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Erasing history, should we do it?

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Drake
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19 Mar 2018, 6:59 am

naturalplastic wrote:
Read a magazine article by an author outraged about how "Nazi death camps in Europe are all deteriorating!". For a nanosecond I thought that he sounded crazy. Why do the death camps need to be pristine? I wondered. But then it immediately struck that YES, its vital to protect the sites were the Holocaust happened because we already have Holocaust deniers now. Just think how ez it would be for future generations to get away with holocaust denial claims if there were no longer concrete (literally concrete) evidence of the holocaust around to point to and look at. So Auschwitz and Buchenwald do need to be preserved.

However confederate statues in Baltimore? Not the same thing at all.

Confederate statues in Baltimore are the opposite of real artifacts that point to real history. They were never anything but bogus puffery to begin with.

They honor men as "heroes" who were traitors to the nation. And who commited treason for the sole purpose of preserving slavery. The statues in question were all built long after the civil war in the 20th century. And...why does Baltimore even HAVE Confederate statues anyway? Yes...Maryland was a slave state, but it stayed in the Union and never even joined the Confederacy. Five thousand Marylanders died fighting for the south, but 20thousand died fighting for the North. So why does a non confederate state have confederate statues in the first place? The existence of the statues is BS wrapped in more BS.

The presence of the statues is erasure of history. Their proposed absence would restore truth. Not take away truth.

Statues of Lee in Virginia, or in any other of the actual Confederate states - that's a little more real. Not gonna take on the issue of Confederate statues in actual confederate states. But in Maryland its a no brainer. Take em down. And melt em down. Don't even put them in a museum. Monuments to both sides alongside each other on battlefields in both regions are fine.

No. Tired of seeing this whitewashing.



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19 Mar 2018, 10:27 am

naturalplastic wrote:
Statues of Lee in Virginia, or in any other of the actual Confederate states - that's a little more real. Not gonna take on the issue of Confederate statues in actual confederate states. But in Maryland its a no brainer. Take em down. And melt em down. Don't even put them in a museum. Monuments to both sides alongside each other on battlefields in both regions are fine.


Although Maryland never succeeded it was a slave state. Loyalties in the state were very divided.

What about Brooklyn, New York of all places?
Army declines request to change Brooklyn streets named after Confederate generals
Quote:
The Army has turned down a request to rename streets at Brooklyn’s Fort Hamilton that honor two Confederate generals.

Rep. Yvette Clarke and three other New York lawmakers had demanded that the Army change the names of Stonewall Jackson Drive and General Lee Avenue.
Both were stationed at the base in the 1840s.

“These monuments are deeply offensive to the hundreds of thousands of Brooklyn residents and members of the armed forces stationed at Fort Hamilton whose ancestors Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson fought to hold in slavery,” Clarke said Monday in a statement

But the Army said the two generals are part of military history and deserve to keep their honors.

The streets were named after Lee and Jackson “in the spirit of reconciliation” after the war, the Army said, adding that they were recognized as individuals, not representatives of “any particular cause or ideology.”

“After over a century, any effort to rename memorializations on Fort Hamilton would be controversial and divisive,” acting Assistant Secretary of the Army Diane Randon wrote in a response letter.

But Clarke said she won’t accept that argument and will keep pushing for the name change.

“That ‘reconciliation’ was actually complicity by the North and the South to ignore the interests of African-Americans and enforce white supremacy, effectively denying the result of the Civil War for generations,” she said.


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19 Mar 2018, 10:39 am

Those who deny history are condemned to repeat it.



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19 Mar 2018, 10:43 am

I personally hate history being erased. It means that it can't be studied, and will forever be lost throughout the ages of time.

-LegoMaster2149 (Written on March 19, 2018)



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20 Mar 2018, 12:39 am

sly279 wrote:
naturalplastic wrote:
Read a magazine article by an author outraged about how "Nazi death camps in Europe are all deteriorating!". For a nanosecond I thought that he sounded crazy. Why do the death camps need to be pristine? I wondered. But then it immediately struck that YES, its vital to protect the sites were the Holocaust happened because we already have Holocaust deniers now. Just think how ez it would be for future generations to get away with holocaust denial claims if there were no longer concrete (literally concrete) evidence of the holocaust around to point to and look at. So Auschwitz and Buchenwald do need to be preserved.

However confederate statues in Baltimore? Not the same thing at all.

Confederate statues in Baltimore are the opposite of real artifacts that point to real history. They were never anything but bogus puffery to begin with.

They honor men as "heroes" who were traitors to the nation. And who commited treason for the sole purpose of preserving slavery. The statues in question were all built long after the civil war in the 20th century. And...why does Baltimore even HAVE Confederate statues anyway? Yes...Maryland was a slave state, but it stayed in the Union and never even joined the Confederacy. Five thousand Marylanders died fighting for the south, but 20thousand died fighting for the North. So why does a non confederate state have confederate statues in the first place? The existence of the statues is BS wrapped in more BS.

