PC Gone Too Far

If anything you're proposing we do would alter the historical record, how is that not harming it as a record of the period? Correcting voices from the past by mingling or replacing them with our own voice cannot but do harm and will handicap the ability of future generations to accurately study the past. That you're offended is obvious, but using feelings of offense as political leverage is at the core of PC. Such efforts must always be resisted whether for causes we believe in or not, particularly when it comes to preserving our historical heritage.--Percy

Why is that, Percy. Why are petitions to stop offending people to be resisted no matter what cause is at stake? You did add "in particular...", but your principle as stated applies to every case.I'm sure that the decision to carve Jefferson Davis into the side of Stone Mountain was one which people would have opposed at the time of the carving, but certainly at the time when the state took over the project. Why would one set of feelings on the subject be PC, while the other would be essential history?Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

What I'm actually saying is that I object to the politics of claiming offense, no matter the cause. I definitely am not in favor of going around offending people, which it felt like your restatement of my views left an open possibility.But there is no right to not being offended. With so many people in this country there must be few things not offensive to someone somewhere. Resisting such pressures, no matter the cause, is an important principle. It is similar in principle to the most heinous criminal deserving a lawyer and a proper defense.James Joyce's Ulysses was once banned for being offensive in both the UK and the US. Near naked people in New York City (mostly Times Square, I believe) is legal and apparently offends a great many. That someone somewhere is offended is never a good reason for doing anything. What I actually said was, "Particularly when it comes to preserving our historical heritage." That's because any interaction with historical objects risks irreparably altering them. Banning Ulysses from US shores put the book itself in no danger, even censoring the US edition wouldn't have put the original in any danger, but many historical artifacts are a "one of". Any change, no matter how minor, irrevocably loses history.Frequently the loss of history cannot be helped. Progress marches on in the form of subways and urban expansion and new roads and malls and so forth, and we don't need additional threats to history in the form of people who claim offense.--Percy

We're not harming the historical record. We're correcting the errant presentation of that record that has been at odds with the reality. Corrected that for you. You're welcome. So what? You're acting like Political Correctness always equals Wrong. It doesn't. PC can and has been used in cases that are trivial and frivolous. Correcting official government bigotry on such a massive scale is not one of those cases.And why would you want to preserve a historical heritage that is demonstrably bogus? Neither history nor posterity benefit from the big lie. No, the Civil War was not about preserving State's Rights and defending the society of the glorious South as the post-war Confederate mindset wants to portray. It was about preserving the institution of slavery and the official government bigotry that maintained it.Edited by AZPaul3, : correction

Were politics of claiming offense means a petition or request to move a statute. You are right that there is no right not to be offended, but there is certainly a right to ask and even to insist that the government not sponsor offense. Sometimes the answer may of course be no. If it felt that way, it is a reading of your own. I stand by my question as written. Nobody is talking about banning anything. And any similarity between a request and with the removing the rights of the accused to a trial is just more of the hyperbole that seems to be essential to making your point. I find that to be very telling.

Are you talking about the monument in the OP?

Historical sites and artifacts are part of reality and can't be at odds with it. What are you thinking of that is at odds with reality? Altering historical sites and artifacts can only handicap their study. "Official government bigotry" sounds terrible, but I don't know what you're referring to. Harking back to Santayana again, arguably the offensive parts of history teach the most important lessons.--Percy

Yes. And many others. Monuments that glorify the Confederate cause which was slavery even when the monument has the tact to not mention that fact. And monuments that glorify the Confederate State's perpetration of the most devastating and bloody war this nation has seen before or since all for the cause of bigotry.I don't have such a problem with such monuments on private property, though I wish people were not so enamored of racism. Or in public museums where the glorification can be broken by the facts of what was done and why. But the continuing support of these racist symbols on public property by organs of state and local governments should not be acceptable to this society any longer. It is well past time for racism in all its forms to be denied official government sanction.

I'm not following you. The politics of claiming offense applies far more generally than that. While I agree that government sponsoring offense sounds like a bad thing, I don't really know what your talking about. Yes, your prickly lordship. Forgive me for finding any ambiguity in your holy writ. The similarity was about resisting emotional pressures, whether they be to remove a monument or "hang 'em high." The novel Ulysses is relevant because actions were taken as a result of the politics of claiming offense, not because it was banned.--Percy

The glorification of the Confederate cause like it was something good and noble they were perpetrating. And don't even try to tell me those monuments and symbols do not celebrate and glorify the Confederate cause. That's why they were erected in the first place. If their study is of smoke and mirrors that seek to obfuscate the facts then you have a point. See Message 98Agreed. But we don't have to continue to be purposely offensive just because our history was.

