Baltimore: ALL Confederate Statues Have Now Been Removed

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[i]Waging War against the Dead

In 2001, the primeval Taliban blew up two ancient Buddha statues in Afghanistan on grounds that their very existence was sacrilegious to Islam.

In 2015, ISIS militants entered a museum in Mosul, Iraq, and destroyed ancient, pre-Islamic statues and idols. Their mute crime? These artifacts predated the prophet Mohammed.

The West prides itself on the idea that liberal societies would never descend into such nihilism. Think again....

....So, Darmok...........does that mean that the removal of Communist statues in the late 20th in the former USSR and Warsaw Pakt countries was a revisionist, PC, crime against history ?

In Moscow, and in the former Soviet Union in general, there is Soviet detritus all over the place. Hammers and sickles are chiselled into buildings, bridges and other infrastructure. Sculptures of happy, heroic soldiers, workers and farmers sit on the platforms in the Moscow metro. Seven massive “Stalin buildings” dot the city.

The Russians have done more than just tolerate these leftovers. All the propaganda that the Soviets used to produce and disseminate – and there was a lot of it – is now kitsch. Kiosks sell Soviet T-shirts next to matryoshka dolls and amber jewellery as genuine Russian souvenirs. As one Russian gentleman said to me, “It’s our past and we embrace it. We lived it. We can’t just wish it away.”

It would not be very practical to knock down the buildings Stalin helped to build or hammer out all those hammers and sickles.

Statues, however, have no practical purpose and can be taken care of rather easily. Moscow has removed many of them from public spaces. It was one of the first impulses the Russian people had after the fall of the Soviet Union.

What is instructive is what the Muscovites have done with their statues, collecting them in a sculpture garden and giving them historical context.

The statues and monuments now reside together in a section of Museon arts park, a lovely green space next to Gorky Park. Museon is also known as the “fallen monument park”, though “felled monuments” would be the more appropriate name. The park contains more than just felled Soviets. There are hundreds of other pieces sprinkled through the park. But walking through the grove of Lenin statues, sitting in the shade of a monumental Soviet coat of arms, or posing next to a large bust of Leonid Brezhnev or Mikhail Kalinin is the thrill for people like me.

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.

What is even more powerful is how the statues are displayed. In some ways, the arrangements are reminiscent of a cemetery. White, granite “tombstones” line a path, an appropriate metaphor for the Soviet regime.

It is the large statue of Josef Stalin, however, that is most striking. Stalin has lost his nose and is in sad shape. Behind him is a monument to the “victims to the totalitarian regime.” The monument is a wall comprising stone heads cocked at different angles. The heads are held in place by a grid of bars and barbed wire that evoke a prison camp. Hundreds of these victims stare at Stalin. Indeed, because of their placement, one cannot look at him without looking at them.

Why do these scenes, these dead Soviet statues, work so well? I would assert that by locating them together, they can be put into “historical and cultural” context, as the markers suggest. Moreover, through strategic curation, these statues have been put into dialogue with each other and with the contemporary sculptures around them and been given new meaning. The statues in their old lives were meant to honour and glorify the Soviet leaders and their regime. In their new life, they have been turned into art. As pieces of art, their meaning can be changed or supplemented by how the viewer interprets them.

Vladimir Lenin stands with Karl Marx and notable Hungarian communist leaders behind the austere brick walls of a unique, if not surreal, statue park museum up in the hilly southern suburbs of Budapest.

Reminders of the dictatorship were ripped out from the city center and hidden out of sight when the Iron Curtain came tumbling down in 1989.

Shortly after the fall of communism in 1991, Memento Park became the place where these communist statues went to die

Proletariat anthems blast out from a small kiosk where visitors can purchase tickets to the park along with communist memorabilia (and CDs of the above mentioned proletariat anthems).
The sight of the monuments standing deep in snow gives the park that extra "Soviet" feel -- until tourists come to throw snowballs at Lenin and sculpt socialist snowmen.
Parked just inside the gate, an old Trabant -- a classic car manufactured in East Germany that was popular in pre-1990s Hungary -- presents an interactive art installation.
Beside it is a phone box where you can listen to the voices of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Che Guevara and Hungarian figures from the Communist Party.

"This phone can not be used to make national or international calls, it only allows you to travel back in time," says the sign taped up inside.

There are around 42 statues scattered around the park and each tells its own story.
Some are obvious, like Lenin poised on a plinth, captured in the middle of a speech.
Others are busts of Hungarian communist leaders who are less known internationally than their Russian overlords. Some are allegorical, like a gigantic pair of hands holding a globe-like object.

