Lets ERASE our history!

First I apologize if this has already been discussed but New Orleans decided to remove Confederate statues amounts to trying to erase history! We can't change the past but responsible people can explain to children what the United States History is, good or bad and to coin an overused phrase "it is what it is!"
Gee... why doesn't Germany remove all the Holocaust monuments and we will pretend it never happened! A brand new-cleaned up past!

www.newsmax.com...

a reply to: wulff

I would think that the propensity for denying truth, fleeing responsibility and scrubbing history was a recent genetic mutation if not for the fact that the supposed wise elders are leading the charge.

a reply to: wulff

A coworker of mines cousin was contracted for the job. He received so many threats from both sides he backed out of the contract. Then a week later his 200 grand Lamborghini was set on fire and completely destroyed. The fbi is now involved.

It's a touchy subject here.

a reply to: wulff

ISIS demolition gangs have been blowing up, destroying and removing ancient archaeological monuments and artifacts in the Middle East for the past 3 years in an attempt to erase history in preparation for their coming delusional global caliphate.

This is acute propaganda - an attempt at changing the history books over coming generations and when governments control the education system and curriculums they also stand a good chance at changing history.

The mysterious destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria, imo, is another example of the establishment perhaps attempting to extinguish from the minds of men, a truth that threatens to destabilize the ruling class's agenda of population control in their quest for power and money.

a reply to: wulff

Wow, that's kinda scary. What are these guys gonna do next, start burning libraries?

Check this out

Lee Circle no more: New Orleans to remove 4 Confederate statues

"We, the people of New Orleans, have the power and we have the right to correct these historical wrongs," Landrieu said Thursday.

Christ on a bike, do these idiots really think that they're going to somehow erase the past and pretending that everything was always fine and dandy by removing a couple of statues? I'm not even American and I find that offensive to history.

People graffiti over Soviet statues all the time, sometimes knit little beanie hats for Lenin when it's cold out, these statues don't command a whole lot of respect, and some of them have been taken down because there's so many of them, but not because people are ashamed of their history and feel the need to make up for it for some reason, doing that narcissistic thing where you pander to minorities purely to make yourself look good, rather than to actually do something that is actually helpful to actual, living, breathing people.

a reply to: Volchitsa

It started as a knee jerk reaction to the s Carolina shooting.

In the few responses from everyone since I posted only awhile ago, I see more intelligence here than all those so called "leaders" put together! and that includes our non American friends on here that also see them for what they are... cardboard heroes!
Thanks all!

Another stepstone towards "1984".

Rewrite history! We are at war with Oceania! We were always allies with East-Asia!

...

Or.... they were just plain awful statues of people who should not be put on such a proud pedestal..
Would you mind if Germany would consider removing a statue of Joseph Goebbels? Or even Hitler? Heey, it is history!
Fact: there are no such statues in Germany to the best of my knowledge.

Wow guys. Calm down. No one is erasing history. The civil war is still going to be taught in school to small children. All of that information and much much more can freely be researched online. The only thing that is happening here is that a city is changing it's appearance to more reflect the current state of mind of the majority of the people that live in the country where it is located.

a reply to: wulff

This would seem to be the best way to ensure that our future will resemble our past as a species. Those who ignore, or deny the past, are doomed see its worst excesses repeated.

a reply to: scraedtosleep

Cities are steeped in history. Slaves were used to build the Colosseum. We know now that slavery is a bit of a no-no, but no-one is daft enough to want to destroy the Colosseum because it's history might be offensive to... somebody.

Monuments illustrate a city's history. When I'm walking through a city, I like to see the old bits nestled in with the new bits, I like seeing how it's changed over time. I find this better than getting everything from a book, because it's a real, tangible experience.

Obviously, they could get rid of every old monument and relegate history to confines of a library, but I think that's a big loss.

originally posted by: scraedtosleep
No one is erasing history.

History books have less credibility than the MSM...

The FACT that "History" has been erased and tampered with has been proven.

The biggest cover-up in the history of mankind is the history of mankind itself.

"History is more or less bunk." ~ Henry Ford

"The falsification of history has done more to impede human development than any one thing known to mankind" ~ Rousseau

“There are two histories: official history, lying, and then secret history, where you find the real causes of events.” ~ Honoré de Balzac

As another man without a high school diploma, I discovered many years ago that the "educated" class is generally not educated at all, it is mis-educated. The whole purpose of American (perhaps all "western") "higher education" is obviously to bring minds into lock step with "The Agenda." As a general rule, the less official American education a person has been exposed to, the greater his/her ration of common sense.

"Education" is Spiritual Suicide

We also have in the city a white power statue that was taken down years ago. It is still in city storage somewhere. Ireland once had British street names and statues. It wasn't until years after it was free the statues came down and new names were made, the two countries could start to see eye to eye. And from what I understand the playing field isn't even level there.

We can not erase history, If we could/did what would we learn from?

a reply to: Squirlli

Exactly.

In every human endeavour, from simple survival, to high physics, from city management to geopolitics, we learn the most from our errors. Erasing our stupidities from history will remove all the most stark and unavoidable lessons that we have learned, and continue to learn, from our knowledge base. Without these reminders, these valuable lessons being present in our lexicon, without the historical buildings, texts, monuments and memorials, it would be all too easy for the species to forget the harshest lessons of all, and those lessons have the chance to inform a better, more vibrant, less oppressive future, than the chaotic and folly ridden past we all share as members of this species.

