Rabbi_NASA wrote They wanna remove the Christopher Columbus statue from Columbus Circle in NYC. This is really getting ridicules. I understand removing Confederate statues and but now it feels anything that hurts your fee fees is offensive and must be censored/removed.

I can partially agree with you there. I think the reason people want the C.C. statues gone are because he was the reason the "white man" stole this land from native americans. He and his people raped and killed woman on their journey.

But then again, he practically founded America. That's what the statue is honoring, not what he did. He did stand for rape and murder, he was an icon for navigating the Americas first.

We also gotta look at who is reporting that these statues wanna get taken down. How many people actually agree with this? I read about the brittney spears one and it said like 700 people signed an online petition(which isn't very many)

The way they are going with the statues, it will cause another civil war...

ip wrote The way they are going with the statues, it will cause another civil war...

I don't think another Civil War is actually possible. When you get groups that absolutely hate each other together they are going to get violent. But the government, despite Trump maybe bringing racism out of people a little bit, don't a want a civil war.

Maze wrote How is teaching history about the Civil War and now the same thing? They will learn about the confederacy and what they stood for when they learn the history of slavery and the civil war. They will learn that they were fighting to keep African Americans enslaved.

When they learn about now, 2017, in say 25 years, they will probably hear about the protests and brawls that happened when we "got rid of confederate statues". In reality, the statues like I said before belong in a museum. When they are out in public they are truly glorifying those leaders and what they stood for. In a museum they can be respected for the history behind them, and further educate the children that visit those museums.

History is already being forgotten, is this what they are teaching kids these days? The south separating from the north had very little if anything to do with slavery. It had to do with separating from the corrupt federal government and unfair taxation the same way our fore fathers separated from Great Britain. The north had as many slaves as the south lets not forget that part. The whole point of the civil war was to keep the country united as one instead of being split between the union and confederacy. Lincoln said himself that if ending slavery will keep us united then that's what he'll do, but if keeping slavery will keep us united then that's what he'll do. The war wasn't about slavery it was about division between the union and the confederacy, period, the ending of slavery was just a by product.

Crippy wrote

Maze wrote How is teaching history about the Civil War and now the same thing? They will learn about the confederacy and what they stood for when they learn the history of slavery and the civil war. They will learn that they were fighting to keep African Americans enslaved.

When they learn about now, 2017, in say 25 years, they will probably hear about the protests and brawls that happened when we "got rid of confederate statues". In reality, the statues like I said before belong in a museum. When they are out in public they are truly glorifying those leaders and what they stood for. In a museum they can be respected for the history behind them, and further educate the children that visit those museums.

History is already being forgotten, is this what they are teaching kids these days? The south separating from the north had very little if anything to do with slavery. It had to do with separating from the corrupt federal government and unfair taxation the same way our fore fathers separated from Great Britain. The north had as many slaves as the south lets not forget that part. The whole point of the civil war was to keep the country united as one instead of being split between the union and confederacy. Lincoln said himself that if ending slavery will keep us united then that's what he'll do, but if keeping slavery will keep us united then that's what he'll do. The war wasn't about slavery it was about division between the union and the confederacy, period, the ending of slavery was just a by product.

No way slavery was just a by product man... You can argue that it wasn't the reason, but that has been long controversial. The south threatened to secede if Lincoln was elected, when he was the south didn't feel represented. The North did have slaves, but they were outlawed in the late 18th century.

But to say that slavery wasn't a cause is debatable. You really have to specify what side you're coming from, because a lot of the Union soldiers believed the war was over emancipation.

Edit: took out the first part of this because moral nihilism doesn't absolve civil war fighters during the actual war. But anyway...

Imagine if someone erected a statue of Barack Obama somewhere in Washington DC and then in 200 years time the practice of eating meat was outlawed and viewed as a serious crime.
Would they destroy that Barack Obama statue because he wasn't a vegetarian? Should they? No.

Most of the people these statues depict aren't there specifically because the person being depicted was in favor of slavery. They are there because they were great generals, war heroes, military tacticians, and leaders.

In Ghana right now there is a movement to get a Gandhi statue removed because he had racist views.
If Gandhi can't have a statue in a public place then literally no one can.

Nobody can withstand this level of moral scrutiny, everybody has done something wrong by the standards of their time and the standards of the future.

Society is one moral improvement after another. It's hard to believe but slavery was a moral improvement over what came before it.
Before someone thought up enslaving the people in a rival tribe they would have just killed them all, enslaving everyone is more moral than killing everyone and this is going to keep happening on and on into the future.

The people tearing down these statues acting like they are the arbiters of right and wrong in the world will be doing something today which will be looked at as completely immoral in the future.

As my mom says: these are just statues. Statues that commemorate the history of the United States; people who want to replace these statues with statues of celebrities are obviously idiots.

Do they represent a "dark" stage for the United States? Debatable. If that were the case, they'd have the 9/11 memorial and the Holocaust memorial destroyed and vandalized since they were "dark stages of history". It seems to me that these "mega-liberals" want to take offense to everything that happens around them and destroy it so that they can live happily within their safe space.

If statues are being taken down, we might as well take down every statue that has been erected in public parts of towns (yes, including the statue of Obama) and put them all in a museum. That way, we won't have these ridiculous debacles, fights and arguments over some stupid freaking statues.

Ah, yes. History books go up in smoke whenever you remove statues, that is why we must keep them up so that people do not forget history.

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Tywin wrote Ah, yes. History books go up in smoke whenever you remove statues, that is why we must keep them up so that people do not forget history.

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I completely understand the point you're trying to make but, if statues aren't that big of a deal to conmemorate history, why do they want to remove the statues BECAUSE of the "dark marks on HISTORY" the people portrayed in the statues have left in the United States? If these symbols of history weren't a big deal and they didn't matter, there would be no arguments from EITHER side.

Lily wrote I completely understand the point you're trying to make but, if statues aren't that big of a deal to conmemorate history, why do they want to remove the statues BECAUSE of the "dark marks on HISTORY" the people portrayed in the statues have left in the United States? If these symbols of history weren't a big deal and they didn't matter, there would be no arguments from EITHER side.

Confederate statues weren't put up directly after the war. Virtually all of them were put up during the Jim Crow era and during the civil rights movement to remind blacks that whites were still their betters and to intimidate them.