Charlottesville

[pongo]

3 hours ago, Aristotle said:

I've watched it several times and for the most part The Birth of a Nation is a fairly historically accurate film. Have any of you even bothered to watch it all the way through once?

Sure I've seen it Sybil - at the old Museum of The Moving Image. Probably before you were born. As a film it is impossible to view in terms of how it would have been see at the time - we can only read contemporary accounts of how it was perceived at the time and the impact it had. But that's boringly irrelevant in terms of your stabbing question because I did not express an opinion about the film. You're doing the mad Aunt Sally thing again.

I am surprised you say that you have seen it and yet that you believe it to be historically accurate. Are you sure you have seen it?

[Declan]

12 hours ago, Aristotle said:

This whole re-writing of history idea is completely stupid, Declan. It may work here and there but you open up a pandora's box with no end to it if you really go down that road. I think monuments of the past serve as a reminder. A statue of, let's say Cromwell, isn't preserved because we all glorify and love him. These statues of him are there because he was part of our journey to where we are now, "warts and all" as he would say. The same with Churchill. Should be get rid of his statue because of Dresden? I think it's best to leave it all to local communities. If somebody wants to take down a monument, fine, they can take that view, but people who want to see the monument stay also have a right to their view. People shouldn't be using the levers of government power to push their views on others. If some morons want to take down a monument, there should be prior notification so that those who do want to preserve the monument have an opportunity to take it and put it elsewhere. But to see people pulling down Civil War monuments like the pulling down of Saddam's statue in Iraq, is really beyond the pale and an obvious incitement to violence.

It's not really  re-writing history is it? The history is the same whether a statue is there or not. 

Are you suggesting that because in the dim and distant past someone (usually the powerful politicians of the day) thought that Joe Bloggs was worthy of a statue. Their descendants should still feel the same way. 

In a way the erection of a statue fifty years after the civil war was just as much about how the perception of the civil war in 1920 Charlotteville as the current kerfuffle does about how modern Charlotteville sees it. Let that decision rest with the modern people of Charlotteville. Do they want a statue of Lee cluttering up their town? 

[twinkle]

Has anyone who is commenting here EVER been to Charlottesville??.

[Shake me up Judy]

It's Declan talkin' like a damn Yankee....

[Mr Shoe]

I see the Germans have got the wrong approach again.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/one-clever-german-town-outsmarted-neo-nazis-made-march-extremism-105530167.html

They should be tooling up and attacking. Trying to outflank them as they exit the park and then pound them with home made artillery.

Mind you, what would the germans know about nazis?

[Shake me up Judy]

.....and they say the Germans have no sense of humour. I hope when they threw the bananas that they were also dressed in monkey costume.

[Aristotle]

18 hours ago, pongo said:

Sure I've seen it Sybil - at the old Museum of The Moving Image. Probably before you were born. As a film it is impossible to view in terms of how it would have been see at the time - we can only read contemporary accounts of how it was perceived at the time and the impact it had. But that's boringly irrelevant in terms of your stabbing question because I did not express an opinion about the film. You're doing the mad Aunt Sally thing again.

I am surprised you say that you have seen it and yet that you believe it to be historically accurate. Are you sure you have seen it?

Yes. I have seen it from start to end, several times. I've also read the various contemporaneous accounts of how it was initially perceived and all the boring commentary by historians. The film uses hyperbolic melodrama to convey the underlying "zeitgeist" of the South during Reconstruction. It's historically accurate in doing at least that much, even if there is obvious artistic and stereotypical licence employed in it. It is a film and not a documentary, after all. It does a good job of explaining the origins of the KKK. As for the KKK's alleged later resurgence, I'm not even sure if that's true. When talking about the KKK, there is no singular institution by that name which has continued from day one. It died out within a decade. Racists and white supremacists may have taken on the name KKK and employed the regalia, and maybe The Birth of a Nation might have contributed at least to that, but I don't think you can say it was a causal factor. I don't believe there was a "revival", but an entire new invention which took on the name KKK.

[Aristotle]

9 hours ago, Declan said:

It's not really  re-writing history is it? The history is the same whether a statue is there or not. 

