Reply to Removing and Renaming Confederate Statues, Schools, Streets, etc: Why?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]For the same reason Germany and Italy don’t have Hitler Boulevard or Mussolini Drive.[/quote]

+1000
This is everything.   End of thread right there.[/quote]

I want to push back a bit and say there's actually more. The premise of the OP is that these names were once OK but no longer are. These names were never OK. This is not like the town of East Hamburg, NY, deciding to rename itself "Orchard Park" during WWI. Or french fries becoming "Freedom Fries" during the first Gulf War. There was never a time when Robert E. Lee was not a polarizing figure and a symbol of hate and racism.[/quote]

+100000000000[/quote]

Ah, but there is the fact that Germany had the Nurenberg trials. What does U.S. do but welcome the traitors back into Congress.[/quote]

There is a difference between wanting to exterminate people and treating them as property. Both dehumanizing and neither worthy of commemoration, but also not the same. [/quote]

Wow, just wow...

If I may ask, what motivates you to even try to defend the utterly indefensible racist legacy of the South like that?

Also, remember this thread is about taking down statues and street names of racist criminals that have gone down in infamy. Please tell what made you get up this morning and take the other side on that issue?[/quote]

I'm all in favor of changing Confederate names on schools and streets, and removing statutes.

I don't agree that slavery is the equivalent of the Holocaust, which is what other posters invariably and quickly insist upon.  Whether you like it or not there are degrees of mistreating other human beings and not respecting their basic human rights, and slavery (a widespread, but reprehensible, practice around the world) is not the same as a genocide that involved the deliberate murder of 6 million people.

So my question to you is what motivates you to compare a Robert E. Lee to a Hitler, or quite possibly to call anyone with whom you disagree a Nazi?  Is your education so lacking, or your sense of moral superiority so profound, that you think you can resort to such rhetorical cheap tricks and never get questioned? [/quote]

I don't see the point of comparing these two atrocities at all. And the result of such comparisons -- intended or otherwise -- is often to minimize the grotesqueness of slavery in the United States. Also, for what it's worth, you're broadening the scope of the comparison from the Holocaust (one event) to the practice of slavery, rather than the specific period of slavery here, which could have a similar effect because it avoids looking at the brutal details of how American enslavers behaved.
[/quote]

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