Hot take: I think they shouldn’t have melted the statue down in the first place and stuck it in a museum instead.
It shouldn’t have been out in public in this day and age because you know what the fuck kinds of people would even commemorate Robert E. Lee, but it should have been put into a museum as part of the history of the US because… well, he’s a sort of important player in US history. What he fought for isn’t representative of what the majority of sane Americans believe in, but it’s also cool to see a statue from the 1920s and why they wanted to commemorate a piece-of-shit Confederate - and a shame it got melted down, because it is a part of history whether we like it or not.
It isn’t required that we save every depicti9m of the guy in existence for museums to reference the guy or his role in the civil war. These statues were built 50-100 years after the war had ended in order to harass those who were seeking equality and civil rights at the time. This would be akin to some rightwing fascists constructing a statue of Osama Bin Laden in NYC in 2051. Would you not argue that such a statue should be melted back down immediately?
Every depiction? No. But such a significant one should be saved. It should stand as a reminder of the harm it did, the public acceptance of it, and the prevailing ideals in the time it stood.
Not in a “he’s important and still worthy of being memorialized” kind of way, but in a holocaust museum kind of way.
And that will be done, just not with this particular statue. There are tens-, likely hundreds, of thousands of similar statues out there for such a candidate.
Hot take: I think they shouldn’t have melted the statue down in the first place and stuck it in a museum instead.
It shouldn’t have been out in public in this day and age because you know what the fuck kinds of people would even commemorate Robert E. Lee, but it should have been put into a museum as part of the history of the US because… well, he’s a sort of important player in US history. What he fought for isn’t representative of what the majority of sane Americans believe in, but it’s also cool to see a statue from the 1920s and why they wanted to commemorate a piece-of-shit Confederate - and a shame it got melted down, because it is a part of history whether we like it or not.
It isn’t required that we save every depicti9m of the guy in existence for museums to reference the guy or his role in the civil war. These statues were built 50-100 years after the war had ended in order to harass those who were seeking equality and civil rights at the time. This would be akin to some rightwing fascists constructing a statue of Osama Bin Laden in NYC in 2051. Would you not argue that such a statue should be melted back down immediately?
Every depiction? No. But such a significant one should be saved. It should stand as a reminder of the harm it did, the public acceptance of it, and the prevailing ideals in the time it stood.
Not in a “he’s important and still worthy of being memorialized” kind of way, but in a holocaust museum kind of way.
And that will be done, just not with this particular statue. There are tens-, likely hundreds, of thousands of similar statues out there for such a candidate.
What makes this one any more significant than any of the dozens of others?
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Death always to the traitor Confederacy
i wrote a paper in college about this exact situation and had the same take lol, should’ve preserved it (in a museum) for history reasons.