SPLC starts new campaign of historical cleansing "Erasing Hate"

The confederate flag isnt history you should be proud of just like that family member who thought the earth was flat wasnt remembered for thier vast intellect, they should be remembered, but not praised for thier lack of proper knowledge. Same as your ancestor who believed in slavery, they were wrong, accept it and move on.

originally posted by: Kali74
a reply to: beezzer

What's draconian about privatizing confederate tributes? Take them out of public debate, everyone wins. Right?

You're not cleansing hate, erasing hate.

You're hiding hate.

I think it should be public, loud and avaliable for everyone to see everyday.

I'll only make sandwiches if there's a good deal on rabbit meat.

It's always a good deal to bet on rabbit.

"Erasing Hate" could lead to a false sense of accomplishment when the "hate" goes underground.

And, it works both ways.

a reply to: Asktheanimals
Your original posting makes SPLC front and center in this discussion. SPLC is the most vicious and vigorous name calling outfit in the United States, and its primary weapon is calling people anti semites and holocaust deniers, and hence guilty by implication of killing poor innocent Jews, now protecting themselves from the pogroms in Israel.....

a reply to: beezzer

I would agree if there were monuments to educate people about treason and slavery but they aren't. They're tributes to fallen confederate heroes to the cause of slavery err I mean rebellion.

I would have thought that privatizing something held by the government would cause you to perform spontaneous cartwheels. If you leave it in the public domain it's always going to be subjected to the voice of the people.

originally posted by: Kali74
a reply to: beezzer

I would agree if there were monuments to educate people about treason and slavery but they aren't. They're tributes to fallen confederate heroes to the cause of slavery err I mean rebellion.

I would have thought that privatizing something held by the government would cause you to perform spontaneous cartwheels. If you leave it in the public domain it's always going to be subjected to the voice of the people.

If you privitize it, you control the narrative.

If it's open to everyone all the time, then there's no way to control the direction of talk.

a reply to: beezzer

What would change about the narrative if it went from government to private? Nothing.

originally posted by: FormOfTheLord
The confederate flag isnt history you should be proud of just like that family member who thought the earth was flat wasnt remembered for thier vast intellect, they should be remembered, but not praised for thier lack of proper knowledge. Same as your ancestor who believed in slavery, they were wrong, accept it and move on.

The Confederate flag does not equate with support for slavery. Many in the South were against slavery yet fought for the Confederacy under that flag. Slavery drove down wages for working whites and many saw it as cruel. If only 5% of Southerners owned slaves why is it they tarnish the memory of the other 95% who did not own slaves? It is making a gross assumption to say that anyone supporting the Confederate cause automatically supported slavery. It's an oversimplification just as blaming everyone in the US today for the war in Iraq would be.

There was an aristocracy then just as now. Their actions do not negate the sacrifices made by the common people.

I just checked the mail & we got a letter from the Southern Poverty Law Center about this. Good. I haven't opened it since it's not addressed to me.

Either way, good. Screw Dixie, the confederate flag, & all that racist crap. America was built by people from many demographics. We have just as much of a right to this country as everyone else. Our side of the story has been ignored since the beginning & it's good to see we're finally getting an equal say in things now.

Nobody's banning the possession of this crap, just as Nazi paraphernalia isn't banned. But that doesn't mean my tax dollars should go towards maintaining this stuff, either.

a reply to: enlightenedservant

So does that mean I can start a petition and get upset and vandalize every piece of public property that maintains some bit of history with which I disagree but my tax dollars support?

I can trash PP clinics and other stuff.

I can burn down my local PBS and NPR stations.

I can go after the EPA and other institutions?

Somehow I am thinking not.

originally posted by: ketsuko
a reply to: enlightenedservant

So does that mean I can start a petition and get upset and vandalize every piece of public property that maintains some bit of history with which I disagree but my tax dollars support?

I can trash PP clinics and other stuff.

We're not trashing "clinics and other stuff". And if we did, we should get arrested for vandalism or destruction of property. Same would apply to you.

I can burn down my local PBS and NPR stations.

We're not burning down local PBS and NPR stations either. If we were, we should be arrested for arson and maybe terrorism, depending on the circumstances. Same would apply to you.

I can go after the EPA and other institutions? Somehow I am thinking not.

The right wing is already going after the EPA & other institutions. Some right wingers attack abortion clinics & abortion doctors physically, though most simply try to defund or eliminate these institutions through other means. So what's your point here?

Though I can't help noticing you immediately resorted to violence as your first option when fighting something. I never once said we should use violence to attack dixie, confederate, and other undesirable crap. Though I'm not surprised by this since the pro-confederate extremists have always used violence against people who don't agree with them.

a reply to: Entreri06

Read this, please.

Lincoln knew, better than most, the hideous cost of that war. He urged mercy.

"The war is over — the rebels are our countrymen again."

linkee.

Grant, too, knew the horrors of war better than most.

Too bad the Republicans in charge of Congress after the war weren't as wise... Other wise, the horrors of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement might have been avoided...

In discarding those monuments, those memories, the history, could be forgotten.

Traitors? No. Mistaken? Yes. But put yourself in their shoes, if you can... Look at what they were facing...an attack on everything, not just slavery, that they held dear. Or so they believed. When you push someone into a corner? What do you think they're going to do? You only have so many cheeks to turn.

There is history behind every single monument...history that ought not to be forgotten.

originally posted by: seagull
a reply to: Entreri06

In discarding those monuments, those memories, the history, could be forgotten.

Traitors? No. Mistaken? Yes. But put yourself in their shoes, if you can... Look at what they were facing...an attack on everything, not just slavery, that they held dear. Or so they believed. When you push someone into a corner? What do you think they're going to do? You only have so many cheeks to turn.

