Regarding The Flap Over Confederate Statues

[Rev. Rye]

Then again, they point out that anyone around the world can vote in this poll, so it may not necessarily reflect the views of Charlottesville's residents at the time [...]

Yes, and it's exactly the same category error. If we wish to take the measure of local opinion, we'll need to access local opinion.

And at least I pointed out the limitations of that poll. I suspect that a proper poll limited to Charlottesville residents might exist, but it's likely been buried underneath all the rhetoric. And if a commission formed by the Charlottesville city council convinced them it would be a good idea, maybe it's less lopsided than it appears. I strongly suspect that a proper poll, if it exists, may really be hard to find if that poll (with all its acknowledged limitations) was the best I could do.

Then again, whether or not the larger populace really wanted it gone, the city council definitely voted against it, and, legally, it's much the same thing. Perhaps it's a limitation of representative democracy, or maybe it's representative democracy working the way it should.

[Thumpalumpacus]

I'll take "category error" for $500.

You're quoting national statistics for a local opinion. Once more, sloppy thinking.

Dude, stop.

I've said I'm trying to find polls from Charlottesville, and these are the only numbers I could find so far.

It's been stated that the people of Charlottesville want the statue removed.  I'm attempting to determine whether that is, in fact, the case.

Let's see what you find, then. And in the meantime, you can offer your opinion from, what is it, Korea, right?

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Yes, and it's exactly the same category error. If we wish to take the measure of local opinion, we'll need to access local opinion.

And at least I pointed out the limitations of that poll. I suspect that a proper poll limited to Charlottesville residents might exist, but it's likely been buried underneath all the rhetoric. And if a commission formed by the Charlottesville city council convinced them it would be a good idea, maybe it's less lopsided than it appears. I strongly suspect that a proper poll, if it exists, may really be hard to find if that poll (with all its acknowledged limitations) was the best I could do.

Then again, whether or not the larger populace really wanted it gone, the city council definitely voted against it, and, legally, it's much the same thing. Perhaps it's a limitation of representative democracy, or maybe it's representative democracy working the way it should.

Forgive my pointing out the obvious, but world opinions aren't local, and posting them is not really pertinent when the question is what the locals would do.

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One of the prevailing points of this thread has been that, my beliefs about symbolism and free speech aside, the residents of Charlottesville want the statue gone.  Are you saying that this point was made without anyone actually checking to see if that was the case?

I didn't say that the residents of Charlottesville wanted it gone. I said that their feelings should be considered -- all of their opinions. I offered my opinion on the matter, which is that such statuary is a needlessly obnoxious intrusion into public life which works to deepen rather than shrink the divisions in our society.

Are we clear now?

[bennyboy]

Let's see what you find, then. And in the meantime, you can offer your opinion from, what is it, Korea, right?

See what I find? I would assume that since one of the dominant memes of this thread is, "It's their city, if the people of Charlottesville want to remove statues from public space, let them do it," that the people making this claim actually have information that the people of Charlottesville, for the most part, DO want that. I have to say that given the overall opinion in the US, and given where Charlottesville sits in that picture politically, that seems highly unlikely indeed. Frankly, I was expecting someone to immediately quote numbers demonstrating that position to be true-- but since nobody has, I'm attempting to get as close to real numbers as is currently possible.

As for where I live, that's a pretty clear genetic fallacy.

I grew up in the States as well as Canada. I'm also surrounded by Americans all the time, currently mostly black, with whom I can discuss things like this. But even if NONE of this were true, I have plenty of experience with statues, with cultural sensitivities, and with the idea of free speech. I'm a true enough Scotsman for this debate, buddy.

I didn't say that the residents of Charlottesville wanted it gone. I said that their feelings should be considered -- all of their opinions. I offered my opinion on the matter, which is that such statuary is a needlessly obnoxious intrusion into public life which works to deepen rather than shrink the divisions in our society.

Are we clear now?

Yeah, and I said that statues of Custer, Columbus and even Lincoln serve the same function for natives-- to demonstrate that their land is permanently lost to them, and that many of the ones most instrumental in that loss are still counted among America's heroes.

I then said that since there is a clear double standard, we need to find a way to resolve this. The two completely unbiased approaches I personally can think of are:
1) Take down all statues. Fuck them, we don't need them, and every statue will probably offend SOMEONE.
2) Treat statues of famous people as protected historical artifacts, and just leave them alone. I think the law in that state currently takes this position, actually, and that the Charlottesville city council had to do some pretty creative semantics to get around it.

I'm pretty clear, now-- are you? Or are you going to tell me that I'm ugly and my mother dresses me funny, so my opinion is irrelevant?

[The Grand Nudger]

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Well, perhaps not the hood wearing ones...but you seem to support the sentiments of the ones in ties who seem normal.  Mission accomplished, from their POV.

Not really, because if it were a statue of Martin Luther King, or even Jesus, I'd hold the same position.  Your campaign of guilt by association is noted and I reject it completely.  If white supremacists want those statues to remain because they are an act of ongoing insult and aggression, then they are dicks.  That they and I both think it's better to keep statues of confederate leaders is not even nearly a good enough reason to draw an association, and you're a dick for thinking it is.

You're the one creating the association, in case you didn't understand how that works.  I'm asking you about your agreement.  In this case, you believe that you agree with them on the issue but contend that you probably don;t agree with them on the reasons.  Here's the problem.  Our racists are also, largely, genteel racists.  They don't say "I want to keep these monuments to racism because racism!" - they talk about their statue enthusiasm.  They talk about free speech.  They talk about whitewashing history, ironically.  

