Opinion of Toppling Lenin Statues

[Maxwell]

Should Germany have kept a few Nazi flags around for the sake of history?

Yes.

[SPC]

Freedom act, horrible actors.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Both. As Tony mentioned, they are part of a historical legacy that should be untouched in most circumstances, though the incident in the Ukraine was a perfect example of when you should do something like that.

[Frodo]

Mega Freedom Practice.

[H. Ross Peron]

FP in 1989-1991, HP afterwards. These statues are part of their countries' historical legacy and have a major cultural value.

While this is a reasonable argument, isn't there a difference between having those statues up in the middle of a public square as opposed to special area set aside for such historical monuments. For similar reasons (to avoid the Nazi analogy), displaying a Confederate flag on top of the State Capitol would be different from displaying it in a Civil War museum.

[Redalgo]

You have a very low standard for whether someone deserve to be venerated with public monuments.  Not everything Ted Bundy did was negative.  Would you support having a statue of Ted Bundy in the center of your town?  People could think about the good things he did, while considering the lessons learned, am I right?

That's at the heart of the distinction I think needs to be made.  A statue in public is venerating and paying tribute to someone by its nature.  You can learn from history and preserve it without affording evil people the tribute of public monuments.  As earlier mentioned, preserve these types of symbols in a museum or in a context that shows our contempt.

I'm a moral relativist. Though I in many respects despise Lenin, Hitler, etc. those feelings are heavily biased and cannot be based in perfectly objective, rational metrics for gauging how good or bad those figures were. Rather than being of the disposition that great historical figures should only have statues or monuments if they behaved in accordance to my moral beliefs or espoused an ideology akin to my own, I'd rather step back and be a bit modest about the whole thing. Let the historical figures be commemorated and let people see both the good and bad in them. If someone wants to build a statue of Ted Bundy that is their business, and I wouldn't support a bunch of folks getting together to vandalize said monument.

If my standards were "high" concerning who deserves monuments very few people would be pleased with the results. We certainly wouldn't have any statues of Washington or Jefferson, Ben Franklin or either Roosevelt, Jackson or Hamilton, and so on. We would not have any of Ataturk, Churchill, Ghandi, Columbus, or of a number of other foreign figures. The faces carved upon Mount Rushmore would be destroyed, as would monuments to the flag raising at Iwo Jima and of any figure who in any way, shape, or form assisted the Confederacy during the Civil War. Likewise would befall monuments celebrating war criminals, accomplices in genocide, and those who supported American imperialism abroad. The iconoclasm would be vast in what to target, reaching back for centuries.

The tolerant, more openminded me who is inclined to see such folk as half glasses of water instead of as glasses either half full or empty is much more sensible, in my opinion, than the one that would purge the fabric of U.S. society of all offensive impurities. It is totally fine if you think Lenin, Hitler, and so on are horrible enough to deserve being exiled from public spaces in such a manner but do then realize that it raises a question of whether you'd also support doing the same by having monuments to a great many folk famous and beloved in America done away with because of the atrocities that occurred with their complicity, or because of their deplorable beliefs, in our own past.

Personally, I think it is already troublesome that the victors of conflicts get to write history. Let's not completely forget the meaningful contributions made by even the folk we've been taught to loathe.

In regards to veneration, a person can have been great - glorious and worthy of remembrance for centuries - without being a moral exemplar or even one of the "good guys." On the other hand, maybe I don't entirely grasp the point you are making. There is very little in the world that seems sacred to me, including the symbols of our nation and its traditions. I almost never see a statue and get struck with a sense of awe, profound respect, inspiration, and such. More often than not it is just an artistic curiosity to ponder about and look at for a moment before continuing on my way. Hmm.

[Goldwater]

Mega Freedom Practice.

[RogueBeaver]

It brings a smile to my face whenever they bring them down.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Should Germany have kept a few Nazi flags around for the sake of history?

Not everything is comparable to Nazism, you know?

But if anything is, the Soviet Union is pretty damn up there. And in Ukraine you have an intentional famine from the Soviet regime that killed possibly more people than the Holocaust.

Nothing of this was caused by Lenin though. Stalin statues would be a different deal, for sure.

