@bobsal u1553115,
bobsal u1553115 wrote:
To all the morons who think Confederate memorials are about "history", then put them into museums and see how many racist rednecks will show up to see them.
The big dirty secret about all these out of historical context so called monuments is that biggest number of them were erected out of historical context between 1900 and 1920 when Jim Crow was being established. These are not monuments to a mere five five years of history they are sticks in the eye monuments to racism, reminders for black folks to know to stay in their place.
There are always going to be people who use historical artifacts as a source of collective pride/worship. It's impossible to preserve any relic for the sake of history without simultaneously opening it up to those who are going to attribute other meanings to it.
Take the Roman Colloseum, for example. Some people see it as a relic of ancient Roman culture. Other people take pride in it as a feat of human and/or European architecture/engineering/effort. African and Jewish slaves contributed to the construction process, and many people were slaughtered there to persecute early Christians and others. Auschwitz is another example of something that is preserved for historical reasons, yet there is nothing stopping neo-nazis from worshiping it if they want. The prison where Rudolf Hess was held until his death was demolished to prevent it from becoming a nazi shrine, so why not Auschwitz and/or numerous other artifacts that have been preserved for the sake of "holocaust remembrance?" Likewise, why shouldn't artifacts and monuments of slavery and slavers be preserved for "slave holocaust remembrance?" Would that just be a guise for preserving them for cult worship, like nazi artifacts? If so, why not demolish Auschwitz, the Roman Colosseum, etc.? Answer, because it's better to preserve than to destroy; without historical artifacts/relics, it becomes that much harder to teach/prove to people that the past really was what it was instead of just being a story in a history book. Even if you destroyed the entire world and rebuilt it from scratch, there would be just as much potential for human power, sadism, exploitation, abuse, pride, and worship of it all because it takes wisdom and effort to rise above that level of the ego and see things from a more neutral perspective.
