It’s a common rebuttal when the subject of remaning places or removing statues of confederates or people like Christopher Columbus, but what does that actually mean? How are we supposed to absorb and retain history from these stationary places vs learning about it in schools? I currently live in a military town that’s very split over renaming of the local post. I understand the disagreement over it being an unnecessary expenditure put on the public through tax dollars, but really don’t understand how renaming them is going to make us forget about the horrors of slavery and the Civil War.
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I don’t either, you think the Germans have forgotten about World War Two? But there is not Himmler Air Force Base, or a Mengele Memorial Hospital either.
They mean that they’re racists who like what the Confederacy stood for.
I think it’s more an issue of “who draws the line, and where is it drawn?”
You could argue statue removal for many people in our history.
There are two types of people I’ve encountered who are opposed to the renaming/tearing down of statues/etc of the confederacy:
1. People who are hardliners of the notion that “if we forget history, we’re bound to repeat it”. They think that if we rename/tear down stuff, people will forget about the civil war (most not so naive to think it will happen overnight, but rather in a few generations). It’s an important part of US history, and they don’t want it to be “erased” by removing it from the public eye. In general, these people *mean well* but cannot grasp the concept that just because these memorials would no longer exist in the public eye, it doesn’t mean they would be forgotten.
2. People who claim they’re apart of “my heritage” because they either A. Straight up hold onto the notion of rebellion being “apart of the American spirit” and cannot grasp that these things (to some/many) represent a particularly heinous era of our history that is still being ironed out 150 years later. Or B. Either legit loud-and-proud or low key hold onto racist beliefs, and believe while these names/statues are still standing somehow gives them some form of merit to their beliefs are still accepted by the public. Cue translation: “I went to Robert E Lee High and I’m a PROUD rebel!!” -> “I get nervous around *insert race not of their own* people and therefore don’t want to ever interact with them”.
My go to is that there’s no statues of Hitler and everyone knows the result of his views and actions.
You don’t need statues or bases named after people to remember the horrible things they supported.
Especially considering these statues and base namings came well after the civil war.
It’s simply just an excuse. There isn’t a valid reason to be opposed to these measures.
Why in the world should we have a military base named after Bragg when he was a traitor and an all around shitty general?
Renaming the bases and tearing down statues is different to me as someone who has been in the military.
The names as bases took life on their own separate from the generals they were named after. Bragg is the home of the Airborne, Hood is home of the 1st Cavalry, etc. In the military they’re instantly recognizable and associated with the units they housed and their location, before the confederates or generals. The general namesakes are a very, very distant afterthought. Just the way it became after decades. The same way that Columbia University alumni and students probably aren’t keeping the association with Columbus or whether.
It’s nice to have that connection with other vets from various generations when talking about where you’ve been. It’s a different legacy within a different subculture that I don’t expect outsiders to understand. I don’t really care to argue over it either – it is what it is.
I think the forgetting history argument is a big motte-and-bailey; while in the discourse there’s a defense of neutral or even mournful civil war remembrance, in practice those monuments are near-universally praising confederate figures as heros & patriots. Literring so many southern towns with big ol’ monuments talking up the CSA, and naming so many southern military bases after CSA generals as if to draw continuity, is a very unhealthy way to remember our history.
I agree with the renaming. Because it’s not okay to have places named after horrible people.
I admit to a disconnect when I have a personal connection to the place that is being renamed
Both my sons were born at Fort Bragg. That place by that name no longer exists.
That just feels weird to say.
My guess it’s the same for anyone who has a connection to a place that has been renamed. Regardless of why that name change occurred.
Because if those that forget the past are doomed to repeat it doesn’t work if you remove any part that was uncomfortable.
Saying that we should remove anything that might cause pain having no trade offs is a child’s point of view.
Remembering terrible parts of history insures we don’t go down that road again.
That’s the principle.
When people try to use a one off example where they doesn’t fit is where it gets all silly.
First of all, I’m not sticking up for the confederacy, considering it was around shorter than the Doritos Loco taco has been around. But the statue should have never been erected, they were traitors to the union, and they deserved to die as such. During the reconstruction era because of the worst president in US history, Andrew Johnson we were very lax on these traitors.
Imagine being Black in The South & regularly driving by memorials to Confederate generals so you can be reminded throughout your day that if that side had won your life would be forfeit. You’d be bought and sold like a farm animal.
Also, they were insurrectionists who were on the wrong side of history. Why the hell should we celebrate that?
By name alone Conservatives want to conserve and not progress/change. Makes sense when you look at it in this angle.
