[conspire] Federales in Portland?

[Rick Moen]

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

> I'm suggesting exactly the opposite. They took down the swastikas
> BUT they put up memorials. On the other hand you can visit Auschwitz
> concentration camp. Saying that putting down statues is "cancel
> culture" is pretty naïve if not hypocritical.

I apologise for not having properly understood your point about that,
the first time, Ivan.  You were being a little bit subtle, during a
rather unsubtle conversation.  (That is in no way any complaint.)


> I'd expect you first speak up in favour of discriminated people, but
> generally people that speaks about statues forget this step.
> Just coincidence.
> 
> Then you'd ask, OK, I did something in support of discriminated
> people. Now it's time to take care of the statues.

In the USA context, it's certainly indeed true that the statues of
Confederate war criminals (limiting, for a moment, discussion to those
and not other problematic historical figures like sadistic mass murderer
Christopher Columbus) are just a surface reflection of a deeper problem,
and are nowhere near the core of that problem.  At the same time, one
can reasonably wish them good riddance, for two reasons:  (1) what they
are.  (2) why they were put up.

(1) What they are is celebratory monuments to traitors, straight up.
I see no reason to coddle Lost Cause revisionism, just to placate some
Southerners.  Let's tell the truth:  Those guys were traitors to, and
enemies of, my country.  

(2) As has been explained patiently on these shores, of late, the flurry
of Confederate statues was in _no_ way an 1860s artifact, but rather
a mass-manufactured ploy during the early 1900s Jim Crow Era, placed in
Southern towns to remind blacks that Reconstruction had been foiled by,
first, the 1876 election that sold blacks down the river again and ended
all enforcement of their voting rights, and (2) the Wilmington coup of
1898 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_1898).
The statutes were intended to be a high-profile reminder that white
supremacy still ruled in the region and that blacks needed to know their
place and not get uppity.

All that rhetoric about how removing them from public places would be
'an attack on our culture', 'an affront to regional pride', and 'erasing
our history'?  It's insultingly transparent sleight-of-tongue, and
nobody with any intelligence buys it, any more.

Anyone (in the USA) who's still mouthing that 'erasing our history!'
slogan either has been living in a cave or is speaking in bad faith
and deliberately spewing crude-propaganda bullshit.

It's self-evident you're right that _just_ moving monuments to Robert E.
Lee, etc. into museums would do rather little (except cease to rub
symbols of white supremacy crudely into the faces of people walking by).
But nobody says to do just that.


> BTW does anyone remember what the Gay Pride celebrate?

The Stonewall Inn, man.


> And please no... Colombo (or whoever else) is a symbol, these things
> has happened in the past as well.

I'm nostalgic for the Viking days when we Scandinavians were by a
country mile the most despicable people in Europe, frankly.  ;->
https://allthatsinteresting.com/iceland-founded-viking-slaves