Should confederate monuments be destroyed?

Should all confederate monuments be moved or destroyed?

  • All the monuments should be completely destroyed

    Votes: 8 21.6%

  • Move them off public lands

    Votes: 17 45.9%

  • Keep the monuments as is

    Votes: 9 24.3%

  • Build even more confederate monuments

    Votes: 3 8.1%
  • Total voters
    37
metalhead said:
Do you really believe all men are created equal if you also believe in your own right to own other men?
Click to expand...

Here's some of Jefferson's words, which Congress took out of the Declaration. Speaking of the King's excesses, Jefferson said:

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the christian king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce:[11] and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
Click to expand...

Later, as Governor of Virginia, he ended slave trading it the state, and as President, he outlawed slavery in what would become the Midwestern states.
 
Well, that's not ENTIRELY accurate either.

As governor of Virginia, he ended the international slave trade in his state, not internal slave trading. Slaveholders were still free to buy and sell locally. Don't get me wrong, it was still a good thing ; but we shouldn't oversell it either.

And he was a delegate in the Congress of the Confederation, not president, when he put forward the plan to ban slavery in what would become the Mid-West (which was eventually adopted as the basis for the Northwest Ordinance). The highlight of his presidency slavery-wise was banning the international slave trade USA-wide.
 
Evie said:
The one thing he ought to have done to not be a terrible person in your world view is commit political, social and economic suicide. In a context where all the other planters are keeping their slaves, and he isn't (and a context of his financial obligations, and personal lack of financial foresight and acumen), freeing his slaves would likely have led Jefferson straight to bankruptcy - and that's 18th-19th century notions of debtors and bankruptcy.
Click to expand...

It seems highly improbable that Jefferson couldn't have found a lifestyle that didn't involve owning a large plantation and slaves by which he would be able to stay out of bankruptcy. He was a lawyer and a diplomat; tons of those managed to live in Northern cities and do just fine without having to own slaves. I have no idea why his choices were either own slaves or go bankrupt. That seems like a completely false binary. No doubt freeing his slaves would have required a pretty extreme change in lifestyle, but so what? Either all men are created equal, or they aren't. If they are, you don't cop out of actually living that ideal because you are comfortable in your current lifestyle.

He's not the worst person in history, not by a long shot. I'll give you that. He did some good, even great things. I'll give you that too. But keeping and raping slaves is keeping and raping slaves. Monstrous behavior, I don't care what time period one lives in. I think people who revere people like Jefferson would do well to keep that, and the fundamental hypocrisy of his life, in mind before putting him up on a pedestal.
 
Like I said. I don't like him. He did things that, on a personal level, I just couldn't stand to let someone else do without speaking up and fighting. "Yeah, keep ranting we know who's really doing the planting" is one of the very best line from a musical that overfows with them.

But I find it probable that, on the whole, he did more for the betterment of the world than against it (and if I were to add a question mark here, it would be over the Native people, not over his own slaves). Even if he could have, personally, done more.

(Re bankruptcy - Jefferson already spent much of his adult life deep in debt...hard to convince your bankers not to call your loans in if they see you just up and throw away what they see as valuable property...yeah, not good. Had he stayed out of debt to begin, things might have been different)
 
Last edited:
Something that baffles me in these debates about historical figures is that some people (usually Americans) think that we celebrate people based on their moral perfection, or at least should only celebrate paragons of morality.

That has never been the case. Unless you are into personality cults, we celebrate someone's achievements, not their personality. Nobody in history was morally perfect.

If we could only celebrate the people who didn't do some effed up things, we would need to rename half of our streets and get rid of most of our statues. All the kings, emperors and generals of old, from Julius Caesar to Churchill and de Gaulle, passing through Louis XIV, Elizabeth I, Peter the Great and Napoleon. And I'm being western centric here. Let's take a close look at Genghis Khan (national hero of Mongolia), Mohamed (considered messenger of God by over 1 billion people), Suleman the Magnificent or any celebrated ottoman emperor and see how moral they were. Or any Chinese emperor. I reckon they all did stuff that made Thomas Jefferson look like Mother Theresa. Yet they're all still very celebrated.

