PC Gone Too Far

And how do we do that without deciding whether something (like slavery) is good or bad? And yet you condone memorializing those who fought to preserve slavery on the same level as those who fought to end it. Evil isn't the only criterion but it has to be one of them.

It's a fairly simple and widespread concept: ignorance of the law is no excuse, "I was only following orders," is no excuse. We do hold people responsible for their evil actions. I think people who fight for an evil cause should not be memorialized alongside people who fought against it.

You're claiming that we should look at history objectively. I'm saying that we shouldn't look at slavery objectively; we should look at it empathetically. It's important to understand that slavery is a very, very bad thing, one of the worst things that can happen to a group of people, tantamount to murdering them en masse. I find it disturbing that you try to ameliorate the evil of slavery.

The situation on slavery was equivocal at one time.

It's hard to understand how you "agree" that slavery is evil when you want to commemorate the people who fought to preserve it. Their basic humanity entitles them to individual headstones. It does not validate monuments to their crimes against humanity. The topic is about moving a monument. I agree with the people who want to move it. Our reasons may not be identical but our goals are similar, to stop commemorating the crime of slavery.

Since we are the ones moving monuments in the present, our present notions of morality are the only ones that matter. Otherwise we'd be leaving monuments to Stalin on every street corner because future generations might decide he was a pretty nice guy after all.And future generations might decide that moving monuments to slavers was evil.You can't just ignore history on the grounds that somebody might eventually change their minds.

It is. We judge that Hitler was evil and we don't put up monuments to him. We judge that slavery is evil and we don't put up monuments to it. You should stop nitpicking and accept the obvious parallel. "Wrong" is dialling a 3 instead of a 5 on your phone. "Wrong" is turning left when you should have turned right. "Wrong" is "Oops, I made a mistake. No harm done.""Evil" is keeping people in chains and whipping them for hundreds of years. There's no "Oops" in evil.

There was no intent to kill people, which you insist is essential to genocide. The intent was to replace their "inferior" culture with our "superior" culture. The intent was paternalistic.The intent behind slavery - besides getting cheap labour - was also to "help" the poor dumb Africans run their lives. Huh? We're talking about a specific example here. The ones we're talking about. Cultural destruction was secondary to getting cheap labour. It was a means to an end. It was a by-product.

The monument in question is to the grownups who did perpetuate it.

The intent doesn't matter. You can wipe out an entire culture accidentally by introducing smallpox, for example. The slaves did try to preserve as much of their culture as possible but they were not free to do so. No more than efforts to kill off the Mafia culture.

No we don't. You're trying to minimize the unspeakable evil of slavery by downgrading it to "wrong". To you it's just a little oopsie, like a wrong number. To you its practitioners are heroes worthy of commemoration.No, we don't agree. We need to call a spade a spade or we're not remembering history.

No. I would like it to be replaced by a monument to the slaves. That would be remembering history as it was instead of whitewashing it. And I've said that it's the only way that makes sense, so quit pretending that we agree. The facts can be remembered by commemorating the victims instead of the perpetrators. They will be repeated unless we remember which side was "wrong". It's not an individual decision. It's a collective decision by society. Our society has decided to accept abortion and homosexuality and reject slavery. Some future society may decide we were evil and ban abortion and homosexuality and re-introduce slavery. You, of course, would want to decide "objectively" whether or not slavery was a good idea.

Commemorated by the monument.

Yes. You can't just ignore the cause they were fighting for. What you're trying to do is like putting police officers who die in the line of duty on an equal footing with Bonnie and Clyde. I have already said that more than once.

And slavery wasn't regarded as a bad thing - until it was. It always takes a while for some people's empathy to engage. It isn't a crime to stop a crime.