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Time for report about another culture war battle that just flared up.
This time not current titanic struggle concerning fate of all mankind, but small reminiscence of another titanic struggle of remote past.
On May 1, New Hampshire Department of Natural & Cultural Resources unveiled in town of Concord new memorial marker honoring famous daughter of the city, one Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.
EGF was famous woman in her time, her adventurous life culminated in position of first chairwoman of Communist Party USA and after her death she was honored with official state funeral at Red Square.
It is easy to understand why many people are not amused with this decision.
...
So far, this stays local teapot tempest, blame game going between the state and the city, but it can easily escalate into major Culture War battle, it could take only some national right wing politicians or influencers take notice.
Concord better get ready for long hot summer of battles between red hat crowds trying to tear down the sign and black flag ones trying to defend it.
We had on this forum long and hard debates about historical statues and memorials, Confederate in the US, colonialist and slave trader in the UK, Soviet and Czarist in Eastern Europe, both debates about who deserves to be publicly honored and meta debates about who deserves to decide who gets to be publicly honored.
My take? If there is any issue fit for democratic decision of the people, it is exactly this one. Let people, actual people of the city, debate and vote who deserves to be memorialized.
If the citizens want statue of Czar, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Satan or Nathan Bedford Forrest on their town square, it is their choice and no one else.
You have to hand it to the Communists. Despite the appearance of "losing" at the end of the 1980s, they thoroughly mind-fucked just about everyone except for a few cranky holdouts into thinking they were just a bunch of idealistic do-gooders who were maligned and oppressed by right-wing authoritarians like Reagan. I don't think I know more than a handful of mainstream American Democrats who have anything bad to say about Communists or Communism. That narrative simply doesn't exist. They were victims of the real bad guys. End of.
As somebody from a European country that never came under communist rule, this doesn’t seem at all accurate.
The communists lost that round of the culture war so thoroughly that literally everybody, including those few who still consider themselves socialist, will fervently, absolutely condemn everything that has to do with Soviet and Soviet collaborators in the west.
I honestly just don’t buy that it would really be any different in the US, and if your experience says otherwise then I think you might be living in a bubble.
McCarthyism did have the inadvertent effect of making US communists seem as victims, and thus as at least initially sympathetic to most of the American left. They won't defend Stalin, but they will portray pro-Stalin communists as victims of an oppressive US security apparatus. Communism did not become popular in the 1960s, but anti-anti-communism became very widespread, especially among boomers.
That's why Bond films had to be rewritten from the books to stop the Soviets being the bad guys. Making Bond someone hunting down and fighting against Soviet spies/sympathisers would make him instantly uncool.
See also the portrayal of communism in pretty much every good anti-establishment comedy of the period, e.g. Monty Python. It's not communist, but it is always anti-anti-communist:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=VEy5vIWCJLQ
Eventually, boomers became the establishment. Anti-communist Democrats like Lyndon B. Johnson or Harry S. Truman became anachronisms. Worrying about communism became a way of signalling that you were a hopeless and contemptible square - a Dan Quayle type:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=83tnWFojtcY
Thankfully, there was nothing to fear from Russia, or from socialist regimes where people would have to line up for toilet paper amidst shortages.
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There might be a more thoughtful contingent of people who will argue that any Communist regime that has bad consequences was corrupted by the human weaknesses that Communism was meant to overcome (IMO, the fatal flaw of Communism), but most people don't think that deeply about it. The Communists lost the short game but won the long game, by spreading Communist ideas through academia and, downstream of that, civil rights movements, and downstream of that, entertainment and news media. That these ideas aren't directly associated with Communism any longer are part of its victory. But, for the most part, in the US at least, Communists were (ironically) "free speech" martyrs who were oppressed by the omnipresent fascism of big business and right-wing political leaders, or they were liberators of dispossessed groups in the U.S. globally, from labor to minority racial groups. It was a very smart strategy, and it divorced the incremental steps from the ultimate goal in the minds of the short-term activists.
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...Then why is Elizabeth Gurley Flynn getting a marker? Like, if what you say is true, how do you explain the event this entire thread is about?
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Post- communist / post-socialist countries are not as kind to the communists.
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Very online zoomers and gen X who know nothing, sure.. but is it the same for mainstream democrats who remember the 1980s and earlier eras ?
Communists should be seen at the same level as Nazis. Communists get tenure at major universities.
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The political situation in New Hampshire is weird at the moment, there are different factions in play than usual. This is going to be a big snarl point for the interventionist libertarian faction that exists there.
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Do you want to bet on it? Because even if it does bubble up to common awareness, it seems the more likely result is the first time a bunch of red hats try to tip a sign (or try to deface it using a car, insert your own more vivid alternatives involving chain here), they get arrested, the entire country uses their misogyny as an example That Must Be Stopped, the moderate Republicans denounce them, the RINOs want them hung like meat, and the Trump/Loomer axis gets distracted with an internal sex scandal instead of even noticing.
