my friend) who was in the German Army.My friend's MIL (the Oma (Grandma)) was an ex-school teacher,Hitler Jurgend who was the widow of an SS Captain.She used to ride around the countryside of the Reich spreading the gospel of the Fuhrer.She was a nice enough person,but she was still an unrepentant Nazi...
My landlord (and just about every other former Wermacht soldier I knew) claimed he only fought "the Russians".I often wondered if I only imagined that the Wermacht had fought against the US Army,since no one in Hesse ever admitted to doing so.
Humourous aside,another friend also married an older German lady and they lived in the house she grew up in.Her father was an ex-soldier who had a wooden leg as a result of an injury.He basically spent his pension on drinking,which was a nightly occurrence.
He'd get up in the afternoon,and head out to the gasthouse frequented by German locals to drink with his buddies.After they had exhausted their funds,they'd head to the gasthouses where the GIs would hang out and drink for free.He'd find a drunk GI that didn't know him and bet the sucker that he could hit his leg harder than the GI could hit his.
Shockingly he always won,and he'd engage in this routine on a nightly basis.Afterwards,he'd stumble back to the house and fall asleep with his bedroom window open,even in the dead of winter.My friend said they'd often find snow on the floor of his bedroom the next day.
Not sure what it was with Germans and open windows,but my landlady had the habit of going in to my spare bedroom when I wasn't home and opening the window without telling me.I usually only found out after a couple of days when I wondered why it was so cold in my apartment.
Both of these friends spoke pretty fluent German,and had a bunch of friends within the German community.While most of these friends would never admit to being Nazis,a lot of them had no problem praising Hitler for restoring "order".There was a sort of closet anti-Semite element who sort of implied that the Jews were to blame for what happened to them,sort of like what I see now on yahoo and other forums from people who post comments starting with "I'm not a racist BUT..."
I left Germany in '85,so I don't know if it's still true today or not.But back then in rural Hesse there was sort of an underground Hitler cult that adhered to the "he was a bad man,but he did a lot of good" rationale.They celebrated his Birthday every year,and were not particularly fond of AA Soldiers,
especially ones who were involved with German women.I can only imagine the situation was the same,if not worse in areas like Bayern and Badden Wurttenburg which had been Nazi strongholds...
i guess it's more historical "common wisdom", when the "losers" were killed or enslaved, and not in a position to tell their tale.
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In my southern Indiana high school in the late 60s, I got the southern version of history, with it being all about states rights, nullification, and the North assaulting the southern economy with the Tariff. Even in college, with all the history courses I took aiming at a major in US History, all the other "causes" of the Civil War were given equal footing with slavery.
There's the old saw about "The victors write the history." That wasn't the case with the American Civil War. Sympathizers/apologists of the southern cause dominated the historical account of the Civil War from the end of Reconstruction until the end of the 20th century. Only now is it acceptable in the academy to proclaim the the Civil War was about slavery and nothing but slavery, and that all the other "causes" are so much bullshit.
"glorification" is like pornography, we know it when we see it.
and a lot of those statues do look like glorification to me.
and no doubt far more so to blacks.
they need to come down. yesterday!
that said, we dance around the slavery issue when discussing the founding fathers.
i've read where G Washington was perhaps the richest individual in the new land, (if nothing else, displaying that money dominating politics and power is nothing new), and that his "richest" title was based to a great extent on his owning the most slaves.
where's the line between taking down the statues of confederate Civil War figures, and taking down the Washington monument.
i agree those confederate statutes that glorify fighting to preserve slavery need to come down, but we also need to hold the founding fathers way more accountable than we do on the subject.
on a side note, there is a large element in this country that are very "clannish", be it race, nationality, religion, or even political party. (even sports team allegiances get way out of hand).
no doubt there were many southern solders who were in it more for "us vs them", rather than for anything ideology based.
that said, that's on them, and when you engage in killing, just "us vs them" is no credible excuse.
war is only honorable, when done to protect the innocent against oppressors.
fighting to the death to preserve slavery, even if done for clannish "us vs them" rather than pro slavery reasons, is still disgusting and a disgrace, and shouldn't be glorified.
it's sad that leaders can invoke such strong loyalties through playing up "us vs them", rather than only through strong ideological values.
and a lot of those statues do look like glorification to me.
and no doubt far more so to blacks.
they need to come down. yesterday!
that said, we dance around the slavery issue when discussing the founding fathers.
i've read where G Washington was perhaps the richest individual in the new land, (if nothing else, displaying that money dominating politics and power is nothing new), and that his "richest" title was based to a great extent on his owning the most slaves.
where's the line between taking down the statues of confederate Civil War figures, and taking down the Washington monument.
i agree those confederate statutes that glorify fighting to preserve slavery need to come down, but we also need to hold the founding fathers way more accountable than we do on the subject.
on a side note, there is a large element in this country that are very "clannish", be it race, nationality, religion, or even political party. (even sports team allegiances get way out of hand).
no doubt there were many southern solders who were in it more for "us vs them", rather than for anything ideology based.
that said, that's on them, and when you engage in killing, just "us vs them" is no credible excuse.
war is only honorable, when done to protect the innocent against oppressors.
fighting to the death to preserve slavery, even if done for clannish "us vs them" rather than pro slavery reasons, is still disgusting and a disgrace, and shouldn't be glorified.
it's sad that leaders can invoke such strong loyalties through playing up "us vs them", rather than only through strong ideological values.
