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New Confederate monument set to be unveiled in Alabama

Most people that endorse slavery are ignorant and stupid. That doesn't mean they shouldn't die in disgrace.

And they certainly all did. But I have a sliding scale of disgust that scales up for Confederate leaders, and only registers a couple ticks for the human meat they used as cannoball fodder for their cause.
 
This is obviously to pander to White Supremacists, and so I'm against it like any red blooded American should be.

But for what it's worth, I don't have a lot of problems with memorials for confederate soldiers as I do memorials for confederate leaders, and this says it's a "memorial for the unknown confederate soldiers." If it's on private property in some middle of nowhere, whatever, I'll judge that person, but I don't think it's as egregious as a street being renamed "Jefferson Davis Parkway" or an elementary school being named "Robert E. Lee Public School."

Many civil war battlefields have monuments for soldiers who died during the Civil War, and those don't rankle me because the fact is most soldiers who died on the confederate side were poor, uneducated people who were conscripted into the army and had no choice. Even if they were filled with vim and vigor to fight for the cause of black slavery, it was because they were ignorant and destitute, and the people who were in power convinced them that keeping 'the negro as a slave' was the only way to maintain white dignity. The rich plantation owner's son didn't go to fight for Old Dominion and Dixie (and if they did they weren't at the front lines), the poor farmers son who had no choice did, and in that way, I don't reserve as much ire for the soldiers that died, versus the confederate leaders who sent them to die.

They still don't need monuments.
 

lyrick

Member
But if we don't put up a statue of Bin Laden on One World Trade Center how will we ever remember 9/11?
 

TalonJH

Member
There is a also group with daughters in the name but they've been quitely removing the statues.

They are removing them because they own them. They are just taking them back knowing that they will get taken down or destroyed. I just want to make sure that people realize they aren't doing it because they believe they should come down.

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Parch

Member
Talk about bad timing.
Either they don't watch the news in Alabama, or more likely they just don't give a shit.
 
Talk about bad timing.
Either they don't watch the news in Alabama, or more likely they just don't give a shit.

They're following the long tradition of putting up Confederate monuments in order to put black people in their place.

They're watching the news.
 
They still don't need monuments.

Agreed, no soldiers need monuments. They've been worm food for 160 years and I'm sure they haven't noticed. But, as I said, I have less of a problem memorializing dead soldiers as I do memorializing dead leaders, though I'm against these monuments and statues because they're clearly being erected to serve as rallying points for racism, southern revisionism, and white nationalism. I said that in my post, but I think there's degrees of disgust.

I'm a "proud" Yankee and I've regularly argued with ardent Southern revisionists, but when I've gone to battlefields like Gettysburgh and Richmond, I was still moved by memorials and monuments on both sides of the battle. I'm not taking selfies in front of a Stonewall Jackson monument, but I'm less offended by memorials to dead soldiers, many of whom had no choice. There's also not a lot of difference between the farmers boy in North West Virginia (now West Virginia because of the Civil War) than the farmer's boy in South West Pennsylvania other than the accident of their birth, that one was conscripted to die for Pennsylvania and the Union and the other was conscripted to die for Virginia and the Confederacy.
 

Zolo

Member
Private land, so it's ultimately theirs to do with. At least it's soldiers rather than leaders, but I'm wary on it glorifying the confederacy.
 

besada

Banned
Some places here trying to do the right thing and get sued for it.
Politics here are so tiring

Alabama has the same problem most of the Southern states have -- blue cities and red everywhere else. Birmingham and Montgomery counties both went for Clinton in the last election. In fact, there's a strip all the way across the state, following 80 through Montgomery, that's blue. The whole state is about 65/35 Republican/Democrat. And like most Southern states, the Democratic voters are heavily minority. In this case, you're looking at a state with a 26% black population, making it one of the blackest states in America -- sixth after Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Maryland, and South Carolina.
 
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