Friday, December 18, 2015

Confederate monuments to come down in New Orleans

According to Business Report:
New Orleans leaders today made a sweeping move to break with the city’s Confederate past when the City Council voted to remove prominent Confederate monuments along some of its busiest streets.
As The Associated Press reports, the council’s 6-1 vote allows the city to remove four monuments, including a towering statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee that has stood at the center of a traffic circle for 131 years.
It was an emotional meeting—often interrupted by heckling—infused with references to slavery, lynchings and racism, as well as the pleas of those who opposed removing the monuments to not “rewrite history.”
City Council President Jason Williams called the vote a symbolic severing of an “umbilical cord” tying the city to the offensive legacy of the Confederacy and the era of Jim Crow laws.
“If anybody wins here, it will be the South, because it is finally rising,” said Williams, who is African-American.
Stacy Head, a council member at large, was the lone vote against the removal. She is one of two white council members. She lamented what she called a rush to take the monuments down without adequate consideration of their historic value and meaning to many in New Orleans.
Fixing historic injustice is “a lot harder work than removing monuments,” Head said, even as many in the packed council chambers jeered her."

First, let's look at some of the phony, illogical, arguments against removal.
First, "you cannot rewrite history by removing monuments."  This history is already written in thousands of books and articles.  Those favoring removal are not trying to rewrite history.  Did Germany forget about Hitler when his statues were torn down?  Germany has acknowledged its guilt.  Many Americans refuse to acknowledge America's guilt.
Second, "Fixing historic injustices is lot harder than removing injustices."  Any moron knows that.  Removing the monuments will not stop or satisfy the NAACP, Urban League, or most black Americans.  Ironically, it is the people who are most likely to want to keep the statues who are least likely to support fixing the injustices.

People want the statutes removed because the honor those who supported slavery and white supremacy.  I suspect that many who opposed removal are open or closet white supremacists who still buy into the "lost cause" delusions. 

1 comment:

  1. Same motivations as ISIS and the Taliban. Same behavior.

    Art

    ReplyDelete