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I've read the discussion on the destruction of General Lee's statue in Charlottesville in last week's thread. I got the impression that many commenters here are prone to come up with explanations why the official removal of the statue was at least unsurprising or objectively justified from a culture war perspective, and I get that. But it seems they aren't focusing on the palpable difference between legally removing a statue and destroying it in a furnace. Because as far as I'm concerned, it's a big step from one to the other.
I'm reminded of the political transitions that happened in Central Europe in 1989-91, because many local monuments to either Soviet politicians/soldiers or local Communists or Marx/Engels were officially removed as a result. Anyone can correct me if they can, but I think all those new political systems were content with just removing the statues and putting them in "museums", which in most cases basically meant that these statues were put in open-air storage in remote and mostly abandoned memorial parks to just wither away, but not destroying them, cutting them up, melting them down etc. This hasn't even happened to Stalin statues in the Baltic states, for example, even though local anti-Soviet sentiment was definitely the strongest in the entire region, not something to understate. You can still find and visit those statues today.
And in this case, even this relatively close parallel doesn't really work, because it's not like there was a fundamental regime change in Virginia since the statue was erected.
And what happened to Lee's statue certainly cannot be explained by financial considerations either, as I'm sure that whatever arrangement that was on the table for putting it away as a museum piece was cheaper than melting it down in a furnace.
The only fitting parallel that comes to mind is Napoleon ordering captured cannons to be melted down to build a gigantic iron monument in Paris dedicated to the victory at Austerlitz. But again, I'm sure I won't have to explain in detail how that political context was completely different from this, even though I'm aware there are many hardline leftists today who would've preferred the evil Confederacy to be publicly humiliated in such ways back in 1865.
In the end, the only sufficient explanation I can come up with is that local authorities were afraid that Lee's statue, no matter where it were to be placed, was likely to become a site of pilgrimage for right-winger heretics opposed to the culture-warring leftist interpretation of race relations in the US, hence the statue's destruction.
Plus, and this is just pure speculation on my part, I think General Lee was such a perfect personification of the Southern patriarchal ideal of gentlemanliness that he invites leftist hostility like no other figure in US history. Plus, he had the cheek to candidly express views on slavery and the innate characteristics of Africans that are, from a leftist perspective, uniquely horrible, just too painful, and cutting too close to the bone, as they say.
Destroying the statue was teabagging the outgroup plain and simple. The moderate voice in every statue controversy has consistently said something to the effect of "move them to a museum" which is what happened here. What this event (moving to a museum and then destroying it) shows is that there is no quarter to moderates in the culture war. It's very much in line with the friend-enemy distinction principle.
As a southerner who was on team "move them to a museum", I'm genuinely disgusted.
Can someone explain to me why teabagging this particular outgroup is a bad thing? Drop the moral relativism: some cultures/societies are so execrable that symbolically "teabagging" them is great. The Confederacy/Antebellum south is one of these---one of the worst cases of hereditarian, anti-egalitarian nonsense in modern-ish history.
What exactly do you mean by "moderates" here? Not hating a person who rebelled to support slavery isn't what I would call "moderate".
It's against the rules.
The question was fine, but the actual tea-bagging--
--is not.
Huh, I'm pretty sure I've seen much harsher language against "the woke" or whatever around here. You're really going to play into this what I though was a strawman where you can insult wokeism but need to be careful how you talk about literal confederate slaveowners?
As usual: other people's bad behavior doesn't excuse your own. If you see something you think violates the rules, report it. I'm not going to claim we catch every violation--far from it! But if the whole substance of a comment is "nah, $OUTGROUP deserves utter scorn," that's just not contributing anything of value to any conversation anywhere. It's pure noise, no signal. And that's without addressing the suspicious move where you substituted "people who prefer not to have Confederate statues destroyed" with "people who rebelled to support slavery" as the outgroup being discussed--maybe that was just an innocent mistake on your part, but even assuming this is so, your comment brings no light.
No. It continues to be basically everyone's favorite complaint about moderation here, though--"the mods are definitely thumbing the scales for my opponents!" But no--you're just the one breaking the rules, this time.
I'm sorry, what? The discussion was about gleefully melting down a statue of a person who led a rebellion to supported slavery. The "outgroup" (well, their values are so opposed to anything commonly held in the modern US that outgroup seems like the wrong term here) that's scorned by this action is the people who rebelled to support slavery.
Part of the bizarreness of this entire discussion is all the posters (including you!) making claims along the lines of "no, I can read your mind, you're really trying to teabag modern southerners"---there's a pretty big difference between "haha, we destroyed this statue of a horrible person" and "haha, we destroyed this statue even though other people didn't want destroyed, stick it to those other people". I assure you that most people happy about the melting down are happy for the first reason, not the overly complicated second.