I can’t answer for the Confederate stuff because I’m not Southern and I think they’re losers, but being Italian-American the Columbus stuff means a lot to me. We were others, treated like shit, living in poverty etc and then one day a group of people in New Orleans lynched a bunch of Italians and Italian-Americans and it got so heated with Italy they recalled their ambassador over it and political tensions were high. To ease it over and coincide with the 400 year anniversary of Columbus’ voyage, they made Columbus Day a holiday for us and our culture to be celebrated. I hate when people want to replace it with a Native American day. I totally think they should have a holiday to celebrate them too, but don’t take our day. Make a new one for them.
It’s the same people that have confederate tattoos and claim it’s apart of their heritage. Most people dgaf about either of those things happening except the snowflake conservatives.
I’m all for renaming posts and tearing down confederate statues, but Fort Liberty is an awful name. Should have been Fort Benavides or Fort Jumpy McJumpface
Seems like people in this sub have already given concise answers so I’ll not go there. However, it seems to me that after doing away with Bragg they could have found some other North Carolinian general or MoH winner or something to name the base after. Instead we get Fort Liberty. It just seems strange when practically every other US Army base is named after a person. It seems a little milquetoast.
The problem is when people don’t understand the purpose of a statue.
The purpose of a statue isn’t to educate. All that you’ll learn from a statue is the name of the subject, and little else.
The purpose of a statue is to glorify. So when you put a statue of a Confederate general in a town square, you are elevating that person to a place of honor, not to mention the cause which he served. Yet any Confederate general helped lead a treasonous revolt against the United States, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Americans, in the defense of slavery.
And let’s be really really clear here. The Civil War might not have been about slavery for the Union, at least in the opening stages, but it was absolutely about slavery for the South. All you have to do is read each of the secession ordinances of the individual Southern states. Every single one of them cite the defense of slavery as either the sole or the primary reason for leaving the United States.
So taking them down is absolutely the right thing to do. Because we are no longer honor these men, because this would be a lot worse place to live had they prevailed. Put them in museums, not street corners. You know, where actual education takes place.
It’s just an excuse. I was in the military and I think it’s disgusting that there are monuments to and military bases named for traitors while good men and women who fought the good fight and died for their convictions just lay buried and forgotten. Those confederate were traitors. They fought FOR the enslavement of human beings and killed Americans en masse while doing it.
At *best* it’s a knee-jerk reaction to things changing around them. Some folks just don’t like change.
At *worst* it’s because they stand for the thing the Confederacy stood for *cough* slavery *cough*.
From what I understand many of the statues were also built decades after the end of the Civil War, and from a quick Google search, many were put up between 1900 and 1920. Which was one of the times the Klan was having a serge in members. So we also have to think of the context of why they were being put up besides “remembering” those who were in the war
The Confederacy were the enemies, traitors in the nation, and lost the war. We shouldn’t honour that, not even a little bit. It doesn’t erase history either. We should absolutely learn about the Civil War and the events that led to it, but we shouldn’t honour the enemy.
The thing that always confuses me about these arguments is that the statues and monuments are never actually located at the historical sight associated with the person
I don’t think the statues should be destroyed but rather relocated to museums about how bad some of the ideals of the confederacy were and who were the terrible men and women who helped lead and or serve it.
Taking down statues and renaming landmarks should be left to the longtime residents of an area, not a bunch of transplants.
As for military bases, I am a bit conflicted. The name has taken on a life of its own apart from the individual that they are named after and there is a comradery amongst those that trained at the same post. I can see why a federal government owned location would like to choose a name of those who didn’t choose state over country at a minimum.
Texan bread and born along with some other CSA ties, but honestly if they are obviously there to glorify rather than educate… well I hope they are melted down and remolded into a statue of grant or something useful
I’d prefer people move them to a museum instead of destroying them. Regardless of who the statue is of. It is important to preserve that history.
I can see the different sides of the issue for the statues, but all I’m saying is, we don’t *really* need to remember the Civil War by sticking up a naked statue of a Confederate dude to honor the defenders of Charleston. The last thing we need is to remember the rebs by looking at a bronze dude with a giant schlong. Yeah, yeah, don’t honor slavers and all that, but more importantly, *why is he naked?*
This argument is exceptionally stupid.
The logic of this argument would require Germans to name things after Hitler lest they “erase history.”
Military bases that were named for generals who fought against us makes no sense.
I don’t agree with the “removing history” argument because statues can still go to museums where people want to see them. But that argument at least makes sense. No reason to train our soldiers at a base named after whom their predecessors fought.
I’m for it for most bases. However, I think they should leave it as Fort Hood and Fort Bragg because it doesn’t seem right to disparage somebody else’s good name with those shitty places.
