A Friend From High School (Who is quite bright)
Erasing history will lead to temporary satisfaction and a fruitless future.
Those of us who have been through this recommend that you hide your history books. When you are forced to believe their false narrative, your children will still have the opportunity to learn from the past.
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I don't understand "erasing history" I don't think anyone is saying we should forget. They are saying we shouldn't celebrate oppression.
A Friend From High School (Who is quite bright)
how is a statue celebrating oppression? Are the Coliseum or the pyramids or any number of statues of past kings and queens celebrating oppression? Is erasing any and all “offensive” pop culture obliterating oppression?
You know how people today are astonished at how the Holocaust came about? Pulitzer Prize winning novels were written about it in the recent past. It was the fettish of literature for the last decade.
This is exactly how the Holocaust came about. One group of people decided what race and way of thinking was acceptable and decided to wipe out everyone and anyone who did not agree with that way of thinking. The cancel culture existed back then. If you didn’t agree, you were cancelled. And guess what? The silent majority who did in fact not agree stood silently by. With the exception of a few who could not stand in silence and acted.
Slavery did not start in 1619. Slavery started in ancient times. That is what people did. My people were slaves of the Ottoman Empire for a century. Your people were slaves before then. Do we see everyone turning the universe upside down? No. Love the way the people of the youngest country on Earth feel so entitled and self righteous. As if the world revolved around the good young USA. Eccentric and absurd.
ok, you've convinced me, it is exactly the same
A Friend From High School (Who is quite bright)
I will convince you of nothing. Sadly, that is how it always is. It’s like trying to warn your children about something and then they go and do it anyhow. And after they go through that painful experience, they say “I wish I had listened to you.” Nobody is listening because everyone is smarter. That’s fine. Sad part is, it is not our generation who will suffer. It will be the generations that come who will not experience freedom as you did.
A Friend From High School (Who is quite bright)
and one more thing. One day, and it will be much sooner than later, someone will decide that what you think is not acceptable. It always happens.
I suppose that the Coliseum and the pyramids are celebrating oppression. To the best of my knowledge those oppressed by those symbols aren't clamoring for their removal. Maybe they are. International news in the US isn't great. I'm uncertain the arguments here are symmetrical. The exterminations in WW2 Europe didn't follow a dismantling of the history of the Jewish oppression Germans - it was more a complete fabrication of the concept that Jews were currently oppressing the majority. That's more parallel to the calls in the US now of the oppressive tactics of reverse racism. I get there's a slippery slope here. That takes cultural dexterity, and no action should be assumed and undertaken without consideration and debate. That is why I make a distinction between celebration and memory. If we are going to remove statues and rename schools then the curriculum in those schools needs to contain the history and the context to make sure the knowledge is not buried or worse intentionally falsified. Taking down a statue of Lee at a state capital doesn't remove Lee from history books, or at least it shouldn't so as to be a bulwark against exactly the kind of new oppression you are warning of.
I also think that there is something about the age of the wound in play here. Many of the people expressing their rage are people that are right now today still victims of the oppression they are speaking out against. To them it is not about history, it is current events. I don't know what European Jews did in the 1950s to keep Nazis from being celebrated. The population was so decimated that they had other things on their mind I would imagine. Also, the rest of the world helped with that lift. The Germans themselves outlawed the kind of celebration that the US failed to intercede with in celebration of the Confederacy. I imagine that had there been a significant movement to paint Hitler more gently that Jews would have opposed it.
A Friend From High School (Who is quite bright)
Why are we judging history by today’s standards? If that were the case across the world, we would not have ANY ancient buildings or artifacts standing. Do you think what the popes did to artists like Michaelangelo was not oppressive? Yet do we take down the Sistine Chapel? I doubt 99% of people taking issue with Lee have ANY idea about who Lee was or what Lee did. And this is why statues of people who actually devoted their lives to overthrowing slavery were also toppled. Ignorance. Complete and utter ignorance of history.
AND... FWIW, and I am not an authority here, but I have been trying to learn something about this recently, apparently many of the monuments were in fact not celebrations of the confederacy and were not put in place until the 1950s and 60s in the US as a direct thumb in the eye to the civil rights movement. So not even the people that erected the monuments were concerned with preserving a historical narrative. They wanted only to hurt people they thought weren't people, within the footprint of my lifetime - historically like... yesterday.
But yes. We need to be mindful of the repercussions of the actions. The actions should not be undertaken without discussion and debate and with an eye toward the preservation of the full historical narrative. And the process must be monitored with vigilance.
There is a difficult dimension to this around art. I don't know how to solve that. We see a lot of discussion about this aspect in my field around #metoo. Does having someone exposed as a monster invalidate all of the art they have created over the length of their lifetime? I don't know what to do with that. Sometimes I get the feeling that Jews have somehow taken the construction of the pyramids as an achievement (even though it is a product of oppression). That seems like a fairly significant emotional contortion - making lemonade from unfortunate lemons.
A Friend From High School (Who is quite bright)
but this is my point. There is no discussion. Only extremism. There is complete and utter obliteration of any point of view except that which is felt to be “acceptable.”
Where did the adults go?
^^^^^ discussion.
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