Are you suggesting that because in the dim and distant past someone (usually the powerful politicians of the day) thought that Joe Bloggs was worthy of a statue. Their descendants should still feel the same way. 

In a way the erection of a statue fifty years after the civil war was just as much about how the perception of the civil war in 1920 Charlotteville as the current kerfuffle does about how modern Charlotteville sees it. Let that decision rest with the modern people of Charlotteville. Do they want a statue of Lee cluttering up their town? 

But it is re-writing history. History lasts only as long as the last person who remembers it. Once it is sent into "Room 101", removed from public places, completely demonised, and history books are re-written, then history ceases to be history, and is re-invented with fake history.

[Declan]

But public statues are only a small portion of how we remember history. Do we need statues of Hitler in Berlin to remember the holocaust, should the Baltic States hold onto all their statues of Stalin as keepsake? 

Removing General Lee's statue from a public park won't make the locals forget the Civil War happened. To be honest if they stop seeing the Confederacy and it's defence of slavery as something to be celebrated by the state, isn't that evidence of them learning a lesson from history. 

[Aristotle]

13 minutes ago, Declan said:

But public statues are only a small portion of how we remember history. Do we need statues of Hitler in Berlin to remember the holocaust, should the Baltic States hold onto all their statues of Stalin as keepsake? 

Removing General Lee's statue from a public park won't make the locals forget the Civil War happened. To be honest if they stop seeing the Confederacy and it's defence of slavery as something to be celebrated by the state, isn't that evidence of them learning a lesson from history. 

But small portions make up the greater portion. History is not some singularity. It is, if anything, a total sum of all local history.

Your question "do we need" is irrelevant. It isn't about need or utility. To bring up a mass murderer like Hitler is really a red herring and not helpful to a reasonable discussion about Confederate generals. They were not mass murderers. They were generals fighting a war. They weren't going around committing genocide. So why bring up Hitler?

You again repeat the silly claim that the Confederacy fought to defend slavery. It didn't. That is not why the states seceded from the Union. If anything, if either side of the US Civil War was opposed to slavery more than the other, it was the Confederacy. They were pretty much in opposition to wage slavery which was at that time just rearing its ugly head in the northern states and spreading throughout North America, as it had done in England. There would have been a civil war in England too during the transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy were it not for it having the greatest intelligence (including counter-intelligence) service in the world to suppress it and keep order. 

[Declan]

Of course a Confederate General is not as bad as Hitler, I was merely making the point you don't need statues to preserve history, in fact sometimes statues and iconography create a misleading impression. 

I'll grant you that the Civil War was about States rights, but the right they went to war to assert was the right to keep people in chains. 

To spin this into a stand against wage slavery is bizarre. How does that work undermine the concept of paid employment by forcing millions to work unpaid? 

You began this exchange railing against re-writing history  and then seek to assert a dodgy theory of your own. 

 

 

[pongo]

4 hours ago, Aristotle said:

If anything, if either side of the US Civil War was opposed to slavery more than the other, it was the Confederacy. They were pretty much in opposition to wage slavery which was at that time just rearing its ugly head in the northern states and spreading throughout North America, as it had done in England. 

That's a nonsense and you know it Sybil. People used the daft notion of "wage slavery" as a defence of actual slavery - ie of keeping people in irons and whipping them etc. As if choosing to be paid to do work somehow equated with actually slavery (ie shipping people from Africa and treating them as if they were property). It's a position which only a very disturbed and sick individual or an internet troll would take today, Sybil.

[quilp]

The American Civil War wasn't just about slavery. It was considerably more complex than that...

https://www.civilwar.org/learn/articles/reasons-secession

[Aristotle]

I give up. People are so thick, it is unbelievable. Why do I keep getting called Sybil? At the time of the start of the US Civil War, plantation slavery was like less than 5% of the US economy, the other 95% was wage slavery.  Both are evil. One survived, the other didn't.

[Declan]

6 minutes ago, Aristotle said:

Why do I keep getting called Sybil? 

Because you're faulty.