So I guess the point is that statues of bad guys should be left up for historical value, but not if they're too bad, which creates kind of an arbitrary standard of what's too bad. Kind of silly. Put the statues in a museum or historical display of some type, but leaving them up like before is obviously going to provoke a reaction.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Should Germany have kept a few Nazi flags around for the sake of history?

Not everything is comparable to Nazism, you know?

But if anything is, the Soviet Union is pretty damn up there. And in Ukraine you have an intentional famine from the Soviet regime that killed possibly more people than the Holocaust.

Nothing of this was caused by Lenin though. Stalin statues would be a different deal, for sure.

So I guess the point is that statues of bad guys should be left up for historical value, but not if they're too bad, which creates kind of an arbitrary standard of what's too bad. Kind of silly. Put the statues in a museum or historical display of some type, but leaving them up like before is obviously going to provoke a reaction.

So should we start toppling Louis XIV statues around here? He was quite a piece of sh*t.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Should Germany have kept a few Nazi flags around for the sake of history?

Not everything is comparable to Nazism, you know?

But if anything is, the Soviet Union is pretty damn up there. And in Ukraine you have an intentional famine from the Soviet regime that killed possibly more people than the Holocaust.

Nothing of this was caused by Lenin though. Stalin statues would be a different deal, for sure.

So I guess the point is that statues of bad guys should be left up for historical value, but not if they're too bad, which creates kind of an arbitrary standard of what's too bad. Kind of silly. Put the statues in a museum or historical display of some type, but leaving them up like before is obviously going to provoke a reaction.

So should we start toppling Louis XIV statues around here? He was quite a piece of sh*t.

Or, for that matter, renaming Amherst, which as it stands is named in commemoration of a colonial general best known for smallpox blankets. (Because of this there was actually a proposal a few decades ago to rename it 'Emily', for reasons that should be obvious.)

[MASHED POTATOES. VOTE!]

Actually, I like the idea of moving these remaining statues to museums or historical theme parks (we do have one such park here).

Toppling those statues during the fall of the communism was a diffrent thing, an understandable reaction and symbolic gesture (we had a Dzerzhinsky statue in Warsaw which was toppled and destroyed in 1989 and I even own a piece of this). But those communist-era statues that survived the transformation belongs to history, whether you like it or not.

While moving Lenin statues to museum or similar place is fine, I'd be inherently opposed to touching a statue of a fallen Soviet soldiers that still stands in Warsaw. Despite everything, a lot of them died while liberating the country from the Nazis, so that'd be just disrespectful.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Or, for that matter, renaming Amherst, which as it stands is named in commemoration of a colonial general best known for smallpox blankets. (Because of this there was actually a proposal a few decades ago to rename it 'Emily', for reasons that should be obvious.)

They aren't quite obvious to me, sorry...

Regardless, I'd like to see that. Emily is probably my favorite feminine name, BTW.

[Stranger in a strange land]

We should only stop when there are just a handful left...like 4.

[Hatman 🍁]

If they aren't popular, they should go. If they are, keep them.  Obviously some should go into museums though.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Or, for that matter, renaming Amherst, which as it stands is named in commemoration of a colonial general best known for smallpox blankets. (Because of this there was actually a proposal a few decades ago to rename it 'Emily', for reasons that should be obvious.)

They aren't quite obvious to me, sorry...

Emily Dickinson was from here and is far and away the most famous and culturally important figure Amherst has produced. My friends and I have a tradition of jumping a graveyard fence after dark to visit her grave at least once or twice a year.

I think I have a tendency to overestimate other people's familiarity with American literary history; sorry.

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It really is pretty, though 'Dickinson' fits in far better as a New England town name.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Yes, and I guess it's far more common to name places after last names than first names.

Don't apologize for me being ignorant.

[morgieb]

Move them to museums or something.

I don't really think they should be out in the public, but there's something about the wording that bothers me.

[LastVoter]

Terrible

Impossible to justify in any case, considering Lenin had pro-Ukranian language policy and was bringing a regime that would be much less brutal than the white empire. They might as well topple statues of soviet soldiers and erect a statue of Bandera to replace it. I wouldn't be opposed if Ukranians toppled a statue of Stalin, in that case they would have some moral capital to argue that it symbolized Russian oppression.