The presence of the statues is erasure of history. Their proposed absence would restore truth. Not take away truth.

Statues of Lee in Virginia, or in any other of the actual Confederate states - that's a little more real. Not gonna take on the issue of Confederate statues in actual confederate states. But in Maryland its a no brainer. Take em down. And melt em down. Don't even put them in a museum. Monuments to both sides alongside each other on battlefields in both regions are fine.


Washington was a traitor to his nation of england.
So we’re all the founding fathers.

Not all statues are of generals. Some were just confederate soldiers to be a memorial to Americans yes they were Americans who died in the war in the south’s side. I’ll defend those satues. Leave memorials alone.
The people who want them down want the Washington monument down too.


There was a very dark and contemptible reason why many of those statues were put up long after the Civil War. Many had been erected specifically to promote white supremacy. In fact, the very first monument to go down in New Orleans had been dedicated to fanatically racist Confederate veterans who had attempted to overthrow the Reconstruction government in that city, and to lynch all blacks. Federal troops luckily intervened. Something as blatantly ugly and racist as this should be swept up into the dustbin of history, considering that it was meant to uphold a past way of life that has largely been rejected as evil.


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20 Mar 2018, 2:27 am

No. This is one issue where I swing right. I don't believe in discrimination in any way, shape or form, and think it should be avoided in the present. However, there is quite a bit of history that has led to the present day, and I don't think it should be erased just because some ignorant individuals find something offensive.

Besides, I think it is actually a disservice to those who were oppressed due to things like racial tensions to forget about everything they had to go through. For example, I think anyone who puts a confederate flag on their Jeep is a d-bag, but there are historical monuments that have the confederate symbol on them which I don't think should be removed. History wasn't all rainbows and butterflies, but acknowledging it doesn't mean we support what some individuals have done. If anything, by remembering certain events we can vow never to repeat them. We cannot learn from what isn't remembered, but we can certainly learn from what is.



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20 Mar 2018, 2:49 pm

Tross wrote:
No. This is one issue where I swing right. I don't believe in discrimination in any way, shape or form, and think it should be avoided in the present. However, there is quite a bit of history that has led to the present day, and I don't think it should be erased just because some ignorant individuals find something offensive.

Besides, I think it is actually a disservice to those who were oppressed due to things like racial tensions to forget about everything they had to go through. For example, I think anyone who puts a confederate flag on their Jeep is a d-bag, but there are historical monuments that have the confederate symbol on them which I don't think should be removed. History wasn't all rainbows and butterflies, but acknowledging it doesn't mean we support what some individuals have done. If anything, by remembering certain events we can vow never to repeat them. We cannot learn from what isn't remembered, but we can certainly learn from what is.


Then at least take the damn plaque promoting white supremacy off, or replace it with something explaining how the ideas promoted by the monument is wrong.


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20 Mar 2018, 6:04 pm

sly279 wrote:
If you see artifacts from them and feel the pain and emotions your far more likely to remember it.

There is an industry determined to remind people what the Nazis did...
No chance in our lifetime that people will forget...
As you said, look at the Romans and their brutality... :wink:

BTW:
If you want to improve your grammar/spelling, there is a free program which can help you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammarly



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20 Mar 2018, 6:20 pm

kraftiekortie wrote:
I don’t believe in erasing history. No.

But I do believe in respecting the rights of people not to hear about Hitler’s car.

And people should KNOW that the atrocities the Nazis perpertrated far outweigh the “good” They supposedly did.

We don’t want to provide ANY credibility to the Nazi regime.


I take the same position in regards to the Morgenthau Plan and Eisenhower's death camps...
"I respect the truth no matter where it may take us"...
I have no respect for "selective truth dissemination"...
Do you agree?

kraftiekortie wrote:
I don’t believe there is any defense for genocide, anywhere, no matter WHO perpetuated it. There should be no erasure of history.


How many millions died through a man made starvation genocide that killed millions of ordinary Germans for 2 years after WWII
And what about the genocide of the American Indians?
You would have my continued respect if you acknowledge that here... :mrgreen:

kraftiekortie wrote:
Yep. People should be exposed to the evils of the Nazis—but they should be exposed to them carefully.


People should be exposed to the truth...period!... :wink:
auntblabby wrote:
mankind has proven repeatedly that he ignores history, by and large. so it matters more for the historians than it does for everyman. besides, if history is written mainly by the victors, how is it not [in henry ford's words] "bunk"?


And consider"
"Lies through omission"...



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20 Mar 2018, 7:47 pm

I think that we should preserve any historical artifacts that send the right message to modern people. We should only destroy/move artifacts that could send a wrong message.

For example, we should preserve the Nazi death camps because they were used to kill people and everyone knows this.

I still think that Confederate monuments should be moved out of public places in the southern United States because they make Confederate leaders look heroic.

In Nazi Germany, there was a street called Adolf Hitler Street. The name of this street was changed in the post-war era in order to avoid honoring a dictator. This was an acceptable change. We don't honor the Nazis at all by preserving their death camps for all to see.