No--that's the claim that was being made. So your response made the conversation proceed roughly in this way:
Except that the word used for the bracketed terms was "outgroup" both times. You did not respond to what was being said; you substituted the argument for your own straw version. I thought it would be easier to just point out that making the point you've made here (two different outgroups are under discussion, maybe it's good to be iconoclastic about one of them) was fine, but actually calling names was not. When you then strawmanned my mod message, too, I got a bit more detailed.
You're certainly allowed to believe that. But you can't assume it in the middle of a conversation with people who disagree, are you certainly can't do so as an excuse to nakedly assert that "some cultures/societies are so execrable that symbolically 'teabagging' them is great." That's too much heat for the amount of actual light you brought to the discussion.
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I mean, this particular group may well deserve tea-bagging*--just remember not to do that here, because we have the very specific rule about outgroups here; and it doesn't matter how good or bad a group is or isn't, that rule has everything to do with us and what kind of website we want to be.
.* And any particular member of this group who may want and consent to tea-bagging is welcome to DM me, because I happen to be into that.
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I thikn the moderate here is someone who wanted the statue moved to a museum.
IMHO, the Charlottesville controversy itself and the national politics surrounding it were enough to make the statue of historical significance, aside from it's object level of depiction of Lee. It should have been preserved in a museum for that reason alone, as an artifact of the Charlottesville event, rather than as a memorial of the civil war. Destroying it seems stupid on that front. That statue is a culturally signficiant artifact of 2017 politics.
Like if someone used a civil war era gun to kill the pope, the gun would take on more significance as the pope killer, than as a civil war relic. Then if someone came and melted it down because of it's racist ties to American slavery, I'd be flabberghasted at the missed point.
Yeah. Kind of facetiously: what if the gun had been used to kill a cardinal instead of the Pope?
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Why should I even accept the premise that hereditarian, anti-egalitarian rule is uniquely bad and horrific?
You don't have to, but "all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights" is a core part of the American civic religion, as is the absence of a hereditary nobility. So not accepting the premise is un-American. Indeed, it is so un-American that it led otherwise honourable gentlemen like Robert E Lee into committing treason against America.
We can argue about the wisdom of forming a more-or-less official Committee on Un-American Activities to punish people who engage in legal but un-American political activity with public humiliation, disemployment etc. (I for one think it is a very, very, bad idea). But the idea definitely isn't new.
Do the people who decided on and supported the removal and destruction of Lee's statue adhere to something called the "American civic religion" as a supreme ideal?
Because I'm very sure they don't. In fact, pretty much the opposite of true.
Did the US exist under an un-American premise from her founding until 1865? Because that's what this entire argument entails. Which is rather nonsensical.
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Sure, but then we do the same thing to muslims, blacks and latinos, because their societies/cultures too don't live up to or run directly counter to whatever values we presently hold to be very important. Come on, let's go burn the quran, let's ban black cultural icons, let's forbid the use of Spanish! We have a superior society to offer, so down with the barbarian cultures!
I'm being somewhat inflammatory here, sorry. But really, I do think you're taking the easy route by heaping searing condemnation on a culture of the past that cannot fight back, while cultures in the present that should run afoul of the same metrics get much more lenient treatment simply by virtue of being able to resist, or, more cynically, because this isn't about standards but simply about whose holy cows get butchered today. Someone here recently quoted Chesterton on Tradition; I guess my point is similar.
Also, to be fair, I am not American, so feel free to ignore me on this subject.
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If the worm were to turn and you were to find yourself at the mercy of your opponents, who would you rather it be someone like you who asks "Can someone explain to me why teabagging this particular tokenliberal is a bad thing?" or someone like this...
If there were such people to choose, I would choose them.
I just think they don't, have never, and will never exist on the RIGHT right. The best we can get is center right statist neocons; anyone who has strong opinions about Lee in statue form I would wager will never not employ the boot when given the opportunity.
That being the case, it is more important that they never get the chance than trying to compromise in some way.
It would be sick as hell if the liberal political tendency was wrong about that, but given the tenor of discussion here, with the smartest and most moderate RIGHT right population I've seen, I really don't think it is.
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I’d rather they pick the moral side to begin with, instead of sacrificing hundreds of thousands of men for the sake of their ‘honor’, and then be honorable. With gentlemen like these, you don't need scoundrels.
Spoken like an ideal Cheka or Gestapo recruit.
I would argue that the socialist propensity for this sort of thinking is the main reason the Soviet Union and Germany went down the paths they did in the first half of the 20th century.
It doesn't matter if I'm a horrible person so long as I'm on the right side is an ok thought in theory but in practice it means your side is more likely to end up as "the baddies" because it's full of horrible people like you.
Let's not do this please.
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Oh, but the german army was full of such honorable, patriotic men. They had made an oath, and they had a duty to their state and people. And by God they carried it out.
