1,000% living for historians and academics who are likewise supporting the destruction of statues of gross historical figures – like yes! we don’t need a statue to remember who they are! and they were shitty anyway so who cares!
They were not evil in the time they lived. Judging historical figures by current standards will always result in failure of the historical figure and is grossly unfair.
Newsflash bud, we’re not living in their time anymore. We’re in our time, with our standards, and if we don’t feel like honoring them anymore, that’s our right!! Just because someone decided to put up a statue one hundred years ago doesn’t mean we have to keep it up forever. Statues do not teach objective history. They honor and glorify. No need to keep em up when we’ve progressed as a society
Hilarious that the actual act of toppling these shitty statues has taught more people about the people they depict in less than a week, than the chunks of metal had in a century or more.
You don’t learn history from a statue. They’re not put up for educational purposes, at least not the ones we’re arguing over. The argue is constantly made that they’re for commemoration, the public act of remembering. That may have been true when the damn things went up and people needed and wanted a way to do that in public. They’re a cultural symbol, showing what a given group values.
And it’s perfectly fine to look at them and go, yeah, we don’t value that anymore, or that In fact, commemorating it actually goes against we now think is important.
Oh no! The destruction of history! Look at this poor statue of a misunderstood Russian leader, destroyed by virtue signalling SJWs.
Oh no! The history being erased in this ancient city.
Literally having slave traders, racists, war criminals, whatever on a pedestal and then going “hmm we’re not proud of this anymore, lets not glorify it” isn’t a bad thing.
We, as a society, don’t immediately forget something existed because the statue is no longer in the town square. We didn’t learn anything real about the person or the time by it being there. We remember by the work of historians and researchers who do the work, putting the thing in its full context, so we can understand why they did whatever they did, and why it wasn’t the only fucking view at the time or since. We can quite easily hold in our heads the dual ideas of “X thought it was right” and “but others then and us now do not”.
Get rid of them, slap them in a museum and teach people the whole picture, turn them into new works of art or just melt them down, whatever. But keeping them in place does nothing to help.
