Protestors Topple Confederate Monument in North Carolina

[HisGrace]

I love how we have so much more unequivocal condemnation of vandalism than we do of neo-nazis killing and assaulting people. Great priorities.

[HisGrace]

"But that statue has such great historical significance and meaning to the local population!"

...said absolutely no one when this happened:

We need Donald Trump to issue a statement condemning tearing down statues on "many, many sides" to deal with this tragic national crisis.

[HisGrace]

As long as we're talking failed regimes guilty of massive war crimes I'd like to see these get toppled too:
Lenin Statues in America
Las Vegas - outside Red Square Restaurant, Mandalay Bay Hotel - Headless
Atlantic City, New Jersey - in the Tropicana Casino
New York City - on top of the Red Square apartment building, E. Houston St. in the East Village[3]
Seattle - Fremont neighborhood (See Statue of Lenin (Seattle))
Head of Lenin, Los Angeles, California - outside a branch of the Ace Gallery, the Ace Museum, on the corner of La Brea Avenue and 4th Street.
Stalin:
A bust of Stalin is displayed at the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia.

Not crazy about Lenin/Stalin statues either and wouldn't have a problem with them being taken down. Although I think the headless one is supposed to be making fun of him. The Red Square Restaurant has a ironic/mocking Soviet kitsch theme. It's a lot easier to laugh at something like that since we don't have thousands of hardcore Marxist-Leninists marching around and launching numerous attacks every year, as is the case with Neo-Confederates/White Supremacists.

Regardless, why are we bringing up statues of Lenin and Stalin in a thread about Confederate monuments?

[HisGrace]

In Spain the monuments to Franco still are conserved and only the communists bet to remove them, State referendum in each state on the monuments, The violent left and antifa would refuse to know that the result would not favor them?

Your employer needs to invest in some English lessons if they're going to pay you to troll on a full-time basis. Most Americans couldn't care less about what foreigners think in a domestic situation - you should at least be able to play the part convincingly if you're gonna do this.

By the way I have citizenship I am half American lol
The pathetic left is afraid of referendum.

Why? The left is the one that wins the popular vote.

I think if anyone's afraid of a referendum it's the people who freak out anytime someone suggests abolishing the electoral college.

[HisGrace]

>Implying George S Patton's political opinion is relevant to any of us

He's just an example of the point I'm trying to make. 1940s American men, including the ones who served in WW2, were not a very left-wing bunch. Plenty of them would sympathize with Trump and/or the alt-right today, contrary to what today's leftists apparently think.

My grandfather was missing part of his hand thanks to a German artillery.  He was a lifelong union man who talked fondly about the Maori, Ghurkas and Berbers he fought alongside. He thought Trump was an idiot in the 1980s. He certainly would not have changed his mind if he were still alive. He was disgusted at Bill Clinton's lack of military service and would find Trump's personal cowardice and embrace of fascism deplorable. (Sure, he wouldn't agree with me on some things. But he'd be just fine with people beating up Nazis.)

He also thought Patton was a jackwagon who got his men killed to boost his own ego.

An ex-girlfriend of mine whom I dated for 5 years had a grandfather who fought in World War II he was decorated. Bronze star Silver Star, Purple Heart. I forget which regiment he was in, but it was V, and I mean the first boots to hit the ground on Omaha short of the paratroopers who came in the night before. He was literally Saving Private Ryan in carnate.

After the war he spent his career organizing unions and was a hardcore leftist until he died in his 80s in the early 2000's. His opinion of George W bush and the Iraq War would have been deleted by the mods for inappropriate language.

Anecdotal evidence isn't, but please take yourself out of this bubble that the greatest Generation veterans were a bunch of hard-working Republicans with few city boy Democrats and Southerners whose kids would windup Republicans who fought the war against Nazism. The existing empirical evidence such as what I previously cited demonstrates the troops were overwhelmingly Pro Roosevelt. The fact that a bunch of been born anywhere from a hundred to 130 + years ago may not have supported gay marriage is neither surprising, nor remotely relevant.

The WWII generation voted for Democrats even into the 90's based on age stats in exit polls. Clinton carried the 50+ bracket both times.

Lots of people would denounce FDR and Truman as Sanders-like socialists if they ran today. I'm not a big fan of their economics, although that's a bit much.

[HisGrace]

Look, why didn't Rosa Parks just organized peacefully and democratically to desegregate the buses. Why did people have to do sit-ins at lunch counters when they could have just simply wrote their congressmen and senators? No, this woman is hardly Rosa Parks, and the presence of a Confederate statue is nowhere near as important as basic desegregation. But there is still a basic similarity involved where institutionalized racism and their symbols are protected from change through meaningful popular democracy.

