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| These white knuckleheads beating on each other . On both sides ARE to BLAME. My observation . |
Getting rid of the Past .
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| Robert E Lee statute at the center of Charlottesville riots |
damnatio memoriae
Interestingly John Daniel Davidson back in 2015 made a statement that resonates in regards to the " removal of the statutes " . Frankly it sound like someones "political agenda".
In ancient Rome, it was called damnatio memoriae, the “condemnation of memory,” and its purpose was overtly political. The point was to dishonor traitors and deposed emperors by purging them from public memory. Rome would seize their property, remove their name from public monuments, and destroy or re-work their statues.
Davidson's point about damnatio memoriae is intriguing enough. Yet the monuments were mostly erected decades after the fall of the Confederacy and made of flimsy materials, bought from factories that specialized in budget-friendly “racist kitsch.” The United Daughters of the Confederacy sought to reify the myth of the Lost Cause by funding the Durham monument and others like it—precisely because people who lived through the Confederacy were forgetting it or dying. Monuments are never just benign markers of the past, but the past told according to a particular narrative and made tangible in order to influence collective memory. Images such as sculptures and paintings have been recognized as having special power for millennia, which is why people from Ancient Egypt to modern Iraq have practiced damnatio memoriae, including the ritual toppling and attacking of monuments.
The "culture war" of the radicals .
In America its a new wave of what we might deem as (2.1)>>"culture war" . In the Obama era we had BLM which showed divided nation still at racial lines . Black Lives Matter radically took over from the Occupy Movement which saw the injustice of racially motivated law enforcement The explosion of the alt-right { white supremacists} who may have been hiding in the shadows during the Obama era , now have found their popularity with the Trump Presidency who during his campaign last year denounced BLM pushing the Republican right wing "all lives matter" . Despite ongoing rebukes over his defense of white supremacists, President Trump defiantly returned to his campaign’s nativist themes on Thursday. He lamented an assault on American “culture,” revived a bogus, century-old story about killing Muslim extremists and attacked Republicans with a renewed vigor.Earlier in the day, Mr. Trump made clear that he has no intention of stepping back from his assertions about the Charlottesville rally that have drawn widespread condemnation. In three tweets, Mr. Trump defended Civil War-era statues, using language very similar to that of white supremacists to argue the statues should remain in place.
Antifa, and the possible staged protests .
While the media was focused on the alt-white supremacists . There is a curious possibility that the protests were some how set up . As I mentioned above , Alex Jones "claim" that the (2.2)>.protest was a staged set up . Could be true . Far-left agitators are calling for an escalation in tactics following this weekend’s violence at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville.Many of the same groups that have organized violent demonstrations in Berkeley, California and elsewhere are now calling for an aggressive response to the violence in Charlottesville. Far-left “anti-fascist” (or antifa) figures are advising agitators to do the job that police won’t: shutting down “fascists” and preventing them from organizing.They relish in punching Nazis. They protest in all black. And they've vowed to physically confront racists and extremists across the country. They wave communist symbols in black , But who exactly are the protesters that violently clashed with white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia? Perhaps it was Antifa . But President Trump's election seems to have injected new vigor into U.S.-based anti-fascist organizations. On Inauguration Day, black clad protesters rioted, damaged property and destroyed a limo while peaceful anti-Trump protesters marched nearby. Since then, Antifa protesters have clashed with white nationalists in Berkeley, Calif., Chicago and now, Charlottesville. It seems that over the years protests have become move violent , case in point BLM movements . These goons and thugs oppose free speech, celebrate violence, despise dissent, and have little use for anything else in the American political tradition. But many liberals, particularly in the media, are victims of the same kind of confusion that vexed so much of American liberalism in the 20th century. Because antifa suddenly has the (alt-)right enemies, they must be the good guys.
Trump's Confusing Charlottesville statements .
President Trump initially issued statements about the incident that condemned “many sides” for their actions, a stance that was criticized by conservative In the Trump presidency, pundits spend days debating the surprising—and often confusing—things Trump says in interviews and tweets. But often, the biggest questions are about what the president leaves unsaid. Charlottesville bloomed with controversy . The "fact" that there where no nice people on both sides , considering the infiltration of Antifia agents in the riots, other anarchists groups. The President was on the mark with that . BUT when he said that there were (3)>>"fine people" there I must disagree . Fine people just don't resort to violence . Trump’s “many sides” statement suggests that there is blame to go around for the day’s violence—that the counter protesters are as much to blame for hatred and bigotry as the “Unite the Right” attendees, whose speakers included former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke and self-identified white nationalist Richard Spencer.Regardless of whether Trump’s characterization is fair, it fails to acknowledge the partisan backdrop against which tensions bubbled over in Charlottesville.
Last Note : Ghosts of the Confederacy .
It makes a hard argument to remove the memorials , but at the same time it also effects other historic monuments like those dedicated to General Custer who was a notorious racist , helped with the genocide of Native Americans . The List of offensive monuments goes well beyond the Confederate . I just don't care about removing them from public . The other point is what about monuments to Union soldiers ?
