Part of the reason Johnson (Lincoln's VP) drew so much animosity is precisely because he did NOT execute the rebel leaders. He was later impeached. When I was a kid they (the school teachers) taught us that Johnson was the only POTUS ever impeached. But then later Nixon resigned on the eve of also being impeached for obstruction of justice, and Clinton was impeach about lying under oath about Monica. The FBI under Mueller as special prosecutor is now investigating Trump and his cabinet for pre-election collusion with Russia, and also Trump for obstruction of justice in firing Comey. History is repeating itself. When I was a kid I did not understand or appreciate why the rebel generals and Davis should have been hanged. Now as an older adult I completely appreciate it. And if I were on a Federal jury and they (the rebel generals and Davis) were on trial, I would vote for conviction and for execution. You can only say what you yourself believe and would do. You can't tell anyone else what to believe or say or do. (That's Native American philosophy.)
Everyone is entitled to their opinion...but to destroy the great works of a previous generation is despicable no matter what the reason. It is difficult enough for humanity to survive on this Earth without being wasteful...and when a culture has enough excess wealth to finally do something beautiful as a message to the ages it is wasteful and ignorant to destroy it. The Egyptians have plenty of reason to hate their pharaohs, but you don't see them destroying their pyramids, even though they were built by slaves. What this destructive action chiefly shows is that the controlling blacks of New Orleans do not consider themselves part of the US, but a separate hoard like the Mongols or Huns, willing to wantonly destroy anything that offends them. They are, therefore, willing to be destructive of the positive legacies our admittedly imperfect ancestors were able to crank out despite the hard times they lived in. These same iconoclasts benefit today from the hard work of building this society by slaves and planters alike. They willfully forget it and spit on it because it was imperfect...even though this makes the country a duller and less informative place. The message conveyed is one of barbarism, not instruction. An instructive action would be to erect plaques describing the less illustrious facts about such figures. I will not hold my breath waiting for the art to commemorate replacement heroes. Such statues are built with community funds collected by people who focus on building, not destroying. This bent toward destructiveness in a community once one's own gang is in power is a very good argument for ensuring one's own community is not similarly taken over.
Agreed. There have been a lot of businesses in the USA that would have been more successful if only they could have used that as a justification for owning human beings to do the work. That excuse doesn't apply just to those who really really wanted to own profitable cotton plantations. The catch is that it just isn't an acceptable excuse.
There is always something positive to be gleaned from any piece of art, no matter who or what it portrays. Each person that views it is affected differently, depending upon their ability to see what is there. To be so mindlessly ignorant as to not make the attempt to find it is barbaric and contemptible. It is something individuals either do or not do, and they define themselves accordingly.
I don't agree. These items are monuments to individuals and what they stand for. It's not some "what is the meaning of art" question. We KNOW what they mean. They were put there on purpose to stand for what they mean. And, when they stand for universally recognized intolerable crimes against humanity, they should be removed, because we no longer laud those criminal objectives. It's not as if there is an assault on the art. Those items in museums, held as personal property, etc., are not being destroyed. The problem with these is that they are prominently and proudly displayed as icons of the state. They could have been moved to a location reserved for recognition of the art, history, etc. That is, if the issue really was the art, meaning, etc., there were ways to preserve that. I would have backed that direction as preferable to destruction.
______ It's those Progressive Democrat carpet baggers at it again. No true New Orleanian would destroy their culture and heritage for some PC excuse. The next thing they'll remove is the statue of Andrew Jackson and rename the Jean Lafitte Park.
Absolutely!! It was much more acceptable for an Irishman to die for every crosstie laid on northern railroads!! At least they weren't slaves, right?
______ So just as the statues have been removed, would you as a Progressive also fully agree that their names be stricken from history too? Perhaps we should do the same with Hitler, Stalin and Mao removing their genocidal acts from historical fact. Oh, I forgot the Marxists especially the CPUSA have already done that and claim Marxist Communism has always been a success. Just look at Venezuela today.
______ Well Democrats honored Ted Kennedy and he was responsible for the death of Mary Jo Kopeckne and then he offered to collude with Communist Russia to beat R. Reagan.
Editing history to only show the good parts would certainly be a profoundly stupid endeavor. I don't understand what made you think of that.
No place in the USA should be proud of their forefather's promotion of slavery. That's just not a useful or positive direction for anyone. We know slavery is criminal. We should be proud of those who recognized that fact and worked to get the US past that horror. I'm sure there were those in New Orleans as well as all over the US both before and after the civil war who should be remembered for that.
Nice to see at least some degree of agreement. Also worth mentioning are the children made to work dawn to dusk in northern factories. Slavery, imo, was not a racist crime, but was a human rights crime, along with other labor crimes. It was economic exploitation, not racism, that drove it. Further proof of that is that free blacks also willingly participated. Exploitation .... as American as apple pie!!
Marxist Marxist revisionists use social class, the social relations of production, and economic conditions as their main lens, and see these as the primary catalysts for social change throughout history, as Karl Marx himself did. Marxist historians are not necessarily communists, though most tend to be left-leaning. One major flaw of Marxist history is that its hypotheses are often not provable or falsifiable, since it asserts that historical figures and events were influenced by socio-economic factors which may not have been apparent at the time: Marxist historians of the Reformation and post-Reformation eras, particularly Christopher Hill, have argued that many of the grassroots Puritan movements emerging in this time, such as the proliferation of spontaneous religious sects during the English Civil War and Interregnum, were actually expressing social and economic frustrations. These movements' revolutionary criticisms and demands were couched in religious terms, since Christianity was the dominant worldview through which all ideas were expressed and, according to Marxist theory, the movements' leaders and members would have been unable to express their discontent in secular terms.
The Jews ended up in Asia, in Israel. And they flooded America. So naturally there would be fewer of them in Europe.