There is history behind every single monument...history that ought not to be forgotten.

Very true. However, that applies to all sides of the history, not just the cherry picked stuff in "official" history books. So maybe those monuments should tell the negatives & positives, instead of just the whitewashed side. For example, one branch of my family line built Chaires, Florida. But Green Hill Chaires and his 2 brothers get the credit because my family members were enslaved at the time. The "official" stories have already forgotten the whole truth, even if we haven't.

Another example would be Christopher Columbus. He admitted in his own journals that he gave away 9 and 10 year old Native girls as sex slaves to his men. And he's the guy whose colonies wiped out the Taino people & everyone in Barbados, then imported African slaves there. That's the reason many of the Caribbean countries have "black" majorities to this day. Should we really glorify him just because people here were taught a sanitized version of the story when they were kids?

Surely you can understand why the descendants of these incidents would be against this false version of "history".

Lacking any issues of substance, they seek to justify their own salaries and keep the contributions coming. Just HOW interested is the average person in street names or old bronze statues covered in pigeon poop? Not very huh? Agitating for an issue, something to do, some papers to file, some e-mails to send. The waning hate for black people must not stand in the way of such organizations as the SPLC, no sir! There's a lack of anti-black actions to be against, so they must reach into the past, find something to rally around.
a reply to: Asktheanimals

SPLC seems to have over looked some simple FACTS Confederate soldiers by act of congress were given US Veteran status with all the privilege of US Veterans . So SPLC is actually going after US Veterans graves and memorials. Seems to me when I went to Arlington cemetery they had tomb stones for confederate dead with a battle flag engraving . Not going to dig it up but many confederate monuments are under state or federal protection.


Take a guess what was one of first businesses on wall street ? Live stock and a Slave market !

And a an article reporting it went on to say.

The city's deep ties to the slave trade only ended when slavery was abolished after the Civil War.

www.wnyc.org...

They are talking about New York city.

Slavery became the backbone of New York’s economic prosperity in the 1700s

Imagine that a free state profiting from slavery and the slave trade. And it wasn't just New York either.

Oh yes vilify the south for having slaves just 8-10 % and some sources say 15 -20 % of the Souths population actually owned slaves. So vilify the 80 -92 % for what the minority did.

Did you know there were free blacks who fought for the south ? Of course not that ruins the narrative . Cant have that bury that fact deep and quick.

Tariffs taxation economics shipping while industry was discouraged in the south keeping it agricultural states rights and not just slavery as the reason for the war.

Rid the history of the Confederacy and it flag and monuments its words. You still have Wall Street Domino sugar plus many more who benefited from slavery.

Many well-known companies and financial institutions benefited from the trans-Atlantic slave trade. They include Lehman Brothers (which went bankrupt in 2008), J.P. Morgan Chase, Wachovia Bank of North Carolina, Aetna Insurance, Bank of America, and the Royal Bank of Scotland. Banks, such as Wachovia’s predecessors Bank of Charleston, South Carolina, and the Bank of North America, and J.P. Morgan Chase’s predecessor banks, made loans to slave owners and accepted slaves as “collateral”. When the slave owners defaulted on their loans, the banks became the new owners. The Lehman family members who established Lehman Brothers started their company to trade and invest in cotton, a cash crop produced by African slaves. Aetna sold insurance to slave owners

adamhudson.org...

The history of the area is described in Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited From Slavery -- a book that details how deeply the slave trade was entrenched in America's economy

www.theroot.com...

O yes cleanse American history of the the evil Confederate its hero's memorials but lets just skip all the Northern cities and states and their corporations that profited off slavery. And lets not think of the current day slave labor that brings you clothes shoes from 3rd world countries.

Hypocrisy

originally posted by: beezzer
The progressive solution to everything.

Ban it.

How "enlightened".

You mean like banning abortion, gay marriage, personal drug use and ACORN, etc? Then there are the people who want to ban sagging pants and try to stop people from building mosques. Seems to me that conservatives have no problem whatsoever trying to ban things they don't like either.

I figured out how to end the debate:
Confederate Lives Matter.
There, now they are victims of oppression.
Which they were in fact, victims of oppression by Northern Industrial concerns.
(who coincidentally became fabulously wealthy due to outfitting the Union Army and Navy at inflated prices)
Lincoln also arranged to build thousands of miles of railways at government expense.

a reply to: Asktheanimals

The very concept of erasing the hate by removing symbols is sad. Anyone with two brain cells understands that hate is a human emotion/concept. An inatimate object cannot hate. Even taking away an object "representing hate" will not erase hate. Erasing hate would mean a change in a person. The whole concept of erasing hate by means of removing symbols is a sad joke. May feel good to some, solves absolutely nothing, hate is still there, and more than likely has the opposite affect as those who actually want the history to remain and don't hate, now resent the way the situation is being portrayed. Then again my guess is this has nothing to do with anything the campaign claims to want to achieve anyway and splc knows this

Make them stop

originally posted by: pianoasis
Make them stop

I'd love to.
Do you know how?
Other than trying to educate people on the complexity of life at the time of the US civil war there isn't much else I can think of.
I did write Morris Dees (the founder of SPLC) telling what an inane concept it was and how it would only further enflame passions needlessly. I knew it was a useless gesture but still I thought it germane for him to know that some of us would not sit idly by while they go on a campaign to destroy a huge chunk of our history.

No doubt generations 200 years from now will look back on us and say " what a bunch of racist troglodytes they all were, letting people starve and go homeless while all that wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few"
ALL OF YOU HERE NOW ARE TERRIBLE, AWFUL PEOPLE FOR ALLOWING THIS TO CONTINUE!
YOU'RE NO BETTER THAT THE CONFEDERATES WHOSE HISTORY YOU ERASED.
21st CENTURY AMERICAN SCUM!