As I said above . My feelings on the "monuments", just to be clear and not misquoted . Robert E Lee himself may have given the best warnings about any Confederate monuments , why . Based on his writings, Lee was not a fan of statues honoring Civil War generals, fearing they might "keep open the sores of war." In a 1866 letter to fellow Confederate Gen. Thomas L. Rosser, Lee wrote, "As regards the erection of such a monument as is contemplated, my conviction is, that however grateful it would be to the feelings of the South, the attempt ... would have the effect of ... continuing, if not adding to, the difficulties under which the Southern people labour." Three years later, Lee was invited to a meeting of Union and Confederate officers to mark the placing of a memorial honoring those who took part in the battle of Gettysburg. "I think it wiser not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered," he wrote in a letter declining the invitation. For Lee setting up monuments only en-devour to further strife and discord . He was right .
NOTES AND COMMENTS:
(1.1)>> influx of white nationalists . There has never been so many idiots to literally come out of the shadows taking the streets is amazing . Charlottesville became the center of ignorance when Nazi flags were displayed along the Confederate flag . While I under stand the Southern white racial images , but seeing Americans wave the Nazi flag is so alien to the Confederate cause it is somewhat disgusting . A slap in the face to many proud World War 2 veterans who fought to liberate Europe, now they have to see would be Nazi's chanting anti Semitic slogans in America . While the "hatred" is real , its also vary stupid . The White Nationalist have really put down the whites they represent as being superior to others. (1.2)>>Alex Jones "claim" . Mr. Jones himself has been considered a purveyor of so-called “fake news” since well before the phrase entered the modern parlance during the 2016 U.S. presidential race, Jones presented his depressingly predictable explanation of what transpired in Charlottesville in a video posted on Saturday. “EXCLUSIVE: Virginia Riots Staged To Bring In Martial Law, Ban Conservative Gatherings,” the headline read. The video was an hour-long diatribe against some of Jones’s favorite targets, including liberal philanthropist George Soros, Black Lives Matter, globalists, elitists, the Democrats, the Republicans and anarchists, among many others. However, Jones failed to provide even remotely compelling evidence that anyone of these forces was directly responsible for the weekend’s violence (Fields killed one woman with his car, while two Virginia State Police officers died when their helicopter crashed en route to Charlottesville). (1.3)>>It's the problem of "re-writing" history by "erasing the past" . Mount McKinley — the 20,237-foot mountain and the tallest in North America — has been renamed Denali, as it was originally known by Alaska Natives before it was renamed to honor President William McKinley. Was renamed by President Obama (2)>>We have had past Presidents who owned slaves . George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, James Madison, Andrew Jackson. Should we also remove their monuments ?This clearly highlights my problem about court rulings based on the "original intent" of the Constitution. Allowance for slavery was such a serious flaw that the war to correct it cost us the lives of over 300 9/11s at a time when the population was less than 10% of what it is today. Robert E. Lee is said to have been a slave owner but so was General Ulysseus S. Grant, the leader of the Union Army. Nobody wants to desecrate any of his monuments. The Confederacy was said to be fighting for the preservation of slavery, but the North had slaves throughout the entire war and for a brief period of time after the war, longer than the South was allowed to keep their slaves. The Confederate flag is seen as a symbol of racism but it only existed for 4 years of slavery, while the American flag existed for around 90 years of slavery and the Union Jack existed for about 150 years of slavery before that (in North America of course.) Many of these facts are not known by the general public and more facts will continue to go unknown if the current trend of revisionist history continues. And those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it. (2.2)>.protest was a staged set up .A Republican state lawmaker in Idaho refused to back away from his claims that the deadly violence following a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, earlier this month might have been staged with the help of former President Barack Obama.Representative Bryan Zollinger shared an article last week that suggested the “Unite the Right” march was orchestrated by Obama along with other leading Democrats, such as Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, Charlottesville Mayor Michael Signer and billionaire donor George Soros. Published by the site the American Thinker, the piece asserts, “Charlottesville is beginning to feel like a set-up, perhaps weeks or months in the planning.”(2.1)>>"culture war" .Of course we have culture wars, because we have always been a nation in which big-city values fight the values of the countryside. "Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic," declared William Jennings Bryan, the Great Commoner who spoke for country folk. "But destroy our farms, and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country." Now, that's cultural warfare. Americans thinking of themselves as "modern" and "advanced" have always battled other Americans whom they wrote off as backward and parochial. The people dismissed as backward have always looked down on highfalutin big-city folks as hopelessly immoral. Today these battling types are all intermixed in suburbs and exurbs, though they try hard to congregate with their own kind.And yes, we are black and white, and much that passes for cultural warfare is also racial warfare. We are a country that waged a civil war over slavery and states' rights. Whether you explain that war in terms of the former or of the latter is still a sign, more than 140 years after it ended, of where your sympathies lie. (3)>>"fine people" there I must disagree . Around dinnertime on August 14, President Donald Trump tweeted about the“truly bad people” who played a role in the Charlottesville race riots. Less than 24 hours later he highlighted some “very fine people” who were there, tooThe “bad people?” Perhaps not surprisingly, Trump was referring to members of the news media, whom he’s previously labeled the “enemy of the American people.” And the “very fine people?” They were in Charlottesville simply to protest the removal of a statue, Trump said. And while they may have walked alongside the neo-Nazis shouting racist taunts and white supremacists carrying torches, these fine people were not only good citizens; they were the real victims. There were, Trump said, “many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists. Okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.” He added: “You had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest.”
