Regarding The Flap Over Confederate Statues

[Mister Agenda]

Yes, it's quite lovely for black people when they walk by a statue erected in honor of Stonewall Jackson, a monument to someone who wanted to keep them enslaved, for trying to keep them enslaved. We definitely shouldn't succumb to the temptation to remove it to a confederate graveyard or museum just because it makes some African-Americans uncomfortable for it to still be honored in the public square. That's so nasty!

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Guess what? It turns out that none of those statues were erected to honor their positions on those topics. However, confederate statues were erected to honor the contributions of individuals for their actions in rebelling against the USA in an ill-advised blood-drenched attempt to secure a separate nation explicitly to maintain the institution of slavery. But for some reason, there's no difference in your eyes between a statue to honor Robert. E. Lee for backing his state instead of his nation with panache, and one to honor Martin Luther King, Jr. for his leadership in the Civil Rights movement. Why is that?

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I think you are forgetting the real background to the Civil war. The war was a religious war in that the slave owners slept well at night believing that their god told them that owning slaves was the right thing to do.

The fights of "Brother against brother" were due to siblings taking contrary positions in the bible on the subject. Most southerners had never seen a black man until the abolitionist tug of war started. The US didn't have the internet then and the church pulpit was the main supplier of positional propaganda.

The confederates were not considered ordinary "rebels" of the US government because of the "PC" idea that "freedom of religious stupidity" is a "god given" right. They were just good christian folk that heard different things from their sky god's mumblings, and did a christian jihad over it. No harm done.

Tear down all the churches that preached slavery and other evils first. Then all the other monuments will be just laughable and easy to judge.

I'm not getting how your reply relates to my post.

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I live in Columbia, SC. If you don't think  removing an in-your-face symbol of oppression from the public square has enough impact on the people it's intended to intimidate to justify removing it, all I have to say is that my impression from close up is very, very different. No victim of horrendous oppression should have to waste the mental bandwidth it takes to deal with that kind of shit.

I'm sorry to have to go back into this thread, especially since I've spent a lot of time making an ass of myself here, but I have to ask: you did read the rest of that post, right?  Thumpalumpacus pointed out that the continued presence of the Confederate statues undermined the ability of minorities to "buy-into" society as a whole. I agreed with the point. However, I also noted that there are also a lot of things undermining that "buy-in," including that the Republican Party does its damnedest to marginalize minorities, and, perhaps more pressingly, that the police can potentially shoot and kill them for spurious reasons, especially if they belong to a minority group; I even mentioned Min's "Fucking Cops" threads as a compilation of examples of this fact.

I even acknowledged that removing them couldn't hurt, and that at least we can have the benefit of feeling better about ourselves for removing relics of a shameful part of our past. And If a community chooses to remove them, I have no real problem. But, let's face it: in the big picture, if we did, there's still a lot of racial issues we have to reckon with; you think racist cops will think more before shooting unarmed black men? Will the Republican Party figure out that it's a shitty thing to gut laws specifically designed to help disenfranchised minorities to exercise their constitutional rights (like, say the Voting Rights Act of 1965)?

In his reply, he said the thing to understand is how insignificant those monuments really are, and he does have a point. Take them down, okay. But the prejudice that spawned them still remains, and still in a concrete form.

If you don't have a problem with taking them down, what the fuck is your point?