General Discussion
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Enabler: The people leading that rally in Charlottesville this weekend were unmitigated assholes, but historical vandalism is a real thing. Take a stroll through Europe, and you'll see statues of despotic monarchs, treasures looted from other nations, and remarkably well-maintained concentration camps. The past happened - good, bad, and ugly - and we owe it to future generations to preserve its artifacts.Me: Take photos of them, and then melt them down into monuments to civil rights leaders.
Or let some rich, racist asshole buy them and display them on private property. They should not be in public spaces and certainly shouldn't be maintained by public funding.
Enabler: The Pyramids of Giza were built to honor men far worse than Robert E. Lee - by slave labor no less. Bulldoze them, too?
So watch out for this tactic: we should preserve the confederate statues because the pyramids.
OhZone
(3,212 posts)Or private property.
greymattermom
(5,754 posts)what do you think about the Confederate cemeteries? Should those be dug up?
http://www.mariettaconfederatecemetery.org
Orrex
(63,225 posts)And the cemeteries shouldn't be maintained by public funding.
Does Germany maintain shrines to fallen Nazis? Do they maintain Nazi graveyards with public funding?
What do you think should be done with those Confederate cemeteries?
Jake Stern
(3,145 posts)Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge (German War Graves Commission) runs cemeteries for German soldiers of World War I and World War II with one third of the funding coming from the federal and state governments.
Orrex
(63,225 posts)Not being snarky here, but are they celebrated, as Confederate soldiers are celebrated in America?
Jake Stern
(3,145 posts)Before the commission got up and running the graves were maintained by the country where they fell (I.e., France, Belgium, Italy, etc.)
Orrex
(63,225 posts)The difference, I think, is that the Confederate states want to enshrine public reverence of these fallen enemy soldiers, whereas Germany preserves the memory as a reminder of the horrors of the past.
Thanks again.
Squinch
(51,021 posts)Foamfollower
(1,097 posts)IT is a lie to say they were built by slave labor. Nothing could be further from the truth.
They were among the first public works projects in human history as a way to keep people busy when the fertile fields of the Nile cold not be worked.
haveahart
(905 posts)I really do not think, and I will go back and read it again, that anywhere in the Bible it talks about slaves building the pyramids.
Foamfollower
(1,097 posts)after the pyramids had been built.
Orrex
(63,225 posts)I thought about going down that road with him, but it was an enabler posting on a friend's page, and I didn't want to clog his feed.
GoCubsGo
(32,095 posts)IIRC, there is a very notable part of the movie featuring Jewish slaves building the pyramids. Millions of people consider that film a documentary, rather than a Hollywood interpretation of a biblical story, sadly.
Foamfollower
(1,097 posts)The movie shows the slaves building a city for Ramses II. Yul Brynner actually has a line in the movie that his monuments will live as long as the pyramids, inferring they already existed for thousands of years.
Ignorant people who watched the movie misinterpreted things to believe their preconceived notions that the Israelites were building the pyramids.
Orrex
(63,225 posts)I didn't copy that part here because it was tangential, but that was my first thought as well.
haveahart
(905 posts)"One popular myth that Egyptologists say was perpetrated in part by Hollywood movies held that ancient Israelite slaves ancestors of the Jewish people built the pyramids.
Amihai Mazar, professor at the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, says that myth stemmed from an erroneous claim by former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, on a visit to Egypt in 1977, that Jews built the pyramids.
"No Jews built the pyramids because Jews didn't exist at the period when the pyramids were built," Mazar said."
ProudLib72
(17,984 posts)Is it true? Did Robert E Lee suddenly decide to go around erecting statues of himself? I don't think so. It was the assholes who loved and admired the twat who erected his statue. The same can not be said about the people who built the pyramids.
Orrex
(63,225 posts)Now that you mention it, it's so obvious that I don't know how I didn't see it.
Nice!
ck4829
(35,091 posts)Where are the statues of Lee surrendering to Grant?
roamer65
(36,747 posts)We can chart a different path.
Orrex
(63,225 posts)He seemed to think that my suggestion was sarcastic.
SoCalNative
(4,613 posts)get rid of all of them. Traitors who committed treason against this country aren't worthy of statues celebrating it.
Orrex
(63,225 posts)Melt them down into something useful.
brush
(53,876 posts)much less public-funded ones.
HAB911
(8,916 posts)Orrex
(63,225 posts)It's so wonderfully on-point and snarky that it serves as a great deflating of the "yeah, but" crowd.
BainsBane
(53,072 posts)They are just like the Crips and the Bloods, only white.
L. Coyote
(51,129 posts)Everyone knows it was ALIENS
Orrex
(63,225 posts)ILLEGAL aliens!!!!!!1!
HAB911
(8,916 posts)BootinUp
(47,197 posts)#grainsurgeon
BootinUp
(47,197 posts)nolabels
(13,133 posts)From a great shallow ocean hundred million years older than them
Orrex
(63,225 posts)Heigh-o!