The difference being that people in the south aren't being "forced" to remember the past -- they celebrate it.

Right, they get to stay.

Right. The correct response to whaaboutism and wheredoesitend is simply "what did Lee do to deserve a statue?"

This should be on TV.

More importantly, that's not an accident. It's why they're there.

Dvauts making great points. Simply put we have to be very careful on how we frame these types of arguments and rebuttals. We have to also remember the simpletons we're dealing with on the other side of the fence.

I vote we skip the part where we argue with Nazis and just skip straight to the part where we tear down statues.

Lol here here hip hip!

I don't, because the next statue toppled might be Jefferson. Or Lincoln. Everyone knows where to find those statues.

Very few Americans from the Revolutionary period have clean hands. I don't know how we continue to celebrate the accomplishments of the Founders, namely resurrecting democracy as a concept, if we're going to give Washington and Jefferson the George Wallace treatment.

What did John Adams do wrong?

Put him on a statue and write that under it.

Or Thomas Paine:

http://www.thomaspaine.org/letters/o...h-16-1790.html

That's genuine cultural remembrance.

They're frankly fantastic quotes which puts into very clear, stark terms the bogus argument that Jefferson and Washington were merely products of their times and everyone would have accepted their conduct as moral.

No: that's not at all true. Their contemporaries knew better.

I guess the reason I picked Washington and Jefferson is because imo they were the two most important leaders of the Revolution/Constitutional Convention/early Republic.

This is being held up as a kind of doomsday scenario, but I think it's at least worth talking about whether deifying a guy who raped slaves is completely healthy to our national character.

Like, hypothetically speaking, how much damage is done if the statue of Jefferson comes down? Don't really have the time to talk about this in full atm, plus I'm on the phone.

Is that really the case, or is it true that the majority of people, even political leaders, always go along with the zeitgeist and that people like Adams and Paine are the exceptions?

The nice thing about being alive now and getting to pick which statues to put up is that we get to choose what to celebrate and highlight and what things we want to aggrandize. Ain't no rule that says statues get apportioned by the importance of the person; you could instead sort by quality of character. And frankly Adams and Thomas Paine weren't irrelevant.

If the Dems did politics right, they'd do a national ad buy and run this spot during week 1 of the upcoming NFL season. Take a page from the Republican playbook and use every resource out there to your advantage.

There are people moving in this direction. Today, there was a rally in Chicago to call for renaming Washington and Jackson Parks.
Given the security in Washington nowadays, some of the damage would be inflicted in the massive riot which would be required to execute that toppling.

You're not going to get some picture perfect view of what the consensus views on slavery in late 18th century America were but northern states saw fit to outlaw it in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, abolitionist societies existed even before the Revolution, and Europeans remarked all along that slavery in America was peculiar, and freeing slaves in French colonies like Haiti were a huge part of the French Revolution, which wasn't at all lost on Jefferson who was an initially a strong supporter of the French Revolution but was aghast at the Haitian Revolution, the implicit threat that presented to slave holding Americans, and basically played both sides of it.

So I stand by my point: plenty of late 18th century slave holders were exposed to all kinds of arguments and public criticism about the moral repugnance of slave holding, it wasn't some universal cultural norm like Athenian pederasty. Owners of large plantations who owned tons of slaves had contemporary critics and ignored them.

Right. So we agree that actually, memorializing Washington and Jefferson is a choice people made, there are American heros from the founding era who could be celebrated and basically had "clean hands" but we have instead chosen to celebrate Washington and Jefferson, and that yet again we still retain agency to do different and rename things and replace statues.

So remind me again what your argument is?

25th Amendment this clown.

Soon they'll be marrying dogs and cats!

Say that Washington Park in Chicago is named after Booker T Washington imo.

Had a feeling this might happen. They are quitting the board after it was disbanded.

My argument is that the lessons of the Founding Fathers are easier to teach and more compelling if Washington and Jefferson are included as Fathers.

Aren't lessons taught in schools, books, museums, libraries, that kind of thing? Isn't the statue on the town square for other purposes? This seems like it's just veering into Clovis "keep Jefferson because it's just like Germany's Culture of Remembrance" when in fact the statues and memorials we erect actually only tell a very limited amount of the lessons worth learning.

Can I give you the benefit of the doubt then that you'll join with me in supporting adding Jefferson Raping His Chattel sculpture to the Jefferson Memorial?

I would support adding slave raping stuff to the educational signs at the memorial, but not a dedicated slave raping statue. I don't have a logical reason why.