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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31793 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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The people of Odessa seem to hate Russian imperialism more than they are grateful for the one time she demanded a city be built on their soil.

So I reckon they'd prefer to live in village shacks as barbarians (also in the original sense of the word) - i.e. not in a city - than to suffer that statue to stand?

You're proposing a nonexistent dichotomy in the first place.

There is no law that forbids toppling statues of founders once they are no longer aligned with the current ideology/national myth/what have you. You're not owed your legacy forever and ever, deal with it.

Vandalism is morally reprehensible. I think that's a universal enough maxim to be natural law even.

I mean the fifth commandment is right there. Destroying the legacy of the dead for temporal power might be popular but I think it's ridiculous to argue that there is no principle proscribing such behavior.

Vandalism is morally reprehensible.

When I had learned this, it was in the context of "a bunch of antisocials destroying things the larger society likes and makes use of". It does not translate well to "destroying a symbol of an empire whose inheritor is kind of literally invading you and destroying things you like, with part of their justification being exactly that some chick of theirs founded the city you live in".

Then you don't know the ethymology.

The Vandals are an ancient Germanic people that sacked Rome in 455, and as part of it intentionally destroyed statues, much to the dismay of Enlightenment thinkers much later who loved Rome very much.

The term Vandalisme was originally coined in French by Bishop Henri Grégoire to describe the destruction of artwork following the French Revolution and comparing it to the sack of Rome in an attempt to appeal to the sensibilities of his time against the "rude northern race" and for Romans.

The word's literal meaning is the destruction of art and legacy in service of the political ideology of the day.

It's second meaning as the destruction or defacing of private property only came later, by analogy.

That's cool but it doesn't win you a war.

One could say the same about slavery, or censorship, or plenty of other and more beneficial crimes the Ukrainians are currently engaging in.

Winning wars has never been an excuse for evil acts.

Besides, if we must be ruthless consequentialists, symbolic gestures sound more like a waste of time and ressources than anything.

If you made weapons out of the statue I'd at least respect the gesture as art or competent propaganda in itself, but petty destruction is evil. Always is.

Of all questionable acts Ukrainians have been engaging in, I count removing a piece of bronze among the least questionable. I don't think we'll find any agreement on whether it's good to fetishize the past to this extent.

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