I grew up next to fort Gordon. I never really bothered to look it up, it didn’t come up, but apparently it’s named after a Confederate general. He didn’t serve a single millisecond in the US Army and they named a base after him during WWI. I didn’t know that until this business about changing the name.
There you go, renaming the post taught us history.
Unlike Germany after WW2, there wasn’t any serious punishment given towards the Confederates after the war, since they were our countrymen and there was an attitude reconciliation in order to keep the country together. While it succeeded in that, it did have the adverse consequence of allowing the Confederates to write their own narrative and create an only slightly different culture, which involved a more skewed version of history that really didn’t make slavery all that bad, made Confederate Generals seem more progressive than they were, and pedaled theories like states rights after, as well as culturally bring back slavery in all but name through the prison system. It wouldn’t really be until WW2 that you started to see changes with that. These rewritings of the narrative included things like the statues.
You see the same thing in Japan, with them still having monuments dedicated to war criminals who arguably did worse things than the SS throughout China and the Pacific Island Chain, because the U.S. needed Japan as an ally for the coming Cold War.
Now the hard part of all of this is how do you really look at people who are long dead and gone? Its the whole speaker of the dead thing. A guy could have been a serial killer and you’d still get a preacher saying how he used to make certain people smile when he walked into a room during his funeral. There’s sort of an unwritten rule that you talk mostly good about the dead. You have descendants of these slaveholders who want to keep the memory of their ancestors up. Or even the average confederate soldier who was complicit in slavery.
There’s also the fact that a lot of our founding fathers including our first president and our third president who wrote the declaration that created this country were slaveholders. Which then brings into question their statues and monuments. Its all very messy because, like most countries, America’s history isn’t very pretty. It’s just been whitewashed through a state run public school system who has a vested interest in keeping a good shred of propaganda in everything.
The fact is statues are a form of propaganda, so you either get rid of them, or you just remember that they’re only showing one side of a person.
The former Confederate states have worked very hard to push a certain, false narrative about the Civil War. They are desperately clinging to that narrative calling it “history” and “heritage.” But really it’s just apologists for slavery and racism. In the garbage heap is where it should all go and it’s more than 150 years past due.
The forgetting history part isn’t even a thing these days because nearly every single person over the age of 8 has a supercomputer with access to unlimited information in their pocket at all times. They can literally just put QR codes in historically significant places that links to a bunch of historical information.
The issue, willfully and ignorantly, is often reduced to being a “you’re either racist or not” issue. The matter is more nuanced and the history more complicated than such an oversimplification.
I think we tend to forget that those that fought in the Confederate side of the war *existed* post-civil war and did do some notable things thereafter.
Take Robert E Lee for example. There are many statues dedicated to this man in the South. His background leading up to the war is fascinating (I do encourage people to read biographies on this historical figure) as he didn’t quite believe in the Confederate cause. He had a mixed feelings about slavery and the Union side almost **recruited** him as a General themselves (Lee, after much thought, turned it down). But I digress.
Many of the statues of Robert E Lee and those relating to Confederates came long after the war was over. Lee believed the South, along with the North, needed to move on from what happened. With that in mind, one of his main goals was to train, educate and integrate former Confederate soldiers into the overall workforce which was changing fast with the times. As president of George Washington College in 1865, he brought to it much needed funding and saw to the needed education of a decimated South.
Was Lee, objectively, an evil man?
No.
He was a man of his time and environment. And though he wrestled with the concept of slavery, war, and the probable inevitability of the South losing, he ultimately chose to fight for the South. Not necessarily to keep slaves, but to fight for the place he called home, for where his relatives and friends called home. Statues were erected to him not just for standing with the South but for leading the South towards peace, rebuilding and reintegrating back into the rest of the country.
And, I wonder, what would we think of Lee if he *did* take up the mantle of one of the Great Generals of the Union forces? Ulysses S Grant–one of the big Union generals who finished out the war–was a slave owner. And yet we we pay him reverence, not for being a slave owner but for ending the civil war and fighting for the Union.
With this, were faced with a common dilemma that rights itself with a rather plain and obvious truth we should all keep in mind: **It’s difficult to judge and measure historical figures by the metrics of today**.
I don’t think tearing down statues is the answer. It does wipe out part of history. The argument could be made that perhaps these are better kept in a museum, a place all longstanding and well-made monuments tend to end up, but that’s for locals to decide and vote on themselves. I don’t believe any groups should make these decisions and I don’t think city bureaucrats should be deciding this either. However, no matter what, these statues should still exist somewhere, within context.