Vorpal wrote:661-Pete wrote:As to the statue which sparked all this off - why such a fuss? I suppose it's America, and they do things differently over there. Anyone know which historical figures - some of them of questionable morals - are commemorated in statues in jolly old UK? (I know there's a statue of Louis XIV outside Versailles - but even the most diehard French republican doesn't seem that bothered).
The US Civil War was fought over the right to own other human beings. It's not just a matter of questionable morals. Most of the statues were erected well after the Civil War, during either the Jim Crow era, or the civil rights era. They were meant to be symbols of oppression, and placed in front of the public institutions in the USA that most suffer from racial bias.
It would be okay to put a statue of Robert E. Lee up in a museum, but does it really belong in from of a court house where there is a demonstrable problem with systemic racism?
How would you feel if someone put up a statue to honour Hitler? That's how it feels to black US Americans.
I think a problem we have here in the UK is that (on average)we just don't think like the Americans do (on average).
I have friends and relatives out there, and have visited. And, (again, on average, thankfully not my contacts there) many Americans are still mentally fighting the civil war. For them, it's still raw. In Europe, we have had to deal with many wars
on our own soil since then, so for us it is difficult to appreciate that ongoing hostility they still harbour about it. Most of us in the UK have no problems with working or playing with Germans, despite WW2 being well within living memory of many of us. But there is still a latent hostility between some states in the US that is a direct hangover from the civil war, despite those involved being long dead, and despite the fact that it wasn't actually fought, as so many people ignorant of history believe, on who was pro or against slavery; that was one issue involved but not the only one. And Americans tend to be significantly less well informed on their history than we are on ours.
You can even encounter people there who still hate the British because of the war of independence, even though no British person is remotely responsible and most British people didn't even have the vote at the time, and were rather more economically oppressed than the people living in what is now the USA at the time. I'm serious, you do. And I mean
really hate. It's scary.
It is a sign of great immaturity in a country to still be hung up on bearing long dead grudges like that, but that's how it is in some places. That sort of attitude is like racism itself, and other similar things, it tends to thrive where people feel marginalised or hard done by (whether that's true or not). Some people try and change things, and work to make things better in the world, those are the heroes. The majority just plod on day to day doing the best they can without hurting other people, because they are decent human beings. But the dregs will always just look around for other people to blame for their problems, and like most bullies, they look for people weaker than themselves- or in countries with stupid gun laws, people less heavily armed. And one thing about the dregs makes them dangerous- their stupidity combined with their malice makes them very easy for the truly evil to manipulate for their own ends.
At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, Hitler used grudges about the Versailles treaty in his rise to power....grudges are a volatile fuel for the wicked.