Complete misunderstanding of my point: It doesn’t matter if I’m a decent person as long as I serve an evil cause.
You might need to hurry up, because there's not a lot of them left, but talk to anyone who lived on territories that over the course of the years were occupied by Germans as well as Russians, and ask them their relative opinion of the Wehrmacht vs. the Red Army.
You're the one misunderstanding him. The point is that people like you are known to turn non-evil causes into evil ones.
Well who doesn’t love the germans. Those slavs could have taken solace in the fact that they would have starved to death in a very orderly manner.
Which causes, slavery, nazism? Anyway, we are not even disagreeing on the sides here.
Obedience, a sense of duty, loyalty, professionalism, those things are not good in a vaccuum. When they are present in people who serve evil, they become evil. They make things worse. It is morally blind to evaluate Lee’s qualities as if he had served the good. Had he been a cowardly, dumb, lazy drunkard, thousands of lives would have been saved. His honor has been a net negative for humanity. He failed morally as very few people fail. A mean-spirited, sadistic soldier in his army only has a small fraction of the blood on Lee's hands, he's an angel compared to Lee.
It’s like Scott’s ‘asymmetric weapons’ concept. Obedience, or, say, loyalty to your home community, helps both Hitler and Roosevelt, it’s a symmetric weapon. Otoh, disobedience, ie, asking the question ‘am I really doing the right thing here, should I give my loyalty to this guy?” is asymmetric, it is more likely to help the good guy and harm the bad guy.
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Personal opinion, no particular historical knowledge: the German army could have been so much worse. Consider the ordinary execution of genocides in history. The Holocaust was unique in organization and sheer scale of suffering, but at least the suffering it caused was, mostly, incidental and not the goal. If I'm de facto going to be the victim of a genocidal campaign, to be quite honest, there are worse options than the Nazis. There are even worse options in German history than the Nazis! Make my captor and executioner an honorable patriotic career soldier any day.
I don’t get what you’re saying here. They weren’t so bad, compared to some hypothetical regime that would commit a genocide of equal proportion, but would purposefully, systematically torture people before killing them… is that your point?
I don’t think a bullet to the neck under stalin or getting stabbed under pol pot was worse. They didn't go out of their way to make undesirable units suffer either.
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Primarily, because demonstrating naked, gloating contempt for your neighbours is corrosive to the social contract and provokes retaliation. In particular:
Everything that raises the temperature of the culture war from any side gets it that much closer to boiling over. Deciding to remove these statues provoked the Charlottesville rally, which provoked substantial institutional reactions, and so on and so on. Every escalation, and the retaliation for it, get you that much closer to the point of no return when people's decisions flip over en-masse to "this social contract is unconscionable; it's worth the transition cost of starting over". We're horrifyingly close to it now; if the Republicans nominate Donald Trump again and he is removed from the ballot that's probably enough to tear the Union. And to be clear, this would suck massively for all sides.
Even discarding civil war, the wheel turns. SJ may feel invincible due to demographic trends, but that's far from the whole story. Black swans happen, and city-slickers have more fragile lives than country bumpkins if there's a pandemic or a nuclear war. And if the Republicans do wind up with total power over you... well, you have a degree of control over how merciful they feel. Even from where I sit I'd prefer to avoid another White Terror; surely you don't want one either?
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Because those aren't what's being teabagged. It's modern day 'racist southerners', similar deplorables, and fellow travelers that are the true target, and the banishment (now celebrated destruction) of Confederate iconography is a good proxy for that. It is a flex not just over southern pride, regional history, and heretofore popular mythology, but also over anyone that doesn't like to see current progressives' thoughtless pursuit of cleansing art and media rewarded.
I have no ties to or love for anything Confederate. It's not in my family tree and I was bred Blue tribe enough to reflexively mock the whole modern shtick of it. Do you think I object to the statues' removal because Lee is a super cool dude and slavery was no big deal, or what?
I think that it might be good to remove the statues to some kind of monument park or something like that: would we build statues of General Howe in our public squares? Of Nazi leaders? What about Soviet ones? These men committed high treason against the Union and in my view were handled very leniently; the traditional penalty for high treason is death. If they're still going to be sitting out there, I think they need some additional context...plaques or something...stating that these individuals were revered by the society that erected them but in the fullness of time, we have realized that these individuals were gentlemanly, polite slaveowning traitors.
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Because many of us have found the hard way that the outgroup being teabagged by this is marked not by neoconfederatism but rather people who speak a bit slower than those on TV. Why do you suppose that so many people learn to disguise their natural southern accent at work? Hell, speaking with a country new england accent got me many of the same accusations.
Classism, probably.
Nothing more shameful than looking and sounding poor, except for looking and sounding poor and being white.
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