That's how it works. Only Americans seem to be obsessed about moral perfection. Newsflash : it doesn't exist. Abraham Lincoln and MLK did immoral things too.
 
Zkribbler said:
...and then it's only those Americans wishing to deflect the movement to cease honoring traitors who sought to perpetuate slavery.
Click to expand...
Meh, I don't care much about confederate monuments. If all they are is indeed a celebration of white supremacy, then indeed they should be taken down*. But SJWs are now going after Jefferson, and Columbus, and who knows who else, and that bothers me.

*Having lived in the Southern US for some years, I would argue that possibly the imagery of the Confederacy represents more than just racism to many people there. I mean, Lynyrd Skynyrd used to display massive rebel flags at their concerts, and they wrote clearly anti-racist songs like Ballad of Curtis Loew and Things Goin' On.
 
Last edited:
I wasn't aware Columbus ever even went to the United States
 
Columbus is best known for designing the globe, but what many people don't know is that he also loved traveling and was a big supporter of black genocide.
 
Zkribbler said:
I've seen the alt-right going after Jefferson; not the left.

If you want me to educate you on Columbus, please, start another thread.
Click to expand...
How many leftists demanding the removal of Jefferson statues or generally just going after him I need to quote for you to consider yourself educated? My guess is that it will take a 5 minutes Google search :)

And I have the impression that what you don't know about Columbus could fill many books. But as I said, whatever his moral flaws may be, we the non Puritan SJWs do not celebrate his personality and morals. We celebrate his daring navigation, which inaugurated the great exchange that is ultimately responsible for the very existence of the vast majority of people in the American contient today (arguably virtually everyone, except some isolated Amazonian tribes).
 
luiz said:
How many leftists demanding the removal of Jefferson statues or generally just going after him I need to quote for you to consider yourself educated? My guess is that it will take a 5 minutes Google search :)
Click to expand...

Do you really expect me to do your research for you? :lol:
 
Statues of any person are problematic, IMO. People should not be idolized. As the discussion about Jefferson should make clear, his legacy is a great deal more complicated than what is conveyed by a towering memorial statue that practically deifies him.
 
metalhead said:
Statues of any person are problematic, IMO. People should not be idolized. As the discussion about Jefferson should make clear, his legacy is a great deal more complicated than what is conveyed by a towering memorial statue that practically deifies him.
Click to expand...
But then we end up without any statues. I agree with not idolizing anyone, but I disagree with iconoclasty. Imagine if Rome or Florence started pulling down their statues... Would the world become a better place for that? No, it would be duller and uglier.

And again, we can admire Julius Caesar as a general and writer and understand his historical importance without being ok with enslaving the gaulois.
 
I think Jefferson is one of the modern "greats" and I think most of the critique he gets here is silly stemming out of the ignorance both about the guy and the contex-environment he lived in but never the less I am inspired to have a deeper look into it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

GoodEnoughForMe
Should the US be a Dictatorship?
8 9 10
Replies
195
Views
8K
EnglishEdward
EnglishEdward
Z
Civlike game idea randomly ejected into cyberspace
Replies
10
Views
741
zuzim
Z
Samson
  • Poll Poll
Consciousness: what it is, where it comes from, do machines can have it and why do we care?
18 19 20
Replies
387
Views
24K
EvaDK
EvaDK
Birdjaguar
  • Poll Poll
AI and Art
2
Replies
25
Views
3K
Hygro
Hygro
M
  • Locked
  • Poll Poll
[Vote] (6-62) Remove Dependence On Monument For Border Growth Rate
2 3
Replies
43
Views
5K
Recursive
Recursive
Back
Top Bottom