It is my belief that we are all linked by our humanity, no matter where on the planet we hail from, no matter what faith, colour or creed we may be a part of, we are human beings before we are anything else, and we have a responsibility to one another, young and old, man and woman, all the peoples of this world. That responsibility, is to make the best of not only ourselves, but of our conduct on this world, of our minds, and to prevent the hardening of our hearts against our fellow human beings. I believe this because the lessons history has taught me, boil down to one searing point, that in my view cannot be forgotten, or ignored. That is, that when we forget our humanity, we allow it to slip through our fingers. When we abandon our fellow human beings, allow ourselves to consider them less than human, allow ourselves to enslave, exploit, or exterminate them, that we become toxins to our species, cancers upon its organs, agents of entropy, rather than stalwarts of cohesion.

Our species will die if we allow ourselves to forget the lessons that keep our humanity in play. Without those lessons, without those errors firmly in mind, it is easy to give into rage, frustration, violence, and the spreading of misery. We must be constantly reminded of why these things are folly, why actions must be reasonable, why lies must never conquer truth, and why actions based on anything other than pure truth, are always doomed to cause pure chaos and ruin.

Without these lessons, we lose the ability to be better than our pasts, because without those lessons there would be no reason to fear our worst excesses, and there would be no way to quantify our greatest successes without their counterpoints to anchor those moments in history, and remind us why they are next to all of them, bittersweet, rather than being simply glorious. We learn from mistakes, as long as we remember them. When we forget them or erase them, we learn nothing.

a reply to: TrueBrit

I understand what you're trying to say, but I disagree with the conclusion. We can learn about out past mistakes through history books and museums.

Italians can learn about the mistakes of their past without keeping Mussolini statues around. Germans can learn about the mistakes of their past without keeping Hitler, Mengele, and Goebbels monuments around. Iraqis can learn about the mistakes of their past without keeping Saddam memorials around. And Americans can learn about the mistakes of our past without keeping the monuments to the confederacy & that time period around.

To be blunt, the Confederacy had roughly 2 million African American slaves and the Confederate Constitution guaranteed the right of slave ownership. My literal bloodline would still be slaves today if the Confederates won. And the former confederates responded to losing the Civil War by passing the "Black Codes", which replaced the "Slave Codes" which guaranteed our enslavement. This is what literally forced the Northern States to pass the 14th Amendment and to reoccupy the South during the Reconstruction Era. So yeah, their monuments are a slap in the face to citizens like myself & my family.

In fact, our nation's already completely wiped away most of its real history. Before the 1820s and the "Indian Removal Act" (a literal ethnic cleansing policy), most of the nation was still Native American land. Europeans & Americans claimed access to that land, even though the Tribes and First Nations were still living there with their own nations & cultures. The Cherokees had an entire nation in most of what is now Tennessee & Georgia. Yet US nationalists (and Pres Jackson) had no problem wiping out their history, paving over their monuments, and looting their belongings (I mean, "claiming recent artifacts").

The irony is that many of our States, counties, and landmarks still have names from the Tribes that recently lived there (or sport words from their languages). Examples off the top of my head are Delaware, North & South Dakota, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, the Appalachian Mtns, some of the Great Lakes, etc. But the people who wrote the history books have completely omitted nearly everything about those people & their cultures, even though most of those Tribes & First Nations are still alive to this day.

And I'm curious to see how many of the people who agree with the OP are also in favor of reintroducing the Native histories.

a reply to: enlightenedservant

The lessons you learn from history do not depend on the intent of the person who raised a memorial, or a monument. The Romans left many things here in Britain, both physically speaking, and in terms of cultural memes. Ancient forts, Roman roads, the pseudo-Christianity they bought with them (bastardised as it was by polytheistic claptrap).

Those remnants remind me that my nation was not always bogged down in centuries of hyper imperialism, domination doctrine, and megalomania. Once it was a land of noble folk, working the land, bashing one another over the head with swords, and keeping themselves to themselves otherwise. Good people, real life. Not pomp and idiocy. It reminds me also that cultures which seek dominion over others must always be opposed, whether they are the culture which permeates ones own nation, the nation next door, or a nation thousands of miles away. Those who seek dominion over others, no matter from where they hail are always wrong.

Lessons of thousands of years ago, taught not by books, but by places and monuments, and the echoes of the footsteps of our ancestors. Whether we are talking about the camps in Poland, the monuments in New Orleans, or the Roman forts and settlements in the British Isles, places and structures, memorials and monuments... They need not represent what they were intended to represent. How they are learned from depends on the lesson, not the subject of the monument itself.

I don't think removing the statues, placed to honor Confederate "heroes" equates to erasing history.

Put them in a Civil War museum and make our history books accurate.

I'm glad they're finally being removed.

a reply to: TrueBrit

And once again, we can learn from the mistakes and brutalities of our past by reading history books and visiting museums. That doesn't mean we should keep monuments, flags, and statues in remembrance of them on public land. Screw that.

That's why I used the examples of Mussolini, Mengele, and Saddam. People can learn about them, remember them and their actions, and even remember where certain events happened without glorifying them. Especially when there are still neo-confederates and white supremacists in our country right now who want to go back to the policies these groups pushed. There are American conservatives who still say my people were better off under slavery. You seem to be implying those things are just figments of the past when they're not.

a reply to: wulff

You don't erase history by removing statues. Any historian will be MORE than happy to tell you all about the Confederacy. Trust me. You don't have to worry, Confederate history isn't being erased. However, they are trying to remove Confederate symbols from being something to look up to and respect.