Opposite the entrance, a pair of gigantic boots sits on top of a huge grandstand.
This is a tribute to the original eight-meter-high bronze statue of Stalin which was torn down during the Hungarian Revolution on October 23, 1956.
That statue was pulled down and sawed until only the boots were left.
Today, the replica is a keepsake of the revolution, and in its odd way, of Stalin.
Visitors can hike up the stairs that run behind the monument to the balcony, where they'll be treated to a great view of the park entrance.
The bunker-like interior inside the grandstand is worth checking out. Here, statues and busts of Lenin collect dust in the dark, including strange relics of the communist revolutionary as a child.
The barracks next to the grandstand has an exhibition on the fall of the communist regime.
Footage of Hungary's Secret Police in training is shown here in a small screening room. Several hundred short films were shot between 1958 and 1988, to train and instruct secret agents and spies to defend the "law and order."

The short excerpts last around 10 to 15 minutes, providing a fascinating window into this once covert operation. Among practical tips offered is a guide to installing a secret camera in your handbag to spy on your neighbor.

For those craving further insight into social realism and Hungarian life behind the Iron Curtain, traces of its history can be found scattered around Budapest in more subtle ways.

The city's street names are one source. Some signs will have names crossed out in red and replaced with new ones, which usually references a name given under communism or communist connotations.

Also, while several of the statues originally placed in citadel on Gellért Hill now stand in Memento Park, several imposing Social realism statues remain here their original location.

Original communist memorabilia can still be found for sale in Budapest at Ecseri Piac.
This huge flea market is a permanent fixture in the city, open Monday to Saturday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. (3 p.m. on Saturday) selling pretty much everything.

Portraits of Lenin and communist memorabilia can be found among the porcelain figurines, antique gramophones and used cameras.

That's one-time Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan Robert Byrd:

Who's heritage indeed!

At least give credit to the Germans for removing all statues that celebrate the Nazis

But nowhere have the questions about the physical markers of unwanted pasts — first Nazi, then Communist and, lately, colonial — played out as long as they have in Germany. Over the last 70 years, the country has accepted a simple truth: Out of sight hardly means out of mind. The removal of the relics of a hateful social order is not in itself cause for celebration. It is the aftermath that matters.

The German case is exemplary not because Germans attained closure, but because they came to recognize that closure was neither tenable nor desirable. Instead, the processing of history is like an open wound that slowly heals only with careful debate about the often-explosive issues at stake. The United States can avoid making irreparable mistakes by learning from Germany's blunders and subsequent course corrections.

Over time, Germans have moved through three distinct phases to tackle the country's fascist legacy: erasing it, ignoring it, and consigning it to the Vergangenheitsbewältigung — German for "the enduring confrontation with the past." The experience offers seven lessons for the fight over America's Confederate past.

There is no zero hour. After the war in occupied Germany, restraint and caution were not initially on the agenda. For nearly a decade, West German authorities followed the path of least resistance by simply eliminating the traces of Hitler's rule.
For better or worse, wartime Allied bombing and firestorms had given them a considerable head start. In some cases, the wartime damage did 90 percent of the job. And yet this near-total destruction did little to prevent the neo-Nazis and revisionists from reorganizing. The 1952 court ban on the Nazi Party's successor, the Socialist Reich Party, sent a much stronger message.

East Germany, all the more parsimonious after bearing the brunt of Soviet reparations, was the first to realize that pragmatic compromise was essential. Of course, the Third Reich's insignia had to come down and mostly did, but the structures themselves were retained for new functions and uses. Though driven by necessity, this pragmatic solution now gets credit for preserving for posterity the pathetic bleakness and soullessness of Hitler's architectural vision. It has not aged well, turning from shades of white to brown as decades have gone by.

Bad history can be put to good use. Walking around cities like Berlin, Munich, and Nuremberg today, a tourist will not often find an obvious Nazi landmark. Yet many inconspicuous remnants remain, ranging from unremarkable city squares and department store amphitheaters to more famous one-offs, among them a retired airport, an Olympic stadium, Nazi party rally grounds, and a former resort.
While the government (and, increasingly, private initiatives) pours money into conserving these places, city tour companies train their guides to peel back all of the layers of the morally complicated history for visitors. Many prominent buildings that are still in use have information boards — not tiny plaques — in front, with meticulously researched historical explanations.

Especially fraught places, where the Nazi project was most present, like the Haus der Kunst in Munich — the inaugural venue for the Nazi art exhibit organized to compete with the more popular modernist "Degenerate Art" show across the street — now commit a lion's share of their resources to displaying the art they would have shunned during the Nazi reign. In the hallways, historical timelines lay out the turbulent past.