The people dropping a statute of Christopher Columbus into the sea were doing what a significant part of t he city council wanted done, but couldn't. That's how this works; it's not a sword that cuts both ways.
As a counterpoint, whoever destroyed the Georgia Guidestones seems to have gotten away with it.
Do leftists give a shit about the Georgia Guidestones?
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I didn't even understand this post at first, thinking a "marker" was something like a honorary statue. It's just a small plaque describing her life. From reading it, it's mostly rather neutral in tone except for the single mention of the Smith Act being "notorious". You could argue though that it is deceptive since it leaves out many of her worst associations though.
I'm hardly a fan of communism and looking at her life also not a particular fan of her, but she is certainly a notable person. Having a sign "this notable person was born here and is notable for X" seems totally appropriate. Given what other posters here write about her, the text should certainly be more critical, but I don't think having such a sign up is at all an insult to anyone, not even patriots. Ironically you could argue that communists should be offended, since the sign clearly tries to minimize all her communist affiliations, only mentioning that she joined the party at one point.
This is not the standard used for signs about people who the left is hostile to.
Yes, erasing people from history is a typical communist move. That's why you shouldn't do it, even to communists.
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"Communist" is already a win for the left. She was a Stalinist, joining the pro-Stalin CPUSA in 1936, around the time when many more humanitarian communists left. She stuck with the Soviet Union through the show trials, the Nazi-Soviet pact, the Iron Curtain, the 1956 revelations about Stalinism, and the Invasion of Hungary.
And for all her support for the Soviet Union, she had the gall to be piqued when the ACLU didn't want a literal Stalinist in their organisation in 1940, whose organisation was defending the use of the Smith Act against Trotskyists, suggesting that the "Rebel Girl" had a high tolerance for hypocrisy as well as bloodshed.
Then I suppose the most appropriate thing would be the plaque just vanishes and nobody discusses it again.
Redact that part of the town’s budget, too.
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I'm glad that there is now a communist statue to mirror the situation with confederate statues.
I have ancestors that fought for the south in the civil war. I think slavery was an evil institution, but it probably could have been ended without a very bloody war.
I hate communism, and I've disliked many communists that I've met (the feeling was usually mutual, "You'll be one of the first ones against the wall" they'd tell me).
All of that just to say that I feel the same about this monument and the confederate statues: what a stupid thing to argue about. Building it in the first place seems like a waste of funds when your political group is in power. I'd much rather have "my" politicians setting up some kind of bullshit slush fund project that funnels money to favored people. Its also a waste of money to take it down.
If you are local and it really bothers you that much, just resort to good old minor vandalism. The legal penalties aren't that hefty. If you are a local business person with too much to lose, just bail out a local vandal from a legal situation and point him in the right direction.
There is this general vibe that America seems to be picking up that everything political must be solved through the political process.
No! Terrible thought process! The political process has some pros. Its slow, has a lot of deliberation, optimizes for optics over all other considerations, and requires buy in from the semi-respectable class of people in society. Those are also all the cons.
There are three ways to short circuit the political process:
Ignoring it. Sometimes political entities like to talk a big game, but they don't have any actual power. I remember seeing this hilariously illustrated when the student governing council at my college would occasionally pass resolutions or support for foreign countries. Fucking idiots. They couldn't even dictate the menu at the school run cafeteria. Their resolutions of support were time wasters for an entirely impotent "governing" body.
Market solutions. Other times politics finds a problem and claims they can solve it. But unless its a public goods problem, or a tragedy of the commons, we really don't need them. Markets are great at providing goods and services. Hopefully somebody can just provide the product better cheaper and faster than the government can.
[other options]. I once heard of this guy. He had a tree adjacent to his property. The tree was maybe on land owned by the city. The tree would dump acorns and other annoying detritus in his pool. The city didn't really like removing living trees. Well suddenly the tree died over a very short time period. Some kind of weird ground poisoning. Strange! Anyways, tree is gone now.
This is like tearing down statues. You only get to do it if enough people in the government covertly support you that you don't get arrested for it. It wouldn't be difficult for the government to arrest him for killing the tree even with little evidence that he did it, they just decided not to.
Yeah, I'd second this. It's very easy to get away with property damage to a third party if the government wants the property damaged, but that this is at best mixed-benefit in the same way that a "needs killing" defense to murder has a pretty sordid history.
And it goes worse: Wallingford v Bonta has a lot of procedural hilarity, but in addition to the more generic (and caught-on-camera) threats aimed at the Wallingfords, Mrs. Nyugen also poured bleach on a tree on their property. The court issued a multi-year restraining order against the Wallingfords officially for pointing cameras past their own property line, but pragmatically for not submitting.
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