Is the left walking straight into a trap? I honestly don't think tearing down statues right and left is a good idea...

and worse thing is, millions of idiot boomers hang on to his every word.

nah, the DSA exists solely because of Berniebro succdems.

It's an absolute enigma that young people don't believe in the failed deadend systems that haven't been working since inception

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The left over thinks things way too much.
Just tear the damn statues down, life will go on.

i'm getting paranoid/having a panic attack

tbh every single homage to persons living or dead should be removed from public places. Street names, statues, monuments, even place names. I'm tired of being watched over by ghosts.

You are witnessing the dialectics in motion comrade, it's bound to happen.

Not only that, but Trump's George Washington / Thomas Jefferson remark was definitely baiting people to vandalize statues…not to mention, someone wrote 'fuck' on the Lincoln Memorial this morning (although it could've been written by a lefty or righty, who knows)

The people who support Confederate monuments aren't the type of people that could have been won over to the left in any case.

Toppling Confederate monuments sends a message that we're resisting the Trump administration and the alt-right. Both started unpopular and are only sinking in the polls. This ultimately makes us look like the good guys willing to put in the work on the ground to resist the forces of the far-right, something the Democrats aren't doing. Yes, it's only symbolic, but sometimes symbolism is everything.

user…

Holla Forums this goes beyond Trump. The left's main targets are the democrats.

Normies tend not to like book burning and story erasing, in general.

As long as nazis and the KKK keep showing up at these rallies normies won't care.

And most people didn't vote.

Trump is at like 30% approval and falling. That's similar to where Bush was at the end of his presidency.

Statues don't have anything to do with history, and destroying them isn't "erasing history".

I don't know where this dumb meme came from.

I still find that hard to believe.

Don't pretend to be stupid to defend a point, this is not a public discussion you have to convince others, you are here to figure shit out.

I'm sure you understand taking down the statues is about recontextualizing history itself, its about getting the 'good guys' and putting in the 'bad guys' box, it changes the entire context of how these people's stories is supposed to be told, it tells everyone they should be ashamed to be like them.

Normies understand this intuitively, and they also understand this is a tactic of totalitarian ideologies who demand a monopoly and to only have their point of view taught, because if their weak ideology is challenged, they lose.

Believe it, fagit

realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_trump_job_approval-6179.html

I mean what are people gonna do? elect another neoliberal? I'm not a rightist btw I just don't really have high hopes for the world's most reactionary country.

I'm a lifelong resident of the Deep South. Personally, though my well mannered polite upbringing still subconsciously cringes (it's like reflex towards anything spontaneously aggressive. I can't even help it) at the Saddam style pull down on the statue in Durham, I'm actually very excited and full of anticipation that this could mean a wave of sentiment to finally stop tolerating Neo-Confederates and their garbage alternative history and romanticism about the old south.

As long as they don't tear down actual historical monuments I don't see much potential for backfiring. Most of the country doesn't give a shit about this stuff.

I don't know how you managed to logically connect any of this rambling bullshit.

Yes, your conceptualization of history is important to your politics, but that doesn't have anything to do with statues, or how any of this amounts to "totalitarianism".

Tell me Holla Forums, do you think the Ukrainians are "totalitarian" for toppling statues of Stalin?

except in most of those red areas there's more cows and tumbleweeds than people. Most of the people are in the blue areas.

polls aren't perfect but are pretty reliable within an error margin. The Trump decline is a clear trend. Even the polls in the election mostly weren't wrong. Most of the national polls had HRC like 2-4 points ahead. And she won the national vote by about 2 points. They were pretty much all right or within the MoE. The problem was in some really wrong state polls in some important states which threw off the electoral college picture.

Its no different from how religions deal with the imagery of their ideological oppositions, they either re-contextualize them to incorporate in their own religion, or they destroy every single image to erase them.

The difference in the case of Ukraine is that they were not doing in the name of any ideology or movement, they were dismantling one to open their society to a plurality of points of view which existed before and which will come to exist. They were already in a totalitarian state.

what are these mental gymnastics.
try again and tell me who kiev and charlottesville are any different.

*how they are any different

Yeah. I mean I studied history in college and have a great respect for the role of museums and archives in our society, so stick the more relevant ones and relics in there. The thing some folks don't grasp is a lot of these things were erected AGES after the war itself as a big "Go fuck yourself" to the Feds about racial politics and policies. Same thing with several states adopting some variation of the battle flag for display on public buildings or straight up on the state flag in the case of MS and GA. It's Lost Cause signaling. Most of the people who shout about it being simply about heritage can hardly tell you dick about the conflict itself or the times in which it occurred.