Empty spaces can talk, but not all should. In Berlin, the Topography of Terror museum fills the space that once held the sprawling lair of Hitler's bureaucracy. It has transformed an otherwise empty lot into a meaningful, and sobering, reminder of the horrors of the Nazi regime.
And yet some sites, Germans have decided, must remain unmarked and obscured for good reason: to prevent them from becoming shrines to the Nazi past. The Berlin bunker where Hitler killed himself, which was blown up in 1947, remains buried under a parking lot, with no signage.

Erasure comes with no guarantees. Austria has a similar vision for Hitler's birth house. In June, after protracted debates, its Constitutional Court finally authorized government seizure of the structure from its private owners. To this point, the building remains under protection as a historical monument.
As in Berlin, Austrian authorities hope to prevent the house from becoming a difficult-to-control and illicit neo-Nazi pilgrimage site. But even a razed landmark is still a spot on the map, and many concede that it, too, could become a beacon for hate groups.

Preserving difficult pasts calls for civic negotiation. In the 1990s, German officials applied the lessons learned from dealing with Nazi iconography to the markings left over from the Communist era. Berlin's Senate impaneled a special commission of experts from the city's East and West. It concluded that celebrations of the Communist past had no place in the reunified capital-to-be, but that the distinctive history should be accessible in both parts of the city.
Other corners of former East Germany have also striven to preserve this history by allowing many statues of Communist heroes to remain standing. In some small towns, such as Königswusterhausen outside Berlin, streets named after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels run parallel to each other.

Razing and replacing uncovers more than it hides. Where attempts to dismantle Communist symbols had prevailed, as in the case of the East German Palace of the Republic, which was destroyed to rebuild the shell of the Kaiser's Berlin Palace, new issues emerged. The demolition and reconstruction have exposed additional unprocessed chapters of Germany's past, especially its history of colonialism. Achieving a clean slate, free of historical stains, proved to be a delusion.

These lessons from Germany should serve as a cautionary tale for Americans rushing to destroy every Confederate monument within reach. Rather than rashly overcompensating for decades of inaction by haphazardly tearing down or hiding Confederate monuments, Americans should have the painful debates necessary to decide the fate of these relics of a bygone era. If German history is any indication, simply turning the page isn't an option.

In a historic decision, Ole Miss Interim Chancellor Larry Sparks announced Thursday that school administration has started the process to relocate the controversial Confederate monument away from it’s current, centralized location.

The decision comes after tensions have recently risen on campus.

Student groups have protested for its removal for years.

In February, pro-confederate organizations held a rally in support of the monument.


By WMCActionNews5.com Staff | March 22, 2019 at 5:15 PM CDT - Updated March 22 at 6:44 PM
MEMPHIS, TN (WMC) - In a historic decision, Ole Miss Interim Chancellor Larry Sparks announced Thursday that school administration has started the process to relocate the controversial Confederate monument away from it’s current, centralized location.

The decision comes after tensions have recently risen on campus.

Student groups have protested for its removal for years.

In February, pro-confederate organizations held a rally in support of the monument.

Ole Miss moving forward with plans to relocate Confederate monument
Earlier this month, the Ole Miss student body senate and faculty senate passed resolutions to relocate the statue to the confederate cemetery on campus.

In a statement Thursday, Chancellor Sparks said, “The shared governance process has demonstrated that our campus constituents are in alignment, and we agree that the monument should be relocated to a more suitable location.”

Ultimately, the Mississippi Institution of Higher Learning will hold a vote on whether the statue can be moved

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (AP) — A North Carolina city removed a Confederate statue Tuesday from the grounds of an old courthouse, drawing applause from onlookers for the rare move in a state where such monuments are largely protected by law.

Construction crews in Winston-Salem spent more than an hour attaching a harness and a cage-like metal frame to the statue of an anonymous soldier, then hoisted it from atop its pedestal with a large crane. A small group of people watching clapped and cheered as the statue was taken down and placed on a flatbed truck. The column and base were then dismantled and removed piece by piece, with workers finishing up in the afternoon.

Winston-Salem Mayor Allen Joines said the statue will temporarily be put in storage before it's eventually moved to historic Salem Cemetery. He said he didn't have an estimate for the cost of the city-funded removal.

"We realize that there are very strong feelings on both sides of this issue, so what we've tried to do is devise a solution that recognizes both sides," he said in an interview, describing the cemetery as "a very dignified and appropriate location for the statue."