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21 Mar 2018, 4:58 pm

The "witch-hunt" of trying to destroy people's jobs and lives in the name of speech being "offensive" has already gone too far and needs to be weeded away. And acknowledging/viewing/reading history or TV/movies in the past (that sometimes had prejudice undertones) is not axiomatic to promoting or defending racism.

And wanting the state to "ban" something out of someone getting offended, it's just as good an idea as wanting to ban dog ownership because Hitler owned a dog.



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21 Mar 2018, 5:19 pm

Hollywood_Guy wrote:

And wanting the state to "ban" something out of someone getting offended, it's just as good an idea as wanting to ban dog ownership because Hitler owned a dog.

Quote:
The name German Shepherd was used in America. The German Shepherds was used by both sides to fight during the war. But the British didn’t want to call their dogs German sothey decided on the name Alsatian.https://www.quora.com/Is-there-any-diff ... n-Alsatian


<wave to Blondi in doggy heaven> :mrgreen:

Quote:
Blondi (1941 – 29 April 1945)[a][2] was Adolf Hitler's German Shepherd, a gift as a puppy[3][4] from Martin Bormann in 1941. Blondi stayed with Hitler even after his move into the Führerbunker located underneath the garden of the Reich Chancellery on 16 January 1945.[5]

Hitler was reportedly very fond of Blondi, keeping her by his side and allowing her to sleep in his bed in the bunker. According to Hitler's secretary Traudl Junge, this affection was not shared by Eva Braun, Hitler's companion, who preferred her two Scottish Terrier dogs named Negus and Stasi.

Blondi played a role in Nazi propaganda by portraying Hitler as an animal lover. Dogs like Blondi were coveted as "germanische Urhunde", being close to the wolf, and became very fashionable during the Nazi era.[6] On 29 April 1945, Hitler expressed doubts about the cyanide capsules he had received through Heinrich Himmler's SS.[7] To verify the capsules' potency, Hitler ordered Dr. Werner Haase to test one on Blondi, who died as a result.[8] According to Albert Speer, Hitler killed Blondi because he feared that the Russians would capture and torture her after overrunning the bunker.[9]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blondi



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21 Mar 2018, 5:29 pm

I had no idea that Alsatian=German shepherd :o :idea:
learn so many new things on these threads :study:



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21 Mar 2018, 5:34 pm

Hollywood_Guy wrote:
And wanting the state to "ban" something out of someone getting offended, it's just as good an idea as wanting to ban dog ownership because Hitler owned a dog.


Hitler believed two plus two made four. I hope you don’t agree with Hitler!


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21 Mar 2018, 5:43 pm

Spiderpig wrote:
Hollywood_Guy wrote:
And wanting the state to "ban" something out of someone getting offended, it's just as good an idea as wanting to ban dog ownership because Hitler owned a dog.


Hitler believed two plus two made four. I hope you don’t agree with Hitler!


So you are trying to be objective and reasonable....
Looking at the facts rather than buying into the emotion-laden distortion of factual history?
Let us lynch this Hitler lover!! ! :twisted: :mrgreen:



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21 Mar 2018, 5:51 pm

Drake wrote:
naturalplastic wrote:
Read a magazine article by an author outraged about how "Nazi death camps in Europe are all deteriorating!". For a nanosecond I thought that he sounded crazy. Why do the death camps need to be pristine? I wondered. But then it immediately struck that YES, its vital to protect the sites were the Holocaust happened because we already have Holocaust deniers now. Just think how ez it would be for future generations to get away with holocaust denial claims if there were no longer concrete (literally concrete) evidence of the holocaust around to point to and look at. So Auschwitz and Buchenwald do need to be preserved.

However confederate statues in Baltimore? Not the same thing at all.

Confederate statues in Baltimore are the opposite of real artifacts that point to real history. They were never anything but bogus puffery to begin with.

They honor men as "heroes" who were traitors to the nation. And who commited treason for the sole purpose of preserving slavery. The statues in question were all built long after the civil war in the 20th century. And...why does Baltimore even HAVE Confederate statues anyway? Yes...Maryland was a slave state, but it stayed in the Union and never even joined the Confederacy. Five thousand Marylanders died fighting for the south, but 20thousand died fighting for the North. So why does a non confederate state have confederate statues in the first place? The existence of the statues is BS wrapped in more BS.

The presence of the statues is erasure of history. Their proposed absence would restore truth. Not take away truth.

Statues of Lee in Virginia, or in any other of the actual Confederate states - that's a little more real. Not gonna take on the issue of Confederate statues in actual confederate states. But in Maryland its a no brainer. Take em down. And melt em down. Don't even put them in a museum. Monuments to both sides alongside each other on battlefields in both regions are fine.

No. Tired of seeing this whitewashing.

Exactly. The presence of confederate statues is whitewashing the past. Taking them down is ending the sanitizing of the past.