‘Silent Sam’ Confederate Statue

[Jhhnn]

Perhaps at some point you'll realize the irony in supporting mob violence, perhaps the most famous examples of which were on the side of intolerance such as the KKK and course the biggest one of all of course being the Confederacy and their uprising during the Civil War. A mob you probably appreciate due to their high level of organization and political coherence in their aims against a government they felt "insulted their communities."

So, uhh, did the statue molesters leave anybody hanging in a tree? Beat to a pulp with bats? Run over & killed with a car?

Doing violence to a thing is quite different than doing violence to people.

 

[senseamp]

GOP explicitly banned these statues from being relocated to museums, so this nonsense about preserving them as historical objects or honoring the dead is a bunch of lies.
https://www.ncleg.net/EnactedLegislation/Statutes/PDF/ByChapter/Chapter_100.pdf

An object of remembrance that is permanently relocated shall be relocated to a site of similar prominence, honor, visibility, availability, and access that are within the boundaries of the jurisdiction from which it was relocated. An object of remembrance may not be relocated to a museum, cemetery, or mausoleum unless it was originally placed at such a location.

They are very specifically forcing local communities to provide places of prominence and honor for these statues of traitors. But looks like the people have found a loophole

 

[Alpha One Seven]

Local ordinance were foreclosed by state law passed by Republicans to keep these statues in place. This kind of anarchy is the direct result. Of course it would be better if this was done properly and the statue, which does have historical and artistic value of commemorating a student who gave up his books to become cannon fodder in the fight for slavery. But this avenue was effectively blocked by state lawmakers.
BTW, if there is any doubt for what purpose this statue was placed there, here is the dedication speech:
http://hgreen.people.ua.edu/transcription-carr-speech.html

The statue had to come down. North Carolina Republicans in the state house decided how that was going to happen.
As far as voting them out, Republicans foreclosed that one too with gerrymandering, and a Republican SCOTUS did nothing, so really hard to blame the students for bypassing this Republican BS and taking matters into their own hands.

Where did it say the statue had to come down?

 

[JSt0rm]

Where did it say the statue had to come down?

poor white man.

 

[Alpha One Seven]

Agree, get rid of those statues and monuments too.

Good idea, erase all traces of history and we can just repeat it all today. It's better to learn from history than rewrite it or destroy it. Hitler removed all the books and statues he found offensive as well, is that a good example to follow?

 

[Alpha One Seven]

poor white man.

What poor white man said that? I must have missed that part in the article.

 

[JSt0rm]

What poor white man said that? I must have missed that part in the article.

they dont need to say it. We all know they feel it.

 

[Alpha One Seven]

they dont need to say it. We all know they feel it.

So why do we have to take down a statue just because a poor white man says to, or any man of any color for that matter, can't everyone decide for themselves what artworks they like or dislike and what pieces of art need to come down? lol

 

[senseamp]

Good idea, erase all traces of history and we can just repeat it all today. It's better to learn from history than rewrite it or destroy it. Hitler removed all the books and statues he found offensive as well, is that a good example to follow?

Where did it say the statue had to come down?

Republicans specifically barred these statues from being moved to a museum, so go cry your history river somewhere else.
Sorry your participation trophy went down. History is still there.

 

[senseamp]

So why do we have to take down a statue just because a poor white man says to, or any man of any color for that matter, can't everyone decide for themselves what artworks they like or dislike and what pieces of art need to come down? lol

That would be nice, but NC GOP decided in 2015 that they would decide for everyone, even communities that didn't want those statues. That's why these statues had to come down this way and not be moved to a museum where history belongs. NC GOP explicitly barred them from being moved to a museum and required them to be placed in places of prominence and honor. So if a community did not want to honor white supremacists, its only option was civil disobedience and some rope.
http://www.ncleg.net/EnactedLegislation/Statutes/PDF/BySection/Chapter_100/GS_100-2.1.pdf

An object of remembrance that is permanently relocated shall be relocated to a site of similar prominence, honor, visibility, availability, and access that are within the boundaries of the jurisdiction from which it was relocated. An object of remembrance may not be relocated to a museum, cemetery, or mausoleum unless it was originally placed at such a location.

 

[JSt0rm]

So why do we have to take down a statue just because a poor white man says to, or any man of any color for that matter, can't everyone decide for themselves what artworks they like or dislike and what pieces of art need to come down? lol

a poor white man doesnt want to.

 

[Alpha One Seven]

That would be nice, but NC GOP decided in 2015 that they would decide for everyone, even communities that didn't want those statues. That's why these statues had to come down this way and not be moved to a museum where history belongs. NC GOP explicitly barred them from being moved to a museum and required them to be placed in places of prominence and honor. So if a community did not want to honor white supremacists, its only option was civil disobedience and some rope.
http://www.ncleg.net/EnactedLegislation/Statutes/PDF/BySection/Chapter_100/GS_100-2.1.pdf

Everyone has the right to vote in the legislators that they want to, and if the majority wants that, it will happen. We also have freedom of movement and can leave an area that we think oppresses our freedoms and we can also simply ignore the artworks we don't like. I moved out of a city that was going to far to the communist side of things because I prefer capitalism and freedom of choice.