The people of Kiev only opposed the communist views, and were open to all other views. Meanwhile, the people taking down the statues in the US do so out of not tolerating any views but their own, the communist views.

lol no. Ukrainian "nationalists" are notorious nazis. Thus why Crimea wanted nothing to do with them.

no they weren't, not everybody who votes for Hillary is a fucking communist

But the people campaigning for the removal of those statues are, and I'm pretty sure they didn't love Hilary either.

To be perfectly honest, everyone from lefty's to conservatives tore back on nationalism/patriotism should want these things at least retired to museums. There is no logical reason to celebrate these people if you consider yourself an American in the modern day, regardless of other points of ideology.

I don't disagree, but that doesn't change the message delivered right now.

Looks like you fell for the meme.

that's a Hillary Clinton town and everybody there wanted the statue gone.

If we forcibly tear more down, yes.

Charlottesville's removal was the decision of the community, though.

What to avoid is going after Washington, yeah. And I suspect Trump might have had some hopes of people doing just that with his "slaveholder" comment. Personally, as bad as America's founders may have been, they were extremely important for the series of revolutions that followed and the destruction of monarchy and feudalism. The Confederacy's leaders were basically the direct predecessors to the KKK and a host of Confederate nostalgia groups.

The only Founding Father that mattered was Thomas Paine and he has a grand total of two statues and one (modest) monument, pic related.

people like Washington are primarily not known for slavery or advocating it. That some of them owned slaves is a footnote to what they were about. For their time they were pretty progressive. They were primarily about overthrowing monarchy and establishing a government founded on individual rights, a notable step forward for the time.

A hundred years later, the Confederacy was about preventing progress and preserving a notably worse system of chattel slavery, with the explicit goal of creating a white supremacist ethnostate that enshrined human slavery in its constitution.

These are not remotely the same thing.

It's very bad because the deep intellectual roots of the new south are built on young men and women seeing these statues and understanding the complicated human problems they represent.

We would not have writers like Faulkner, O'Connor, Hurston without these statues. These are some of the brightest voices in philosophy and they are born out of the darkness of Southern history.

Anything that nazis like I want to see gone.

That's dumb and solves nothing. There is no reason to depraive future generations of the wealth of knowledge the South has to offer.

The south shows darkness in people, how good people do awful things, and there is no reason to make it a cultural wasteland by tearing all of that away.

Sweet tea and Mississippi air isn't what made Faulkner the greatest American writer, being in a place to reflect on how good people do awful things in the most visceral of ways made him who he was. The same goes for Baldwin, O'Connor, and the entire southern intellectual tradition of the last 100 years.

These monuments have a duality - they represent evil things, but very often have intellectual counters sitting nearby. Symbols of where we have gone since they were erected. Destroying symbols of the past doesn't remove any history, it just makes young people forget.

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it barely even does that tbh

The point is that the south of America is a wonderful point of observation for understanding human motivations and capabilities and we should not loose the learning that inspired so many great writers just because the 90s gun show culture and the neo-nazis it produced is currently depriving our culture of meaningful academics regarding race that aren't sjw shit.

I grew up in Alabama, and now live in a liberal European country working as a philosopher. Reading Faulkner in a small Alabama town and realizing the implications of the small monument to black writers in my town alongside civil war monuments was the most life-changing experience of my childhood. It is incredibly impactful and is a bond many southern academics share.

If you are not from the south you really should not speak on this issue. There is a reason many liberal southerners do not want these statues taken away, even if we can't say it out-loud because of the current reactionary politics culture.

So what is it like to literally be employing 1984 doublethink while accusing the opposing ideology of "totalitarianism"

Uh, no.

I say we move past the whole thing. Bury it and never look back. Whatever it managed to produce, it's already produced and the conditions for that are long gone. There's no value to these shrines to the far-right, and you're bonkers if if you think they will.

No, what the right wants is for us to stop. They are waiting for weakness. We should offer rewards for every statue that is taken down.

lol wordfilter. On topic they should let the locals vote and if they vote to remove them put them in a fucking museum or auction them off to private caretakers. This whole thing is a retarded non-issue that's being used by both libtards and rightards to obfuscate real issues by dogwhistling at each other over it, and I really wish people would realize this.

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This.

okay we need to make it go full-circle, 'excellent' should filter to 'degener8'

polite sage for doublepost

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Why? It stands for the exact same things Clinton does.

