537
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
537 points (96.5% liked)
News
23259 readers
1545 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
As much as I am all for inclusive art, I would have not melted that statue and instead put it in a museum as a memorial to who the south once thought of as a hero. Maybe add some context like how he shouldn't be celebrated, but still provide historical context as to his person and insight into how people back then thought of him.
Don't worry, it's the south. They have about a thousand more statues of that traitor at least.
Plus everyone and their cousin-sister has the middle name Lee.
Why? They're a dime a dozen and were put up in the 1900s largely due to the Daughters of the Confederacy and to reinforce Jim Crow laws.
They aren't really worth preserving. A picture can be taken to explain how awful these things are.
Museums don't store this sort of thing though. Since it's not from the civil war, it's not sensible to store and exhibit such a thing. Imagine if people started telling the Louvé to display paintings inspired by the Mona Lisa, because it's basically the Mona Lisa. Museum curators would have no reason to do so, despite what the public thinks.
Edit: Also the statue is a piece of propaganda rather than actual history. There's honestly not much to say about the statue itself. The bulk of what could be said is about Lee, and actual historic pieces of his life do exist in museums. Displacing those real historic exhibits in exchange for this statue would be a shame.
Propoganda + Time = history.
The statue doesn't say much about the civil war. But it does say alot about the Jim Crow era in which it was built. Personally I think this is even more important because the Jim Crow era is far less well understood by most Americans, and far more relevant to the race issues we see today.
Exactly this. Plus, unfortunately, there are plenty of Confederate monuments and statues erected way after the Civil War whose sole purpose was "scare those black people into knowing their place." Some of those can find new homes in museums displaying the history of racism (with added context), but we can't preserve all of them. So melt the rest down and reuse them in ways that uplift people instead of oppressing them.
It's absolutely history but just not Civil War history. This is the Charlottesville statue and it's iconic of our contemporary far right nationalist problem. Imagine things like this being a part of an exhibit laying out the turmoil our country is going through.
Edit: A lot of key pieces of history are missing because people didn't look to the future. I think some of it should have been carefully stored in a basement somewhere. Out of sight for at least 20 years.
That would be one huge museum of equally bad similarly looking statues. No need to preserve them all, because there are so many of them, a couple will do.
That doesn't sound like a fun place. Hey honey want to take the kids to the museum of poorly made statues of hate today?
Yeah, the caption should be segregation now, segregation forever. And if we are legally forced to stop scratching, we will make their place clear by building statues to the people that fought to keep them slaves when they get their rights from the federal government. The statues were about sending a message to those that believed segregation was done. The stairs being melted is the right move to send a message to those that built them.
Unless the statue was erected by George Wallace, that caption is irrelevant. Put a caption of Lee's written words:
This passage is commonly cut off after the full sentence before you get the full context in which Lee actually cares about how bad slavery is for white people and how slavery was good for the enslaved.