New Orleans City Council Votes to Remove All Monuments/Statues With Confederate Figures

I'm not overly motivated one way or another. Not a big deal to me either way, especially since I don't live there.

We've had the subject of removing similar monuments where I live, but they still stand. I'm not offended by them (I'm white though) and honestly didn't even know they were of Civil War "Heroes" until the controversy.

 

I understand removing some Confederate artifacts and statues that honor the worst. Jefferson Davis is an example. He was basically an idiot racist. General Robert E. Lee is a different thing, however. Context should be taken into account. He was responsible for a lot of the reconstruction, reintegration, and mending of fences after the war. Both the people that fought for him AND against him held him in the utmost respect. He was considered a hero even in the North after the war. He's literally one of the most brilliant military minds to come out of West Point.

It is kind of a shame that people don't look into each historical figure's worth in each case.

 

Putting aside that Reconstruction, at least for blacks in the south, was kind of a disaster insofar as they began getting murdered as soon as the war "ended" and Jim crow-based apartheid moved in...honest question - where did you learn that garbage?

It took me literally one google hit to discover this transcript of Lee testifying before Congress in 1866.

http://www.historynet.com/encounter-robert-e-lee-faces-congress.htm

So...blacks are lazy, stupid, and we should expel them all from my beloved Virginia. But, because he didn't physically take up arms against his country (for a second time) or soil his patrician hands by lynching blacks in the streets and joining the Klan - he's a fence mender? That's great stuff.

**** Robert E. Lee - he fought to keep human beings in chains. He was the general of an army of traitors that was formed to protect this right. Not advocating lynching doesn't erase that stain, and it sure doesn't mean that a city that is 60% black has to keep a bunch of statues erected by white supermacists in the early 20th century up.

This isn't Washington or Jefferson or somebody who made other contributions but also was a major slaveholder - he is defined by his taking up arms against his country, to enslave his fellow americans, because they were black - **** him and the horse he rode in on.

 

We will never stop fighting the civil war, it's gone on, unabated, in one form or another since 1865. F the monuments and the southern apologist's that perpetuated the romantic lost cause before the damn war was even over when they knew the end was at hand. I'll take my cue from Sam Houston.

 

Transcript here.

 

So now people want to take down the Sam Houston statue on Montrose?

.... didn't he oppose secession?

 

The same folks want the big statue on 45 to become rubble too.

 

I just don't get it when it comes to Houston. He was removed from office for opposing the civil war.

Yes he owned slaves, but so did nearly everyone with wealth. It was a dark time. Are we going to remove Washington/Jefferson from our money?

 

I thought UT handled this well:

Nineteen months after being forklifted off its limestone plinth on the University of Texas at Austin’s Main Mall, placed in the back of pickup, and hauled off, the controversial Jefferson Davis statue is back on campus.


But instead of casting a fixed gaze southward over Austin from its former place of prominence, the 9-foot-tall, 1,200-pound former president of the Confederate States of America now resides at the Briscoe Center for American History, where he looks westward, past some display cases, through a window, and out over the LBJ Presidential Library’s fountain—albeit with a view partially obstructed by low-hanging tree limbs.

http://www.texasmonthly.com/the-daily-post/jefferson-davis-back-ut/

 

They better not touch that statue.

 

This is what ticks me off about certain liberals. They're very stupid in picking-and-choosing their battles. It's one thing to remove the Confederate Flag, or remove a statue from someone who is let's say the leader of the KKK. It's another thing to go apeshit over anyone that had even some sort of remote connection to the confederate states.

There is no way in hell they're going to remove that statue or anything associated with Sam Houston. Absolutely no way.

Liberals supporting this need to back off- that would set me over the edge and I'd go back to being a Republican again.

 

Why would something so stupid set you "over the edge"? You seem prone to wild swings of emotion. Liberals are a full spectrum of people, not some lock step thought paradigm.

 

It's my alma mater, man! You can't remove Sam!

Just kidding. Seriously, though, some liberals do take it a bit too far. So do conservatives, I suppose. The only problem is when the ones who take it too far get their way. I'm not a fan of extremism.

Except in sports.

 

I did say certain liberals, BTW.

 

From what I understand, this was some post on Facebook from I have no idea who probably re-posted by some right wing blog and picked up after that by some newspaper. It's really a bunch of nothing.

 

I hope they get caught into an existential loop of stupid when they don't realize the name of the city they're protesting in.

 

I'm not sure if you're playing a role here or if this is really you speaking but if it is really you and the removal of a statue of one of your favored racists is enough to make you support (again?[!]) the goons that run your state and ruin your country, well, I don't know what I can tell you other than you can surely plant your flag as a proverbial Texan.