 

[sactoking]

Nothing like big government conservatives overriding the will of the people at the local level.

 

[Blackjack200]

Good idea, erase all traces of history and we can just repeat it all today. It's better to learn from history than rewrite it or destroy it. Hitler removed all the books and statues he found offensive as well, is that a good example to follow?

Yes.

 

[senseamp]

Everyone has the right to vote in the legislators that they want to, and if the majority wants that, it will happen. We also have freedom of movement and can leave an area that we think oppresses our freedoms and we can also simply ignore the artworks we don't like. I moved out of a city that was going to far to the communist side of things because I prefer capitalism and freedom of choice.

Hahahaa, good one. It takes a whole lot more than a majority to make change happen in NC, because it is gerrymandered to shit and has vote suppression up the wazoo.
https://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article122593759.html

In the just released EIP report, North Carolina’s overall electoral integrity score of 58/100 for the 2016 election places us alongside authoritarian states and pseudo-democracies like Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone. If it were a nation state, North Carolina would rank right in the middle of the global league table – a deeply flawed, partly free democracy that is only slightly ahead of the failed democracies that constitute much of the developing world. Indeed, North Carolina does so poorly on the measures of legal framework and voter registration, that on those indicators we rank alongside Iran and Venezuela. When it comes to the integrity of the voting district boundaries no country has ever received as low a score as the 7/100 North Carolina received. North Carolina is not only the worst state in the USA for unfair districting but the worst entity in the world ever analyzed by the Electoral Integrity Project.

Young people aren't playing these Republican games, they are just taking care of business that needs to be taken care of. But nice try.

 

[JSt0rm]

Everyone has the right to vote in the legislators that they want to, and if the majority wants that, it will happen. We also have freedom of movement and can leave an area that we think oppresses our freedoms and we can also simply ignore the artworks we don't like. I moved out of a city that was going to far to the communist side of things because I prefer capitalism and freedom of choice.

liar. you never lived in a city.

 

[zinfamous]

Good idea, erase all traces of history and we can just repeat it all today. It's better to learn from history than rewrite it or destroy it. Hitler removed all the books and statues he found offensive as well, is that a good example to follow?

nothing was erased. Not even close

The existence of the statue can be preserved in a museum. People can go there and read about it.

The citizens of occupied states, after they kicked out the Soviets toppled all the Lenin statues. Should they have been forced to keep the symbols of their abject oppression on display? No, they shouldn't have, unless you are an ignorant cvnt.

Also, the only history these statues represent is southern oppression of black people, as they were never erected to honor the Civil War, but in direct response to specific, national and local, civil rights movements of that period. Facts, and we know all of this because history--which is clearly a history that you don't care to learn about, because you made an ignorant statement here, clearly oblivious to history, that was preserved for you.

Silent Sam was erected by a KKK asshole on the spot where he beat a black woman to a bloody pulp, explicitly for that purpose. Fortunate for us, the history of that event has been preserved in the very words of the very racist KKK motherfucker that sponsored that statue, EXACTLY AS YOU DEMAND. Lucky for us, we continue to learn from that, because we know the history, and the people made a decision: no monuments honoring explicit racism and bigotry.

Want to keep remembering history? Go to a museum, just as you demand. LoL--yoiu'll never do that. Seriously: how many museums have you been in? How many fucking books have you actually read? BOOKS. Not cliff notes, not summaries, actually sat down and read a fucking BOOK. Where have you traveled? Have you left the comfy boundaries of your comfy bubble land? Do you know a fucking thing about fascism and communism? Do you have a single bone in your body that is capable of empathy?
Do you give an honest fuck about the 99.9999999999999999999999999998% of humans that aren't you? What about the 57.576599987654% of humans that look nothing like you, have lived their entire lives completely unaware of you and your comfy western WASP lifestyle, ignorant of the type of life you have, but still live their lives, completely oblivious to your god(s), daily life, desires, stroll to work and back.

IN summary: fuck off until you learn the first fucking thing about being a fucking human on the planet earth, you goddamn cockneck.

 

[senseamp]

Everyone has the right to vote in the legislators that they want to, and if the majority wants that, it will happen. We also have freedom of movement and can leave an area that we think oppresses our freedoms and we can also simply ignore the artworks we don't like. I moved out of a city that was going to far to the communist side of things because I prefer capitalism and freedom of choice.

So you are saying that if people of a city want to get rid of a white supremacist statue in their city, enough of them should move somewhere else to tilt gerrymandered districts and vote Republicans out and and hope in the meantime GOP doesn't re-gerrymander the districts or suppress the vote to block them?
I guess enough of them decided that getting some rope from the hardware store was a better way to take care of the problem than playing these rigged Republican games.

 

[mikeymikec]

This "history erasure" argument needs a different kick up the ass and out the window.

