PC Gone Too Far

Good question. What if the whitewashing is a lie that essentially discredits the victims of slavery What result should we go for? How does not facing the horror of the past help ensure that we don't re-enact them.Beyond that, I'm not convinced that racists need any excuses to hate, and celebrating other racists surely dos not help reject racism. In some cases, these symbols were raised for the purposes of championing racism.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

That is not what I've proposed. At most I've talked about addressing things that are themselves a sanitizing pf the past. Putting a statute in a museum does not sanitize anything or adding context does not add anything.If anyone here is guilty of insisting on sanitizing I'd suggest it is the person who does not feel we should judge folks harshly for supporting an evil institution and who suggest that such judgments cannot be fact based.

Nor should we assume the opposite; that an objective view by a non participant is less accurate than a motivated view by participants who lived with and accepted slavery for financial and social reasons benefitting themselves. In the case of slavery as practiced in the South it seems we can make an objective judgment that the institution was evil. Nothing you've said even hints at a fact based reason not to reach that conclusion. You can pretend that 'maybe it wasn't' if you wish to do so, but nothing you've posted so far, including your hypothetical about slavery evolving into something humane justifies the initial inhumane treatment. Beyond that, the evolution never happened anyway.With regards to the premise of this thread, namely that facts may not have the power to convince, I accept that such things occur, and even that they frequently occur. I don't accept that the premise provides as an excuse for not properly evaluating slavery either. At best it is a partial explanation for behavior.

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.

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.

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.

Given that the flag on the SC capitol building was installed as a racist response to a historical event, I think it is just as much history as the carving on Stone Mountain. None of these monuments is actual history. The monument in Kentucky is not a grave marker. All of these instances are memorials and not the actual history. You seem intent on missing the point. A racist's monument to Jefferson Davis, a clear white supremacist and slavery supporter, sponsored by the Klan and later taken over by the state is quite a different thing than a monument to George Washington. I'm not an idiot. I understand what you are suggesting I can glean from the incident. But I am not limited to understanding your point. Given that your state position is that requests to move offensive objects must always be resisted on principle, I think the distinction between what happened to Ulysses and what is actually being requested in these cases is important. It shows that your argument is a 'slippery slope' argument that we may well have reason to reject. Nobody is asking that southern history be banned. They are asking that a memorial be moved somewhere else. There is a reason why the carving on Stone Mountain exists, and it is to celebrate Jefferson Davis et al. You can attribute the fact that you don't know much about some significant part civil war history to whatever choices your school system made about what to teach and not to the fact that the event was of no significance. From your description we can certainly understand that neither the plaque nor the dedication tell the full story. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : minor grammar stuff. Perhaps I should compose my messages in a word processor...

Inventing? Surely not.I specifically mentioned only Jefferson Davis, and I limited my remarks to him for a reason. If you want to expand my remarks to Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee then you are doing so on your own.But it is certainly the case that I don't care what a bunch of white supremacists think about themselves or who they consider their heroes. I don't give the idea that there were large numbers of such folk any consideration either. Further, whatever those post war guys thought about their heroes at the end of the civil war, those guys did not manage to finish the carving on Stone Mountain. In order to get the rest of the carvings completed, we needed a new modern set of what supremacists/segregationists from the 50s and 60s to carve those legends into the side of the mountain in a reaction to Brown vs. Board of education and gains in civil rights.In my mind, that carving never should have been started and even after those initial guys failed to finish it, there was an opportunity to leave the thing uncompleted. I am not personally inclined to have in removed or destroyed. But I don't believe that people who do feel that way have no legitimate beef or that they are merely claiming to find the carvings offensive. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Not exactly. The Klan started the project, but it was taken over by the state. The purpose was not to tar the project with the Klan, but to instead help trace the motivation for the project getting started and for its being continued.I suppose if I mention that the Nazi's had death camps you would insist that I am simply tarring the concept of death camps.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

I point specifically to Jefferson Davis as the president of the confederacy, as a slave owner, and whose writings indicate his reasons for seceding and going to war. In my view, the cases of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee are different.But suppose it were were correct that few of the Southern civil war heroes would meet my definition of those for whom a meaningful carving into Stone Mountain would be acceptable. So what? That makes my judgment severe, but not necessarily incorrect. By your description we are talking about racists, white supremacists and slavers.And of course if we want to define Southern in the way you do, namely as only the racists, white supremacist slavers, we are of course leaving out a huge number of people who actually lived in the South that wanted nothing to do with any of that stuff.What if it turned out that neither MS-13 nor the Russian mafia had heroes that I found worth celebrating. Would that suggest that my standards were flawed? Is my response to this question not something you can anticipate? Jefferson Davis, in particular, is worshiped for acts that are despicable and he was praised by the Klan for those reasons. In the 50s and 60s, some white supremacists and segregationists felt that having the state pick up the Klan's project was a mighty fine idea. Not guilt by association. Guilt based on their own choices and actions.I understand that a bunch of white supremacists from various ages including the present think that Davis was a great man. So what?Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

I suppose that explains quite a bit.

