Hopefully LSU will do this and not give in to these yahoos

http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/metro/index.ssf?/base/news-15/1152430298258250.xml&coll=1


Sunday, July 09, 2006
By Ed Anderson

BATON ROUGE

A state senator from Oak Ridge fired the first volley in a battle over naming a building on the Louisiana State University campus after Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, and now an emotional war is raging with no end in sight.

In the waning days of the recent legislative session, Sen. Robert Barham, R-Oak Ridge, an active LSU alumnus, got colleagues to pass a nonbinding Senate resolution requesting the LSU Board of Supervisors to "give consideration for the naming of an appropriate building in honor" of Sherman, the first president of the institution that would become LSU. The measure passed without objection or debate.

I'd offer as much support for naming a building after him as I'd offer for naming one after Andrew Jackson...I'd spit on it.

No matter how you felt about the south and the confederacy, the reality is that Sherman ordered homes and businesses burned that belonged to civilians who had never owned slaves. He burned a city to the ground using the same logic as we used on Hiroshima and Dresden...that an annihilated enemy can't fight back. His orders, which survive to this day, were quite clear...everyone was an enemy. Under his watch women were raped with impunity, people were shot dead for the crime of trying to protect their crops to feed their families, and civilian infrastructure (including water and sewage systems) was completely destroyed.

After the civil war, there's also his history of massacring Native Americans to factor in. His "total warfare" theory was revisited on the Natives, and many Native American women and children died under American guns following his orders. I would also assume that you've heard of the near extinction of the American Bison (buffalo)? That was also Sherman's idea...his plan was to eliminate the Native American's food source as a way to destroy their society and ability to fight. He won that war too.

Sherman may have fought for the Union, but he wasn't a nice guy and certainly isn't someone that we want our young people looking up to (or having a building at their colleges named after).

but with all the threats of murder and other violence backed off, what lovely people "name a building after someone and I will murder you."