Or put another way, if the legislature hadn't specifically gone to such lengths to force cities like Durham to keep their Confederate statues in place despite the willow the vast vast vast majority of his residence, no one would have needed to pull the statue down by force.

Oh, and yes, there is just a teensy teensy tiny difference between pulling down a statue and physically assaulting another human being, let alone running 20 of them down in the car

That's why I find the "outraged" reactions in this thread so put-on, and just a desperate attempt to deflect from what happened over the weekend. Non-violent law-breaking has long been recognized as a legitimate political tactic by both sides of the political spectrum for a long time, unless we're suddenly going to start condemning Rosa Parks and even MLK, Nelson Mandela, or Gandhi.

It's not like this caused a significant amount of damage either, it's not like Eco-terrorists blowing up car dealerships where they do millions of dollars of damage even if they don't kill anyone. This was about "sending a message" rather than inflicting a monetary loss.

[HisGrace]

The 2016 Green Party VP candidate argues that Washington's and Jefferson's statues need to be taken down as well:

"If you want to remove symbols of white supremacy why are you limiting it to confederacy? Yes Trump, Jefferson & Washington must be next."
--Ajamu Baraka‏
@ajamubaraka
https://twitter.com/ajamubaraka/status/897890816366137344

I'm really worried about this since the Green Party has a really great chance of taking both chambers of Congress in 2018 and winning the White House in 2020. Thanks for warning everyone.

[HisGrace]

Can we get rid of every photo of Robert Byrd while we're at it?  Please?

FDR threw an entire racial minority in concentration camps. Take his evil racist grin off the dime.

Bill Clinton had a confederate flag on his campaign buttons can we get rid of his statues.

I think those were unofficial. Even if they weren't, there's a big difference between a statue of someone who once put a confederate flag on a button and someone who was actually a leader of the  Confederacy.

[HisGrace]

I used to be pretty much indifferent on this issue, but leaning towards keeping Confederate monuments. I just didn't care enough to argue with anyone about it let alone protest. Now with them being used as a rallying point for hate groups I think we ought to tear them all down. When you look into it a lot of them were put up in the 50's or 60's, so that's really what they always were, I just hadn't cared enough about the issue to learn about it before.

Can you agree that we should not erect statues to people who fought against this country?

There is a George Washington statue in Trafalgar Square, London. Using your logic, would the Britons be justified in tearing it down?

Wouldn't care either way.

Although I think the reason it's up is to honor the founding of the United States with its representative government and Bill of Rights and all that jazz. Not to just to stick it in the eye of the Civil Rights movement like most the Confederate monuments are.

[HisGrace]

>Implying George S Patton's political opinion is relevant to any of us

He's just an example of the point I'm trying to make. 1940s American men, including the ones who served in WW2, were not a very left-wing bunch. Plenty of them would sympathize with Trump and/or the alt-right today, contrary to what today's leftists apparently think.

Thomas, if you're trying to make the point that the men born in the early 20th century and (at least among officers) late 19th century are more socially conservative than the average person in the 21st century, you're not exactly giving us a hot take here. Nor a remotely relevant one.

I think it's relevant. Leftists and their sympathizers are posting memes all over social media showing photos of American troops who served in WW2 with captions like ''violent, alt-left thugs''. The memes imply that all of the men in those photos would sympathize with the modern left today, which is an absurd assumption to make.

No, it implies that they wouldn't like a bunch of guys marching down the street with swastikas and fascist eagles on their arms yelling "blood and soil". They killed people like that. Right-wing outlets are denouncing the counter-protesters as "alt left" despite the fact that the only things they were protesting against were fascism and racism, the things we fought against in WWII.

No one gets called a Nazi for being against abortion and gay marriage. You get called a Nazi for choosing to wear a swastika and attend a rally that was promoted with posters showing a Star of David being smashed with a sledgehammer, caricatures of black people drawn to look like monkeys, and fascist eagles. Despite what the current occupant of the White House says there were no "very fine people" at that rally and their actions were not equivalent to those of anti-racist/fascist protesters. They deserve every bit of condemnation they've received and more, since so many people on the right see fit to defend and make excuses for them.

[HisGrace]

I'm sure that everyone who supports these statues due to "history" would be ok if Islamic groups or others erected statues to the 9/11 (or other terrorists), right? If you don't support it you're "trying to forget history"?

I'm sure if some Mosque put up a statue of Bin Laden just to "remember" him Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity would be as 100% fine with it as they are with the Confederate monuments.

[HisGrace]

No one is in a better position to identify things that are worse for black people than segregation than a white conservative.