The people who want to erase history are the ones who seek gain from its erasure. Example: In Soviet Russia, figures who had fallen out of favour with the government were sometimes erased because say the government felt that it reflected badly on them to show say their leader consorting with traitors. A few examples here:
https://petapixel.com/2018/07/31/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-of-soviet-photoshopping/

So, to apply that argument to the confederate statues situation, the only people who would be seeking to erase history would also be wanting to portray the confederacy in a more positive light, ie. confederates. As others have pointed out though, history is written in books and other forms of evidence, not statues. Furthermore, AFAIK not one of these statues is of a confederate slave owner stringing up or punishing a slave, or has a plaque beneath a general's statue inscribed along the lines of "<Name> was a slave-owning, slavery-supporting arsehole who fought/led armies in the cause of keeping slaves", in which case I would see why confederates would want to have the statues (or at least the inscriptions) removed, because it's an element of history that they would preferred to have painted over. If I had to guess, most of these statues will have a prettily-worded description of what that person stood for.

However, what we have here are people who are opposed to what those figures represented in every way, wanting to get rid of the glorification of shitty values. Logically, those people are also utterly opposed to erasing history, and probably would all want greater education on the topic of what those historical figures honestly represented in US history. It's the very opposite of wanting to erase history.

 

[mikeymikec]

Want to keep remembering history? Go to a museum, just as you demand. LoL--yoiu'll never do that. Seriously: how many museums have you been in? How many fucking books have you actually read? BOOKS. Not cliff notes, not summaries, actually sat down and read a fucking BOOK. Where have you traveled? Have you left the comfy boundaries of your comfy bubble land? Do you know a fucking thing about fascism and communism? Do you have a single bone in your body that is capable of empathy?
Do you give an honest fuck about the 99.9999999999999999999999999998% of humans that aren't you? What about the 57.576599987654% of humans that look nothing like you, have lived their entire lives completely unaware of you and your comfy western WASP lifestyle, ignorant of the type of life you have, but still live their lives, completely oblivious to your god(s), daily life, desires, stroll to work and back.

IN summary: fuck off until you learn the first fucking thing about being a fucking human on the planet earth, you goddamn cockneck.

<adjusts monocle>

I say, steady on old boy

 

[Sheik Yerbouti]

Good idea, erase all traces of history and we can just repeat it all today. It's better to learn from history than rewrite it or destroy it. Hitler removed all the books and statues he found offensive as well, is that a good example to follow?

lol.
what, do you have the memory retention of a gnat? History is written, it's in books, in museums. Theses statues were put up to show the Black man his place in society.
LOL.. erase history, what a maroon. That is the argument of a feeble mind. And then the hitler comparison, jeeezus.

 

[brianmanahan]

confederate statues should've all been torn down after the civil war anyway

why they decided to put this one up 50 years after the war makes no sense to me

 

[Meghan54]

confederate statues should've all been torn down after the civil war anyway

why they decided to put this one up 50 years after the war makes no sense to me

FYI....the vast, vast majority of Confederate glorification statues were erected during two time periods, the early 1900's and the mid-1900's, not just after the Civil War. Interestingly, both periods were times of civil rights movements.....but there's no connection because they're simply history and certainly not attempts by the white conservatives in these areas to use them to help remind the blacks of their place in society.

Certainly not.


/s

 

[Jaskalas]

confederate statues should've all been torn down after the civil war anyway

why they decided to put this one up 50 years after the war makes no sense to me

Various aspects to this question.

1: Reunification. They are not "confederate" statues, as in they are not distinguishably separate from the United States. The South is part of our country, their history and honored people are ours as well. We are one nation, one people with a shared history. Those who waged that war, at the time, accepted our brothers and sisters back into the fold. And as things worked in prior generations, locality and states meant a great deal more. There was far less national character compared to local character, local history, local "heroes".

So the end of bloodshed, the reunification of the United States, means adopting it all. It means accepting the end of slavery, the end of the war, in return for peace. Part of that peace, at least back then, was letting them live and let live. To maintain whatever dignity remained. Their noses were to be rubbed in it only so far as to enact the real outcome of the war.

Today's society appears to have no love for that status quo. The agreement that ended the war is broken, now it is the forcible imposition of our national discourse over theirs. To dishonor their honor. To tear down their statues and to redefine their culture and society. To finally end the "South", not just physically and spiritually as well. To me it appears more forced than it needs be.

2: This particular statue appears to be a gross violation of our societal norms today. For who erected it, to where it was placed. For who it honors. As an "outsider" myself, I would only value historical markers for military service to our nation. Maybe the statue discussed here was of a guy elected into office. I don't know. It seems fine to remove it given its particular context.

 

[glenn1]

FYI....the vast, vast majority of Confederate glorification statues were erected during two time periods, the early 1900's and the mid-1900's, not just after the Civil War. Interestingly, both periods were times of civil rights movements.....but there's no connection because they're simply history and certainly not attempts by the white conservatives in these areas to use them to help remind the blacks of their place in society.

Certainly not.


/s

As has been pointed out repeatedly those timeframes represent the 50 and 100 year anniversaries of the Civil War. They weren’t picked arbitrarily just because some white guys randomly felt extra racist at the same time.