I specifically listed factors regarding Davis, and to this point I have specifically mentioned Davis as undeserving of worship. Based on that I don't have to defend why Lee and Jackson should not be there. If you think those folks are in identical positions, then perhaps you should do a bit of research. But I'm not making that case. I disagree. For example you did say this: Continuing along the same vein. How about the significant number of colored folks who served as slaves. Were those folks not southerners? Is there some reason that their opinions and numbers don't count? Beyond that, your numbers game is irrelevant. And your reasons for discounting the opinions of their peers that slavery was evil are, in my opinion, ridiculous. Yes there was UDC activity before the Klan involvement. But the UDC at that point in history was yet another group of white supremacists. Did your research reveal the role of James Venable or William Simmons or the inspiration from 'The Birth of a Nation? Did I not list some of them in my post? I see that I did.Regarding Davis:Did Jefferson Davis own over 100 slaves?
Was Jefferson Davis an avid white supremacist who defended extensively in writing the idea that former Africans had no rights and should have no rights?
Davis on the cause of the civil war:

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said that his state had seceded because "She has heard proclaimed the theory that all men are created free and equal, and this made the basis of an attack upon her social institutions; and the sacred Declaration of Independence has been invoked to maintain the position of the equality of the races."

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Seriously, given your description, it cannot be that Davis was being celebrated for his great performance during the civil war, something that might instead by an attribution for Jackson or Lee. A better case can be made for Davis being inept. Okay...I cannot believe you failed to find anything objectionable about Davis during your research or that you cannot distinguish between Davis and say Robert E. Lee. I'm not going to help you with that beyond my current comments. Perhaps we are encountering the issue with facts not having the power to persuade. Hold on Percy. We're not talking about an absence of facts, but rather a failure on your part to verify facts I've cited in your own attempts, which includes at least some rejection of sources as 'unbalanced' based on whatever criteria you are using. I certainly don't consider you to be objective on this subject.Of course there are plenty of accounts that don't detail every aspect of the project. Stone Mountain is a tourist attraction. I don't expect to see much detail about the Klan showing up in the sites advertising brochures or on vanity web pages.Slightly off the topic. Just why is it that events like the Wilmington Massacre or the St Louis race riots during the early part of the twentieth century are not mentioned in most history books? Is it because some monument celebrating those events got removed?Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

1) It is my view that Davis is distinguishable from Lee and Stonewall. Perhaps I am simply more familiar with Davis and the things he is famous for.2) In any case, the number of Southerners who held morally challenged views is simply not of interest to me. If it is your opinion that those other guys are just like Davis, I certainly am not defending their carving into a mountain. Apparently I have claims for which you reject what support does exist. That is not the same thing. The fact that you cannot find something on Wikipedia and that you reject support found elsewhere is not the same thing as claiming that there is no support.In an attempt to qualify your search I asked you if you had encountered certain details that are pretty much inescapable. Your answer reveals exactly what I suspected.Further. Isn't pursuing this line of inquiry besides the point? You really don't care what these folks did or did not do.ABE:After writing the above, I find that I cannot avoid providing some pointers to facts about the history of the carving on Stone Mountain. I understand that most folks probably don't spend much time poking around in civil war and post era history. For anyone interested I would point to the following :This book devotes some amount of text to the history of Stone Mountain over the extensive time period from conception to completion. There is not quite enough of the text available on Google to get the entire story: Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art, and the Landscapes of Southern MemoryThe Real South Starts Here": Whiteness, the Confederacy, and Commodification at Stone MountainCarved in Stone: The History of Stone Mountain

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The creation of this Confederate Memorial, the world's largest work of sculpted art brought the mountain to the notice of the nation and the world. In 1915, the United Daughters of the Confederacy leased the land and commissioned Gutzon Borglum...

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Proceeding intermittently over six decades the project was once again revived during the South's massive response to racial integration. In 1958, capitalizing on this impulse the Georgia legislature funded the project for use as a tourist attraction.

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Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

No, Wikipedia does not contradict me. I agree completely with the sketch provided there. But it is not the complete story. In the meantime I have provide you some sources. With regards to Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, my distinctions don't matter if you want to conclude that they are unfit, or fit heroes that's on you alone. You seem to think it matters how many Southern Heroes turn out to be unfit. I find that to be irrelevant. I've provided facts and arguments. I've also provide some pointers to references.

What I said was that the state took over a Klan project. Which is true. You pointed out that the UDC initiated the project. I acknowledged that to be true, but pointed out that the early UDC was yet another group of white supremacists. Further, the UDC wasn't even that far from the Klan anyway. The Klan worked with the UDC on the Stone Mountain project.None of that is contradicted by the Wikipedia article. Percy, you quoted me, and re-reading what you quoted, I must note that I said nothing about any supremacists group. The white supremacists/segregationists in question were members of the legislature and similarly minded lobbyists and other people who urged the state to pick up the project. The project at time was failing miserably until the state stepped in with financing. And of course I have cited sources that discuss some of the motivation for funding such a project. Other sources specifically reference responses to Brown v. Board of education and civil rights for black folks as motivation for the state financing the project.ABE:Additional facts, Until the state bought the rights, Stone Mountain was owned by the Venable family. At the time the carving was conceived, Stone Mountain was a Klan meeting place, the Venable family were members of the Klan, and they also helped secure financing for the project.From Wikipedia

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The UDC established the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial Association (SMCMA) for fundraising and on-site supervision of the project. Venable and Gutzon Borglum, who were both closely associated with the Klan, arranged to pack the SMCMA with Klan members.[11] The SMCMA, along with the United Daughters of the Confederacy continued fundraising efforts.

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Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by Admin, : Fix quote.