These would all be poor arguments even if they weren't racists...it's not because they're racists that these are poor arguments.  As the many responses you;ve recieved to them have tried to explain.  In this instance, you would have people believe that you incidentally agreed with racists.  That the shit they use as a set of talking points...which you have contained yourself to in the discussion of the issue, is also..apparrently, incidental.

I offer this not to suggest that you're a racist, by association or otherwise, but to suggest that you're a normal human being upon whom the campaign to normalize racism through genteel talking points has worked.  It's expected to work.  That's why it's done.  Mission accomplished.  

As to the turn the conversation has taken......it doesn't matter an ounce whether or not the local racists love the shit out of them.  Oh I'm sorry, excuse me.  The freedom loving statue enthusiasts trying to save our history.

[bennyboy]

These would all be poor arguments even if they weren't racists...it's not because they're racists that these are poor arguments.  As the many responses you;ve recieved to them have tried to explain.  In this instance, you would have people believe that you incidentally agreed with racists.  That the shit they use as a set of talking points...which you have contained yourself to in the discussion of the issue, is also..apparrently, incidental.

Given two parties who think it's better to keep statues up, even controversial ones, wouldn't you expect a lot of the arguments to overlap?

I offer this not to suggest that you're a racist, by association or otherwise, but to suggest that you're a normal human being upon whom the campaign to normalize racism through genteel talking points has worked.  It's expected to work.  That's why it's done.  Mission accomplished.

Yep, that's me. An impressionable, easily-swayed idiot who thinks his brainwashers' ideas are his own.

As to the turn the conversation has taken......it doesn't matter an ounce whether or not the local racists love the shit out of them.  Oh I'm sorry, excuse me.  The freedom loving statue enthusiasts trying to save our history.

This is something nobody has really said so far, I think: what if most of Charlottesville ARE racists, and if they voted on the removal, it would be 80% in favor of keeping it where it is? Then what? Do we still demand that the statues be removed, because fuck the majority, some ideas are just more right than others? This very much does seem to be the case-- I doubt very much that the majority of the citizens of Charlottesville are offended by a R. E. Lee statue, and I even suppose that you might find that more than 50% consider him a truly great man worth memorializing.

[The Grand Nudger]

Given two parties who think it's better to keep statues up, even controversial ones, wouldn't you expect a lot of the arguments to overlap?

Would I expect that?  No.  I would expect a legitimately independent second "party" to have come up with a good argument, rather than parrot the woefully inadequate talking points of racists in suits.  

Yep, that's me.  An impressionable, easily-swayed idiot who thinks his brainwashers' ideas are his own.

That's all of us.  It's a feature, not a bug.  Consider the alternative, however. If it's just not possible that you've been swayed by racists whom you did not recognize as racists, or advocates of racism....and you honestly came up with exactly the same shitty talking points on your own....what -is- the difference between you and a racist, in this regard? You support racism for the -same- reasons that racists do...and you did it all by yourself.

It's difficult, for me, to see the point in angling for one conclusion over the other, in this instance.

This is something nobody has really said so far, I think: what if most of Charlotteville ARE racists, and if they voted on the removal, it would be 80% in favor of keeping it where it is?  Then what?  Do we still demand that the statues be removed, because fuck the majority, some ideas are just more right than others?  

Yes....that -is- what we do, because we don't rule by mob in the US.   Particularly not the racist mob, what with it being unconstitutional and all. So much for yammering on about freedom. A freedom that includes overt monuments to inequality being defended on the grounds that most of the people of x are racists...but....somehow....doesn't include the freedom of not living in the shadow of monuments to racism supported by racists.

This very much does seem to be the case-- I doubt very much that the majority of the citizens of Charlotteville are offended by a R. E. Lee statue.

The majority of the citizens of some town might not be offended by a "whites only" sign as well.  Point of fact, that's how genteel racism persists in the face of cultural and legal opposition.

[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?

[Rev. Rye]

My problem is with the Manichean outlook endemic to both sides of the controversy: I mean, the whitewashed view of history by many of those who support the monuments s pretty clear. The thing I've spent all this time arguing against is that a lot of us seem to have decided to react to that ideology not by looking at the nuances that might make their legacies complex, but by taking the old paradigm and simply inverting the places of the heroes and villains.

Personally, I'd like to think that they can be reclaimed by history buffs, BUT, and this has proven to be a much bigger but than I previously assumed, we evidently haven't reached the point where we can do that yet, and both sides of the argument are demonstrating this.

[The Grand Nudger]

They could be claimed by history buffs interested in the 60's, for example.  There are such things as civil rights museums. That;s where we store the rest of the racist and historically important public art for placard and statue enthusiasts to enjoy.

I;m not sure how you could acknowledge the whitewashing of history and then immediately invoke complex legacies. The one refers to the other. Lees legacy wasn;t, in actuality, that complicated with regards to either the civil war or slavery. Not that it matters, since statues to lee aren't -about- lee. They have nothing to do with the man himself. They never did. They're about whitewashing history in service of inequality - including Lee's.

[Rev. Rye]

Well, then, put them in museums. I've made clear throughout the thread it's the motives behind it that concern me. I have made that abundantly clear in the vast majority of posts I've made in this thread.

And with regards to the whitewashing of history, the impression I've gotten throughout this thread is that we've noticed that the "Lost Cause of the South" mentality is bullshit, and rightly so, and decided the best thing to do is turn it on its head. Lee was certainly not the saint people want to see him as, but from my research, he was a bit more complicated than that. Lee was no abolitionist, but he did have some qualms about the effect slavery had on society, even if he did not act on them. The CSA was founded on the desire to perpetuate slavery in its worst form, but Lee stuck with the union until Virginia seceded and he decided he could not bear arms against Virginia. He was notoriously silent on civil rights issues after the war. But then again, even his enemies in the North had respect for him.