Winston-Salem had more leeway than most North Carolina cities because the old courthouse property had passed into private hands. A 2015 North Carolina law all but prohibits the permanent removal of Confederate statues from public land. More than 90 Confederate monuments stand in public places other than cemeteries around the state.

In January, a judge denied a request by the United Daughters of The Confederacy to prevent the removal of the Winston-Salem statue from the grounds of the building that now houses apartments.

A statue of a Confederate soldier is being removed from a Florida park.

The statue had stood at the center of Lakeland's Munn Park for 109 years. City officials began dismantling the monument Friday.

City commissioners voted in December 2017 to start the process to move the statue after receiving complaints from residents. In November, commissioners approved funding the $150,000 cost of moving the statue with citations issued as part of the city's red-light camera program.

The Ledger reports the statue is being relocated to a different park where the city honors soldiers and first responders. Veterans Park is adjacent to a city-owned convention and entertainment complex.

An East Feliciana Judge ruled against a defendant’s change of venue request due to a Confederate monument located outside of the courthouse.

Ronnie Anderson was charged with illegal possession of a stolen firearm and filed to change the venue of his trial, which is set for Feb. 4.

This motion was a revision on an earlier change of venue request the District Attorney called "ridiculous and embarassing."

Haymer also filed a change of venue motion back in July, saying the Confederate monument outside the courthouse there would make it impossible for his client to get a fair shake in court. The DA then called those claims “ridiculous and embarrassing.” That motion was also denied.

I remember seeing that monument years ago. As a New Englander I was used to passing by a counterpart Union soldier monument most every week, so it was a bit striking to visit that campus and see the Confederate soldier very high up on top of his pedestal. (I assumed he had been put up there to avoid vandalism long ago.)

Plenty of Union leaders and commanders were racist and committed war crimes. There is not nearly the demand that they be no platformed. Same is true of WWII leaders who ordered terror bombings and nuke bombings of highly civilian areas.

Since when is it right to erect monuments to the losing side of a war?

The Confedercay is dead! Long live the Union!

That Lee expressed such views, and did so more than once between the end of the Civil War and his death in 1870 is confirmed by historian and biographer Jonathan Horn, who wrote in 2016:

“In April 1865, after four years of civil war, Lee surrendered the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and soon afterward accepted the presidency of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia. Letters seeking support for memorial projects received reluctant responses from the general-turned-educator, according to documents at the University of Virginia and the Library of Congress. Lee worried that building memorials so soon after the war would anger the victorious Federals.

“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 in the present condition of the country would have the effect of retarding, instead of accelerating its accomplishment, and of continuing, if not adding to, the difficulties under which the Southern people labour,” he wrote.”

In June 1866, Lee criticized a plan to build a monument to Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, whose fatal wounding at Chancellorsville three years prior had deprived the Army of Northern Virginia of its best corps commander. How could Lee ask war-ravaged families to contribute money for memorials when they lacked funds for food? “I do not think it feasible at this time,” he wrote.

It’s not strictly accurate to say that Lee’s objections to memorializing the Civil War applied only to Confederate monuments, however. A letter he wrote to David McConaughy of the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association in 1869, in which he turned down an invitation to participate in their preservation efforts, made clear his conviction that it was more important for the nation to heal than to perpetuate the memory of the “civil strife” it had so recently undergone. The letter was quoted in a 21 November 1957 article in the Chicago Tribune:

“My engagements will not permit me to be present, and I believe if there I could not add anything material to the information existing on the subject,” Lee wrote to David McConaughy. “I think it well, moreover, 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 and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered.”

Horn quotes this passage as well, saying of Lee

Rather than raising battlefield memorials, he favored erasing battlefields from the landscape altogether…. Lee feared that these reminders of the past would preserve fierce passions for the future. Such emotions threatened his vision for speedy reconciliation. As he saw it, bridging a divided country justified abridging history in places.
Lee’s zeal for North-South reconciliation verged on the evangelical, judging from some of his postwar statements. Another of his biographers, Charles Bracelen Flood, recounted an anecdote that speaks to Lee’s conviction that the formerly warring factions — particularly the side that lost, his side, the South — needed to forgive and forget and get on with the business of being Americans:

“Lee knew that the war was over and that everything depended on a new attitude for a new day. He was taken to call on a lady who lived north of Lexington, and she promptly showed him the remains of a tree in her yard. All its limbs had been shot off by Federal artillery fire during Hunter’s raid, and its trunk torn by cannonballs. The woman looked at him expectantly as she showed him this memento of what she and her property had endured. Here was a man who would sympathize.

Lee finally spoke. “Cut it down, my dear Madam, and forget it.”


Little could he have imagined that we would still be debating the issue some 150 years hence.