[conspire] Federales in Portland?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ivan Sergio Borgonovo (mail at webthatworks.it):

> In Germany they put down swastikas and put up memorials to the
> holocaust.  Would it have been wrong if it had not been chosen
> democratically, by the majority of Germans?

At the time that this _started_ happening, at least, Germany was still
under four-power occupation, so expecting anything to happen purely
democratically was not reasonable because there was only part-sovereign
democracy in the Federal Republic (not to mention the DDR).

I don't really know the details of that part of the history, but I
suspect that a lot of the tearing down, if not the putting up, was 
either done at the best of the Allied powers or in the early days when 
the aftermath of the war was being worked out, a period that included a
lot of extralegal actions in both Germany and elsewhere.

In my dad's country of birth, Norway, the revived country took many
actions in the first years after the war that remain controversial as to
their legal basis, including executions.  Nobody misses Vidkun Quisling,
mind you, but the legal basis of his quick trial and execution, along
with that of others, is widely and properly questioned.

In that context, I expect that the convulsions in early West Germany
were far greater, and that a huge number of important actions were both
taken and necessary without putting everything up to vote.  The
situation was extraordinary.  Also, if I'd been alive at the time, it
wouldn't even have been my business (except as a citizen of one of the
Allied powers), but rather something for West Germany to sort out.
My concern is limited in scope to my own country, so asking me 'What
about Germany?' is not particularly relevant or useful.  (The
resemblance to KGB-inspired 'whataboutism' is actually a little
irksome.)


> This kind of thing has always happened and you'd agree that after
> hundreds of years people may have exhausted their alternatives if
> things keeps on changing so slow.

Sure, I understand impatience.  I'm just pointing out that destruction
of public property is a crime.  As I've mentioned repeatedly to Ruben,
unlike him I actually do believe there should be one law for everyone,
and that it should be enforced.  Some laws badly need to be _changed_, 
but nonetheless the law should not be ignored or selectively enforced,
as that creates bigger problems including corruption and tyranny.


> From my POV I'd prefer that statues of Columbo wouldn't be put down,
> but well, I'm not in the position to say what's right for people
> that have suffered discrimination and abuses for centuries.

I don't see that I need to even express an opinion.  Frankly, I'm tired
of the recent notion that people have to take sides on anything that
happens anywhere.  It's a waste of time, and approximates being assigned
mandatory outrage, and I don't wish to have any part of that.

My neighbouring town of Menlo Park (which I'm not a citizen of, being in
unincorporated San Mateo County between two lobes of Menlo Park) has 
neither statues of Christopher Columbus nor anything named for him, so 
even _if_ I were a resident of Menlo Park there would be nothing of
concern to me.

The City / County of San Francisco, 60 km north of me, has a significant
street named Columbus.  If I were still a resident of San Francisco,
having one of its streets named for a sadistic mass murderer might
bother me, but I haven't lived there in 19 years.  So, that's the San
Franciscans' problem, not mine.

There _had_ been, also, a bronze statue of the old creep at the top of
San Francisco's Telegraph Hill, next to Coit Tower.  San Francisco's
city government made the decision about a month ago to remove it and put
it into a warehouse while the city decides what to do with it.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-06-18/christopher-columbus-statue-removed-san-franciscos-coit-tower

But I don't feel any obligation to feel either supportive or
(especially) outraged, because San Francisco is just not my problem.

By contrast, the shredding of the US Constitution and the running wild
of US Federal police officers in Portland, Oregon actually _is_ my
concern, because of harm to my country from the bozo pretending to be
President.


> The way you chose priorities always says something.

Indeed.  That's why you don't see me getting worked up over other
cities' decisions to do things about/with statues of problematic
historical figures, for example.  It's really their problem.  E.g., if
the City of New Orleans really wanted to keep having a big statue of a
Confederate traitor in a public space, I regard that as their perversion
and not my problem.

On the other hand, naming US Army and Air Force bases for Confederate
traitors _is_ my concern, because again, it involves the doings of my
country and not just a local perversion.

On the other hand, if there continued to be Army bases named for the
Confederacy's two worst and most famously incompetent generals, North
Carolina's Braxton Bragg and Kentucky's John Bell Hood, for the rest of
my life, it really wouldn't bother me _much_, and is after all good for
comedy value.  

I'm actually surprised there isn't a military base in the South named
for the CSA's worst of the entire bunch of generals, North Carolina's 
Leonidas Polk.  Polk, in addition to being a religious loon who
personally broke the South's Episcopal churches away from all the
others, out of fear that the Church might say something nasty about
slavery, was so famously incompetent that, after he was suddenly killed
by cannon fire, while spastically mismanaging the defence of Atlanta in
1864, this was deemed a serious misfortune for the Union, because
General Polk being in charge was at least worth a few battalions for the
cause of the other side.

Military historian Steven E. Woodworth wrote:  'Polk's incompetence and
willful disobedience had consistently hamstrung Confederate operations
west of the Appalachians, while his special relationship with the
[CSA] president [Jefferson Davis] made the bishop-general untouchable.'