General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Georgia, can we talk about Stone Mountain and the racist eyesore upon its face? [View all]Chainfire
(17,474 posts)How far do we go with removing references to our evil past? Should we also remove the monuments to all Americans who, at any time in their lives, held slaves?
Should we remove monuments for those who participated in the wars against Native Americans? Andrew Jackson slaughtered and relocated whole tribes, man, woman and child, his actions were the very definition of genocide, yet damn near every town in the nation with more than two streets, has a Jackson Street. Should we bust up the statue in Jackson Square?
We have a monument to the airplane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan, incinerating thousands of civilians, should we be proud of that? In Europe, during WWII we used terror bombings against civilians and intentionally destroyed cultural sites that had no military value. (Dresden, Monte Casino for starts) We killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Vietnam in and unjust war that only benefited the defense industry; should we tear down that wall too? The Catholic Church is directly responsible for the deaths of untold numbers of native populations on their crusades to convert native populations; I find their actions to be highly offensive, should we bulldoze cathedrals?
The Confederacy is not something to be publicly celebrated, and I do not celebrate it, but it is certainly not our only sinful legacy. I think that it is not very sincere to only go after that single issue, unless the same logic that applies to the Confederacy should also apply to other historical events and individuals. No matter how many sites we destroy, it does not change, nor excuse the past, and it does not help us hide from the past. Perhaps we should have to look at the monuments every day to remind of us of how easy it is to for a society go off the moral rails in the name of patriotism and nationalism.
As a people we damned the Muslim fanatics who blew up thousand year old World Heritage Sites, in Iraq and Syria, that their religious leaders interpreted to heretical. Is it a similar situation? If we decide, as a nation, that we want to blow up the face of Stone Mountain, so be it, it is no skin off my teeth, I don't care if we pull down statues of Lee or plow under Confederate cemeteries and replace them with Wal-Marts. But we need to consider and understand what we are doing and why from a historical perspective.