OK ffs people.
Pulling down statues is purely symbolic.
Pull them down AFTER the revolution. Doing it now just pisses everyone off.

the left loves symbolic victories like tearing down statues that nobody cares about because symbolic victories are all we've really been capable of for almost 50 year and all we're capable of right now. It makes people feel good, feel like they achieved something while the wheels of capital continue to turn uninterrupted because we know, and they know, we are not really a threat. Not just because we're kept very neatly away from power, but because the majority of the left has long since given up on taking power and even become hostile to the idea of power. So we focus on shit like this. Symbolic, cultural, ultimately politically innocuous victories.

The only function it can serve is to remind everybody that we're still around so people remember the left when shit hits the fan. The problem is that, with this kind of tactical posture at this point in history, when most people think of us they think of petulant children of wealthy families acting out. I don't have any better ideas though, so I don't really have anything against people pursuing shit like this. Only with people on the left fooling themselves and each other into thinking it's politics.

Trump voting enemy scum here.

I hate the fucking south. The reason that nignogs are in the U.S. is because the southern white trailer trash inbred hillbillies were too lazy to pick their own cotton, plow the fields, work the land, feel the sun and sweat of a hard days work on their brow.

Then, Lincoln hated the groids and wanted to ship them back to Africa. What did the rednecks do? They killed Lincoln thusly ensuring that blackie would stay in the U.S. forever.

The south will never rise again. I would rather see VX gas spread and melt the entire eastern seaboard before those stupid morons ever rise again.

The south fucking lost. They are loser trash. They got beat. yet they still wave their loser fucking confederate flag? Fuck that noise.

The worst part is the people waving the confederate flag, if they saw a beaner waving the wetback spic flag, would be the very first to be enraged about it and complain. Yet they wave the banner of a foreign nation (The confederacy) when we are the U.S. of fucking A.

I hate them more than I hate nignogs and illegals.

Tear down every statue dedicated to the foreign invading nation of the confederacy. Fuck them all.

m8, white trash hillbillies were only seen as and treated marginally better than the black slaves for most of the history of the southern US. It wasn't the families who you'd now call trailer trash who owned the plantations and brought in the slaves to do their work for them, it was the rich white landowner families who are mostly still rich landowner families to this day. You know, Republican party donors.

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Uh no, wrong. Multiple generations of hillbillies' children weren't sold into slavery. Women and children weren't legally raped regularly as a matter of course. Nor were medical experiments conducted on them.

I finally read the transcripts of Trump press conference. Highlight.

Pretending they're of any historic value is the real recontextualizing history: basically all of these were put up during periods of integration as a way of saying "yeah the feds can makes us TREAT you like people but we want to make absolutely sure you still know we don't consider you people."

would anyone be surprised at this point?

Nor were they prevented from learning to read, getting an education, marrying who they wanted, living together as a family, not getting branded, not getting hung, not getting tortured etc. etc.

That's all true, and for these muh privileges, "the filth" that were there as way for the upper classes of Europe to be rid of them, were just left simply to starve or were pressed into military or merchant marine service to have their lives spent that way because it was cheaper to own, house and feed slaves on plantations than deal with white trash. Or compelled into dangerous mines that slaves were too valuable to use in. They at least had some kind of legal standing that might be enforced, could only be kept as indentured servants with some, at least theoretical modicum of freedom at the end of their contracts. They were kept from literacy via economic rather than institutional means.

Like I said, they were treated marginally better but they were certainly not the people who owned the land and brought the slaves like seems to think.

The one statue that was torn down in North Carolina was a case of fully justified collective action. The city had voted in a democratic way to remove the statue, but the state government had blocked the measure. A clear case of anti-democratic meddling - the question of the decoration of your collective living spaces is something that should belong to the community in question, there is no overriding need for this to be dictated at the state level. Moreover, being only placed in the twenties, the statue had negligible historical value.

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Peacful protest only gets you so far. its useful in inspiring people and awakening class conciouness i guess, in actually addressing any of the issues the protest is about it gets you jack shit.

Appealing to the conscience of utterly vile rulers like those who lead the US is absolutely not going to achieve anything. they dont care, and the fact a protest is undertaken with license and dosent cause any damage to meaningful private property plays to their favor.

The moment the capitalists and their supporters turns against the people with open violence is the moment to ramp it up a notch.

a shitty statue is nothing, the struggle of the American left, if it wishes to go beyond basic liberal platitudes like unisex bathrooms, is going to be arduous, immoral and long.

To overthrow a state the price of occupation and control must outweigh the benefits. this requires serious damage to morale and private property.

Just my opinion after living through part of the violent struggle in my country against both a hostile state and far-right defenders of said state.

Transferring control from one lot of imbeciles to another is hardly an improvement.

If the only standing between you and being a writer, is a statue of an old dead guy, you should quit.