Tarsonis wrote:Northern Davincia wrote:All ideas are eventually antiquated, we might as well accept that and leave the statues be.
You know I agree with you on the founding fathers and other non-confederate statues. We can just accept that history is messy, people are complicated. I mean sure our founding fathers were racist slave owners, they were also products of their time and happened to give us a governing document that would set the bar for freedom and democracy up through the later part of the 20th century. Not to mention birthing what would become the most powerful nation the world has ever seen in the process. Yeah they have some flaws, big ones. But the other shit they did is so incredible that it deserves public celebration, in spite of them.
However these confederate statues, it's not merely an issue of antiquated ideals. These men tried to found a nation entirely predicted on those antiquated ideals, committed high treason in pursuit of said nation, and after losing the bloodiest war this country ever fought in defense of those antiquated ideals, they were commemorated in stone by their contemporaries to ensure that, while they may have lost the war, those antiquated ideals would project long in to the future.
It's not about erasing history. These men don't deserve the glory afforded to them through these statues, and we would do well to make sure that neither they, nor their antiquated ideals, continue to receive it any longer.
Note that many statues were not even made by contemporaries but added far later for the explicit purpose of intimidating negroes.