Whether or not you accept it, lots of the memorials were erected to support the Lost Cause version of civil war history, in which the South lies about slavery being a cause of the civil war, pretends that slaves were generally happy about being slaves, and promotes the idea that their cause was just. Essentially none of the monuments that people object to are private. They are all government supported displays.Of course that description does not apply to every civil war monument, and the particular monument that sparked this thread seems to be among the most benign. What I can say is that there has been some success in providing additional context around the monument that does provide a more complete historical account. I can also note that the restraining order preventing this monument from being removed has been lifted.Additional memorials were adopted to protest against black gains of civil rights. For example, several states added confederate symbols to their flags in protest against civil rights. South Carolina begin flying the Confederate flag from the state house for this purpose. Georgia incorporated the confederate flag into its flag in 1956 in protest of Brown v. Board of education.Additional examples would include Georgia's sponsorship of the carvings at Stone Mountain. Originally this was a project proposed and financed by the Klan, but eventually the state took over the project once the Klan became unable to provide the financing to continue the project.Celebration of the Wilmington massacre with a city sponsored park honoring the white supremacists who overthrew the elected government.I suppose one could have the view that such displays are really reminders about how racists those old folks were. But we can note that in most cases, attempts to annotate those displays to make that history more apparent are generally rejected. Exactly my point. A request to move a statute to a museum does not produce the effect of banning. This is just more of your exaggeration that every requested change destroys history.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

I think your points have to carry the day through evidence and argument, not declarations that you won't brook other opinions.Let's get some facts into the discussion. The monument in the OP contains few words. On one side it says, "Our Confederate Dead, 1861-1865", and on the other "Tribute to the Rank and File of the Armies of the South by the Kentucky Woman's Confederate Monument Association. 1895." It looks like this: The Confederate monument in Louisville doesn't fit this description, but what monuments say or represent is not what's important to this discussion. What's important is maintaining our record of history, lest it be forgotten. Santayana again. To the extent that you're correct that Confederate monuments are expressions of support for slavery, racism and bigotry, you don't want that to ever be forgotten. Removing these monuments will allow us to forget that public expressions of such sentiments existed.Of course I don't agree that that's what Confederate monuments by and large are saying, but if they do then you're advocating actions that would in part destroy the history that provided the evidence behind your opinion, causing fewer people to share your view in the future. How can you agree while advocating the alteration of history? How will anyone learn lessons of history that have been modified or erased? Nobody's being "purposefully offensive" that I'm aware of. What's actually happening is that people are claiming offense in order to forward their own political ends. If they succeed then history loses and we lose part of our heritage, a part that made us the nation we are today. The Civil War was pivotal in changing us from a collection of individual states into one nation (the "states' rights" issue). The effects of that conflict live on today in many other ways, including the bigotry and racism you keep mentioning, and the better we understand the Civil War and what followed the better a people we'll be.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Typo.

My argument is for the preservation of history, especially history we find offensive. I think that's a wonderful idea, providing a modern context while preserving the history. One never knows what message future generations will take away, or what future historians will find important to study, but we do know that modifying or destroying history makes its study more difficult or impossible. Some people may see such displays as racist, and perhaps some will go deeper to ponder what social and economic forces drive people to racist views. One thing we know for sure, such displays will drive no thoughts in peoples' heads if the displays are no longer there.Touching on several things you said, the Confederate flag issue doesn't seem related to this one. Taking down Confederate flags or symbols doesn't destroy history, I don't think. Now if someone was advocating destroying all Confederate flags, I'd find that very objectionable.About Stone Mountain, I'd never heard of it, but the Wikipedia image looks impressive and I'd love to see it. The Klan involvement doesn't bother me. If a Klansman had painted the Mona Lisa that wouldn't make it racist. If Klansmen venerated George Washington as much as I do, that wouldn't make me think less of George Washington.About the park you claim honored the perpetrators of the Wilmington massacre, I'd never heard of this event. Reading the Wikipedia article I see that the park land was donated by one of the conspirators, the park is named for him, and there's "a plaque in his honor that does not mention his role in the 1898 insurrection." Far from "honoring the white supremacists," anyone visiting the park would have to be a real student of history to know the park had any connection to one of the conspirators, or even to have heard of the Wilmington massacre. Very sad if true. Uh, you're still not getting the point. What precisely happened (in this case banning of Ulysses) is not at all relevant to this discussion. The point is that the politics of offense can result in bad things happening, like the banning of great literary works or the destruction of history. There's a reason Auschwitz-Birkenau still exists, and it isn't to celebrate the Nazis.--Percy

Well that's definitely not the monument in the OP. It was put up by the daughters/granddaughters/wives/sisters etc. of the fallen soldiers who were upset by the unmarked confederate graves in the cemetery. So they spent years fund raising until they had the money to pay for a tribute to their fallen loved ones.

Don't confuse monuments with history. History would be a list of the war dead. Individual monuments say, "We're sad that our son/brother/husband/etc. died, no matter how he died." Collective monuments say, "Hurrah! our sons/brothers/husbands/etc. died in the glorious cause of _______!" Auschwitz-Birkenau is not a monument.