President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Agreed. Doesn't look good to talk about the primacy of the rule of law and then ignore that sentiment.
Practically speaking, a terrible idea to bring it down like that. People could have been hurt or killed. Don't know how much that monument to racism weighs, but I'm guessing it's enough to take somebody out if it had fallen swiftly enough.

The university was in an impossible position here. The Trumpist legislature doubled down on protecting their bigoted heritage a couple of years ago -- yeah, Trumpists, I know your boy wasn't in power yet -- and the law says the monument can't come down unless it's structurally unsound or a board of historical preservation or some such thing gives the go-ahead. The board, presumably appointed by Trumpists, wouldn't have done the right thing.
Politically, this is a balancing test between Southern whites' alleged right to preserve their contemptuous heritage and the right of black students to go to class without walking past an ugly reminder of what Trumpists still think of them. This isn't a hard test. Basic humanity should be a good guide. But that's gone.

A couple of years back, Dylann Roof became a conservative hero when his act of barbarism started a series of reactions and counter-reactions. In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, a movement to remove Trumpists' "beautiful statues" began. The NC legislature, in its perpetual quest to find and drop in to a moral sink hole, passed legislation giving the middle finger to the statue opponents. Hence, Dylann Roof had a legacy beyond killing black people.

Trumpists are only too happy to support that legacy today, eagerly embracing the pain these monuments to bigotry and treason still cause on a daily basis.

Unfortunately, tearing down the statue without approval only gives Trumpists cause for indignation. It allows them to castigate the protesters as lawless miscreants. And that's all they'll talk about. They'll whine (QYFW) about the loss of beautiful heritage, but they'll absolutely never acknowledge the morally indefensible position of tolerating bronzed bigotry.

Because nobody appears to have been hurt in this action, the net effect will be a safer campus. There were apparently a few dust-ups between protesters and Trumpists last year. The university has spent $400K on security. Thankfully, nothing got serious. But the threat was there.

 

As a graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, one of a long line of UNC graduates in my family, a descendant of Confederate soldiers and having had a father who steeped me in the Lost Cause, I 100 percent get what you're saying. I used to not only be OK with Silent Sam, but as a little kid looked up to the statue with some kind of weird pride and intrigue.

My views changed over the years as I learned a great deal more about the history of the monument; got a more balanced history of the war itself - at UNC Chapel Hill - and started listening to my African American friends about how they perceive these Confederate monuments.

So Sam was put up by the UDC in 1913 and they invited Julian Carr to give the dedication. He is the man for whom Carrboro is named. He was a UNC grad, Confederate veteran, successful businessman, and unrepentant white supremacist. About 10 years ago a transcript of his dedication remarks surfaced and began circulating among UNC people. It certainly gave me new perspective on the statue's purpose, particularly this paragraph:

Transcription: Carr Speech

 

Do we build statues to people convicted of treason? Because that's what the Confederates were. They took up arms against the United States of America in order to preserve an economy built on forced human bondage. Now we shouldn't desecrate their graves or call out individual soldiers as traitors, but neither should we construct or maintain objects of honor in their memory.

 

Sad that it had to come to this at my alma mater. That statue should have been taken down a long time ago.

 

The GOP controlled legislature made it practically impossible for the university to move it. I would have much preferred an outcome like that, though, which is why I have long thought it should've been moved to the cemetery with some appropriate interpretive display to contextualize it.

 

Except for a handful. Like Jeff Davis and Robert E Lee, the average soldiers were pardoned. By Andrew Johnson. Lincoln would have done so as well. Please, under no circumstances do I consider the confederates anything more than traitors. And the political and economic leaders were race hating slavers of the worst order. They should have known better, but were too self and greedy and sadistic.

As I said, there is a difference between a monument intending to honor and a memorial intending to remember.

 

How would you thread that needle? In terms of language, what would the memorial inscription say that an honorary one wouldn't?
Especially these days, I think everybody looks at a statue as honorary. The nuanced difference to which you refer would get lost on viewers.

 

I think the Vietnam Memorial doesn’t honor the warrior as much as memorialize the solider, but that it does it in a way that does honor the individual soldier and memorialize him at the same time. The memorial that was just torn down depicted a symbol of a soldier not an actual person. Which is different than a larger tha. Life Stoneall Jackson.

Nuance is indeed lost. As is critical thinking, context, perspective, scale and relativism. This is trumpian America, the lowest common denominator is the highest achievement. .

 

The comments section on this piece is pretty much what you'd expect it to be:
Protesters topple Silent Sam Confederate statue at UNC

 

Why There Are No Nazi Statues in Germany

"The Southern Poverty Law Center rightly points out that the vast majority of statues, streets and schools dedicated to the memory of the Confederacy date from the period between 1890 and 1930—four decades when the legal, cultural and political edifice of Jim Crow was under heavy construction. Another memorial spate followed after 1954, in response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education and, coincidentally, the 100th anniversary of the war’s outbreak. The statues were blunt instruments in institutionalizing white supremacy and blotting out the dual sins of treason and slavery."