PC Gone Too Far

But they're not "bygone passions". Memorializing the slavers is an ongoing insult to the descendants of the slaves. Moving the insult to a less visible location doesn't "lose history". The memory is all too well preserved without the monument. That question is pretty good evidence that no objective answers are possible.

Except as I demonstrated, I had already provided a definition. Did you even look at the reference I provided? I pointed to your message posted well before message 624, which responded to my posting of a definition. Here is my a pointer to my definition from Message 533: You recognized that I had posted a definition in your post 544 although you did have some issues with my definition. I'll also note that from my wording in message 533, that my post was not the first one in which I offered a definition. So yeah you did see it. You've now denied at least three times that I posted such a definition despite having responded to my definition.So given that I had already provided a definition, I clearly was not stonewalling when I answered your question. In fact, I've insisted on that reasoning in various prior posts in which a definition was required.Percy on the use of the word evil. I don't make any distinction between extreme cases of being morally wrong and evil. As you yourself indicate, neither are timeless or non-objective. There is essentially no difference between the two terms.Edited by NoNukes, : Add documentationEdited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Ringo asks: But those are different discussions. We are NOT attempting to evaluate slavery here. The memorial is to the nameless dead soldiers, not to the institution of slavery.One aspect of this that I think is getting lost is the vast difference between the powers of the Confederacy represented by a minority (more than my 1%, I'll admit) who perpetuated the slavery culture over the much more numerous average Confederate soldiers, who have been basically brainwashed - as are most soldiers even today. For them, their homelands and families are being attacked by invaders. They defend as anyone understanding human behavior would expect them to do. But even to say that is to stray from the OP issue.This is not a memorial to the Confederate power brokers.

The initial topic was the single monument. The scope of the discussion has included much more than as early as a dozen or so posts into the thread. In one of Percy's subsequent posts he talked about renaming of buildings. Since then we've discussed any number of monuments including Stone Mountain, the Maryland state song, and slavery in general.ABE:So the discussion is not limited to a single memorial. With regards to the memorial which is the subject of the initial post, I don't personally the monument offensive. On the other hand, I don't have to live with the thing and I don't know and am not interested in looking up the history of the folks it does celebrate, so I'm not prepared to slam folks who want the monument moved.I do, on the other hand, find the carving on Stone Mountain, and the catering of the GA politicians to the UDC and SCV to the exclusion of all other requesting folk both offensive and disgusting. I have empathy for folks who want to move statutes of Jefferson Davis off of the campus quad, who want their state to stop flying the confederate flag, or who petition their government for renaming the FBI building. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

It appears to me that what is being attempted here is to not evaluate slavery too harshly. Apparently attempts that result in such evaluations, particularly if those evaluations are applied to slave owners, are considered non objective.

NoNukes continues: and the OP monument has nothing to do with slave owners.I thought maybe we could start a NON-coffeehouse thread up there, but I couldn't find a category for "Slavery". I do NOT want to start (or actually open up the subjects discussed here tangently that I am also guilty of doing with song lyrics) under a new coffeehouse subtopic, "Slavery & the Civil War". That will fill up the rest of New Hampshire with Percy's flash drives.So - sorry, I do not want to talk about slavery here anymore, because in my mind, adhering to the EvC principles, it is off-topic.This thread has been a lot of people talking past each other....*sigh*

I wrote: But I do want to draw everyone's attention to Samuel Clements words that I quoted in Message 540 (sorry for reposting!!!): The Reason I quoted that was to show HOW a poor white southerner could have an epiphany, despite all his upbringing and brainwashing. It was more of an accent on this OP subject. It was very hard for Huck Finn to get there - let alone Samuel Clemens - and he wrote it beautifully. And the nerve of anyone who would suggest that if you, yourself, in that time and place, friends of Huck like Tom Sawyer, didn't have the same epiphany and are therefore EVIL boggles my mindEdited by xongsmith, : Spell check on Mark Twain

Evil is like that. It can pervade a society and become the norm for behavior. Mind-boggling, but repeatedly demonstrated throughout history. I cannot really praise Huck Finn, a fictional character for having an epiphany; the praise is due entirely to the author who managed in nineteenth century to be well ahead of the many of his peers. If instead you were to discuss how Samuel Clements managed to see things as he did, after having been raised during the pre-civil war South, we would be confronted with a real story. Clements, through Finn, may well have been describing his own awakening.10 Fascinating Facts About 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' | Mental Floss.

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As a child, Twain didn’t question the institution of slavery. Not only was Missouri a slave state, his uncle owned 20 slaves. In Autobiography, Twain wrote, I vividly remember seeing a dozen black men and women chained to one another, once, and lying in a group on the pavement, awaiting shipment to the Southern slave market. Those were the saddest faces I have ever seen.

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At some point, Twain’s attitudes changed and he married into an abolitionist family. His father-in-law, Jervis Langdon, was a conductor on the Underground Railroad and housed Frederick Douglass.

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That the society in the south made it nigh impossible for these kinds of realizations is damning. The images of sad slaves seem stark and persuasive to me, yet such scenes moved few "good" folks who were inured to those kinds of feelings. In fact the norm for society is that real good folks who imitated Langdon were the vile traitors and Frederick Douglas was the thief who stole value from his owner by escaping. In the end, every bit of slavery was created an operated by men who placed their own ends above the worth of the most basic needs, dreams, and destinies of an entire race of folks through deliberate actions. I suppose there are more depraved attitudes imaginable, but those I've described above are justifiable high on some lists of many folks.Nobody is born evil, yet all evil is done by men. Mind boggling indeed.ABE:
Sorry. I felt that I must address this...How is Huck Finn's epiphany described by Clements?

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thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell.

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Apparently, Clements does not dither about the issue that we debate here.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

NoNukes on board with: Duh. Huck IS Mark Twain! NO. Here is the salient quote:

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"All right, then, I'll GO to hell"--and tore it up.

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Mark Twain said that no one person was Huck Finn. Huck was the combination of lots of folk that Clements encountered during his lifetime.

So what? The point I was trying to make with this is that there is a cultural upbringing that is hard to overcome and...yet, this memorial to the fallen Confederate soldiers is somehow being construed, by even folks here in EvC of all places, as an evil thing and therefore should be destroyed.The passage I quoted from Huck Finn is ON POINT about overcoming the upbringing the poor whites were subjected to, and how hard it is.

Sorry to do this again, but I must point out that Mark Twain WAS THERE, and yes he wrote FICTION, and yes he was SELLING his words - BUT:He was there and used the power of fiction to tell a greater Truth than even the excellent Shelby Foote of Ken Burn's Civil War could ever hope to do.

It appears that we are in agreement other than a quibble about whether Finn was identically Mark Twain. I only posted about that issue because you raised it as a correction for me. As I mentioned in my post, Twain himself went through a transformation of sorts regarding the issue of slavery, and certainly that experience was reflected in Finn.

Of course we are. Percy values the historical value of the monument above the symbolism. I value it lower. No. It's because the individual soldiers are nameless that the monument is seen as symbolizing the Confederacy - and its salient feature, slavery.

I suppose this might be the case for some folks, particularly in the case where the memorial is not actually a grave marker. While I am sympathetic to folks who desire to move monuments that are not really historical events, I would be inclined to argue with those folks with regard to monuments that are only tangentially Confederacy symbols."To our confederate dead" is not clearly tangential IMO, but it is pretty close.