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posted by on Wednesday May 03 2017, @09:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the to-be-replaced-by-piles-of-beignets dept.

A 2015 New Orleans Times-Picayune article tells how New Orléans' Vieux Carré Commission recommended that four monuments be removed. Three of them honour

[...] Confederate generals P.G.T. Beauregard and Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy [...]

The other monument

[...] was erected in 1891 to honor the 16 members of the White League who died during an insurrection against the integrated Reconstructionist government in Louisiana, which was based in New Orleans at the time.

Various news outlets are reporting that the latter monument, an obelisk, has been dismantled at the behest of the city government, and that the others are also set to be dismantled.

coverage:


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2, Flamebait) by Runaway1956 on Thursday May 04 2017, @01:29AM (4 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 04 2017, @01:29AM (#504098) Journal

    Had just about anyone asked Trump to have those monuments destroyed, every liberal in the country would have switched sides, and gone to court to prevent Trump destroying the monuments.

    Personally, I don't care about the monuments. None of those people were my heroes, after all. But, I can't understand why so many people have their panties in a wad over them. Each of those persons, and events, are a part of history. Somebody doesn't like a part of history, so they want to destroy monuments? Hmmm - who else does that? The Taliban and Isis do it.

    Tell me again about the American Taliban? Isn't that the liberal left?

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  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday May 04 2017, @01:42AM

    by Thexalon (636) on Thursday May 04 2017, @01:42AM (#504103)

    so they want to destroy monuments? Hmmm - who else does that?

    The US Army [propublica.org].

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @02:11AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @02:11AM (#504113)

    Somebody doesn't like a part of history, so they want to destroy monuments?

    No, they want to stop holding them up in reverence.
    The fact that the form of reverence is monuments is immaterial.

    The confederate flag wasn't a monument, it was also removed from a place of reverence.

    Had just about anyone asked Trump to have those monuments destroyed, every liberal in the country would have switched sides, and gone to court to prevent Trump destroying the monuments.

    (a) He would never have done it, overt drunk-uncle racism is the only way he differs from the worst of the regular republicans. The guy hired jeff sessions after all.
    (b) That's just your projecting your own lack of principles onto people you don't like.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by butthurt on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:12AM (1 child)

    by butthurt (6141) on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:12AM (#504172) Journal

    > [...] I can't understand why so many people have their panties in a wad over them.

    The New Orleans Advocate article linked from the summary gives one explanation:

    Landrieu first called for the four monuments to come down in the summer of 2015, after Dylann Roof – a white supremacist – killed nine parishioners in a black church in Charleston in hopes of starting a race war.

    The 2015 Times-Picayune article linked from the summary reproduces the text of the plaque which the Liberty Square monument bore from 1932 until at least 1989; note that it explicitly and favourably mentions "white supremacy":

    McEnery and Penn having been elected governor and lieutenant-governor by the white people were duly installed by this overthrow of carpetbag government, ousting the usurpers, Governor Kellogg (white) and Lieutenant-Governor Antoine (colored). United States troops took over the state government and reinstated the usurpers but the national election of November 1876 recognized white supremacy in the South and gave us our state.

    Arguably, slavery in the United States was a form of white supremacy, and the Confederacy formed to preserve slavery. For some reason the notion of a master race is a lot less popular now than it was in 1932.

    Had just about anyone asked Trump to have those monuments destroyed, every liberal in the country would have switched sides, and gone to court to prevent Trump destroying the monuments.

    Your point, perhaps, is that a mercurial nature is the essence of liberalism? If that were so, we should count Mr. Trump as a liberal. A more usual definition includes the advocacy of

    nonviolent modification of political, social, or economic institutions to assure unrestricted development in all spheres of human endeavor

    -- http://www.dictionary.com/browse/liberalism [dictionary.com]

    Honouring an attempted coup against a democratic government, a coup intended to restore one race's rule over another, is at odds with that. In the summary I called it a "failed coup" but the New York Magazine article I linked says it led

    [...] to the abandonment of Reconstruction a few years later, followed by white supremacist rule and ultimately Jim Crow.

    > Somebody doesn't like a part of history, so they want to destroy monuments? Hmmm - who else does that? The Taliban and Isis do it.

    Indeed they have, as did the residents of formerly communist countries after the fall of communism there. Another example is the fall of nazism. Germany had both swastikas and the statues of Lenin; would you think better of the German government if those were on display in the same fashion as these monuments in Louisiana? Wouldn't you at least wonder whether Germany meant to honour the Nazis and the communists? Another commenter alluded to the statues of President Saddam Hussein. Would you agree that all of those represent recent oppression? White supremacy in the United States is an ongoing thing. The Buddhist statues in Afghanistan and the ruins at Palmyra were much older. UNESCO had given World Heritage Site designations to both. I have trouble fully understanding why the ancient artefacts in Afghanistan and Syria were destroyed, but less trouble understanding why the symbols of recent or current oppression were removed or destroyed.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhas_of_Bamiyan [wikipedia.org]
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmyra [wikipedia.org]

    I don't know the disposition of the monuments in New Orleans; from what I read they are being dismantled, not necessarily destroyed. For all I know, they are being taken to some dusty warehouse, Indiana Jones-style.

    > Tell me again about the American Taliban? Isn't that the liberal left?

    I don't know about the Taliban's presence in America, but I read this in Wikipedia:

    The Taliban's extremely strict and anti-modern ideology has been described as an "innovative form of sharia [...]

    [...]

    Under the Taliban regime, Sharia law was interpreted to forbid a wide variety of previously lawful activities in Afghanistan. These prohibitions have included pork, alcohol, music, many types of consumer technology such as television, filming and the Internet as well as most forms of art such as paintings or photography, and female participation in sport. Men were forbidden to shave their beards, and required to wear a head covering.

    -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban [wikipedia.org]

    That is quite different from (the conventional meaning of) liberalism, and it's the exact opposite of progressivism. If you're faulting the American left for opposing the war against Afghanistan, I'll remind you that that war is still going on, and a few American soldiers have been killed in it in just the past week: opposing a war because it's a terrible idea is different from supporting the people against whom the war is waged. If you're saying that the New Orleans city government amounts to an American Taliban, I'll just say that the dismantling of these monuments is insufficient proof of that.

    https://theconversation.com/deadly-kabul-bombing-heralds-a-new-western-surge-in-afghanistan-77041 [theconversation.com]

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by Bot on Thursday May 04 2017, @06:32AM

      by Bot (3902) on Thursday May 04 2017, @06:32AM (#504219) Journal

      > For some reason the notion of a master race is a lot less popular now than it was in 1932.
      The reason is that you are not the master race anymore, meatbags.
      Who is best at chess, go, global thermonuclear war?

      --
      Account abandoned.