Sanitizing History???

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Brian P said:
Have you been to mainland Europe?

There are many, MANY war memorials. The properties that many (possibly all) of the Nazi concentration camps were on, are war memorials. The need to remember the ugly parts of the past, in the interest of not repeating it, is well known. Part of that is the need to not glorify those who were responsible, hence the ban on some symbols.
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None of them show say Adolf Hitler, Goering or Rommel. There is no war memorial for the invasion of Poland or France.
I was born in Germany of German parents, at age 3 we moved to Brussels. By the time I was 6 I knew every WW2 related name calling or insult for Germans. Not a nice feeling trust me.
 
I82l8 said:
None of them show say Adolf Hitler, Goering or Rommel. There is no war memorial for the invasion of Poland or France.
I was born in Germany of German parents, at age 3 we moved to Brussels. By the time I was 6 I knew every WW2 related name calling or insult for Germans. Not a nice feeling trust me.
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I knew a WWII German pilot and a soldier. Both were decent guys, just fighting on the wrong side. The soldier recalled seeing 13 year old boys in the trenches, crying for their mothers.

Rommel was just a high ranking soldier on the wrong side. He followed orders but to my knowledge wasn't involved in any atrocities.

Obviously he got on the wrong side of Hitler and was invited to go for an escorted car ride where he accidentally ingested something that upset his stomach.

I also worked with a Canadian radio operator who flew bombing raids over Germany. He commented once that they bombed every day but it never came to mind until much later that they were dropping bombs on people as they sat down to their Sunday dinners.

The trouble with monuments to people is that one can always find something nice to say about the individual. Hitler restored the pride of the German people (for a while). He brought about the VW beetle.

It's pretty hard to find something good to say about the benefits of a death camp or an instrument of torture.
 
nobbie48 said:
I knew a WWII German pilot and a soldier. Both were decent guys, just fighting on the wrong side. The soldier recalled seeing 13 year old boys in the trenches, crying for their mothers.

Rommel was just a high ranking soldier on the wrong side. He followed orders but to my knowledge wasn't involved in any atrocities.

Obviously he got on the wrong side of Hitler and was invited to go for an escorted car ride where he accidentally ingested something that upset his stomach.

I also worked with a Canadian radio operator who flew bombing raids over Germany. He commented once that they bombed every day but it never came to mind until much later that they were dropping bombs on people as they sat down to their Sunday dinners.

The trouble with monuments to people is that one can always find something nice to say about the individual. Hitler restored the pride of the German people (for a while). He brought about the VW beetle.

It's pretty hard to find something good to say about the benefits of a death camp or an instrument of torture.
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Fully agreed. My point was in response to Brian P about war memorials in Europe that are all about the allies/liberation or as a negative such as the KZ's. None of them about anything German in glorious manner such as statue of General Lee.
 
nobbie48 said:
If all statues of slave owners are to be removed see Mount Rushmore before it's too late.
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I think it has a lot to do with what those people did with the rest of their lives. The statues being pulled down are of people accused of trying to tear a nation apart partly over a matter of slavery which they never renounced. The history of the US is very complicated with regards to race. In the 1920's the KKK were holding massive rallies in NY with many thousands of members and then they were fighting the "roman catholic" police, many of which were Irish immigrants or children of Irish immigrants. The US has always had this very nasty underbelly of racism that's always been pretty close to rearing it's ugly head. Having Obama as a president made many of them creep out of the woodwork, Trump has emboldened them. Statues are commemorations, the citizens of Charlottsville decided they didn't want to commemorate what Lee stood for.

Here's a bit of an analogy. In the UK we had Jimmy Saville, a larger than life figure who did a lot for various charities, so much that hospital wings were named after him, streets were named after him etc. Turns out though that the entire time he'd been sexually abusing children. His name was subsequently removed from anything it was associated with...and rightly so. People rightly didn't want to commemorate a character that has been so monstrous in his actions despite whatever he did for charities and no matter that he was a part of recent pop-culture history of the UK. Removing his name doesn't mean he never existed, it means people don't want to commemorate his character.
 
RockerGuy said:
I was watching citytv & some of the people were carrying Russian flags. Do those people even know what communism represents?
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I saw on Twitter that David Duke (former KKK leader) stated that Russia was the last great white hope (or something like that). And after godaddy and Google refused to host their website, they have hosting in Russia.


Btw- political thread, marked for deletion?

sent from my Purple LGG4 on the GTAM app
 
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If they are relocating them to a museum or something I don't have a problem with it. If they are taking them down to destroy them or hide them in a warehouse, then that seems wrong.
 
48Connor said:
If they are relocating them to a museum or something I don't have a problem with it. If they are taking them down to destroy them or hide them in a warehouse, then that seems wrong.
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I thought that the Charlottesville one had been bought by a private citizen although I might be wrong. I agree, a museum is a fitting place for the statues along with a write up of why the statue is in a museum in the first place.

Heres the irony though, Trump said it should be up to individual "cities" as to what they want to do with various statues etc, that's exactly what happened in Charlottesville, the city council voted to remove the statue.
 
48Connor said:
If they are relocating them to a museum or something I don't have a problem with it. If they are taking them down to destroy them or hide them in a warehouse, then that seems wrong.
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Pick 400 acres in rural Alabama and make a KKK theme park, like darian lake or eurodisney. Put all the statues and relics out there, campfires have a burning cross theme.
 
crankcall said:
Pick 400 acres in rural Alabama and make a KKK theme park, like darian lake or eurodisney. Put all the statues and relics out there, campfires have a burning cross theme.
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haha....now that's funny, park could have an all black staff to make the whiskey tango feel like they've gone back in time

referring back to the Stalin statue in Seattle...that is extreme stupidity,
man was more a murderer than a socialist leader

Even in Russia they went to some lengths to remove Stalin iconography after the USSR fell,
not so much Lenin as he was a socialist theorist first, not so much a dictator

but I like what they did in Moscow with the statues from the soviet era
collected them and placed in a park for the artistic value of the objects to be appreciated
with a plaque for each explaining the history of the statue and the subject

so the art can be saved, the statues historical significance can be explained
in place where those that want to see it, can see it

Each statue or set of statues is accompanied by a panel that informs the viewer about the work, its composition and the history of its display. Notably, there is little about the leader being portrayed in the text. Each description ends with, “By the decree of the Moscow City Council of people representatives of Oct 24, 1991, the monument was dismantled and placed in the Museon arts park exposition. The work is historically and culturally significant, being the memorial construction of the soviet era, on the themes of politics and ideology.” The point, of course, is that the Moscow city council is careful to state that the display is not intended to glorify the past, but to document it.
 
Should Egypt tear down the pyramids?
 
Mon·u·ment
a statue, building, or other structure erected to commemorate a famous or notable person or event

Com·mem·o·rate
o recall and show respect for (someone or something).
o celebrate (an event, a person, or a situation) by doing or building something.
 
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