Robert E. Lee statue being melted down; bronze to be re-used for new more inclusive art
Robert E. Lee statue being melted down; bronze to be re-used for new more inclusive art
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Not just any Lee statue, the one from Charlottesville famous for the Unite the Right Nazi rally that culminated in Heather Heyer getting murdered.
I ended up in Charlottesville for a wedding a few years back and unintentionally parked right across the street from the statue. It was covered up with plastic; sent a shiver down my spine when I realized what it was. I’m glad they’re melting that shit down to turn a hate symbol into something beautiful. RIP Heather, you stood up for real American values.
Charlottesville was the wake up call for many. Never I expected nazis openly marching on US soil, chanting slogans straight from WW2... nearly a century after WW2.
It also must suck for the locals to have their town's name being forever associated to those scums.
Are you even tangentially familiar with US history? US citizens have historically been right up there with Nazi level hate. Racism didn't just go away. It just became illegal to own slaves.
Nazis admired a lot of things from the US: eugenics, the genocide of the Native Americans, anti-semitic oligarchs like Ford.
The way WWII went made the US pump out anti-nazi propaganda to support its fight against the horrible regime. Let's not forget that before, and after WWII the US Government supported many fascist groups as long as they were anti-communist. It was just convenient to foster anti-nazi sentiment during the war, especially with strange bedfellows like the USSR after they were betrayed by Hitler.
You think I don't?
I wasn't pretending racism just 'went away', but I had met so many bystanders (pretending racism wasn't that big of a problem because they didn't get to experience first hand) arguing it would eventually go away with the dinosaurs, until Charlottesville happened right in front of their eyes. That made even bystanders realize how serious it was.
"Tangentially familiar"? What is this? Reddit?
Yeah, generally, I prefer stuff like this to get preserved for historical value, just out of public view.
But many of these things are rallying points for hate right now, and the value of actually destroying that in the present outweighs the value to any historian or student of history in the future.
This one in particular. History won't miss it. Burn the fucker.
The vast majority of these statutes, including this one, were erected decades after the Civil War and have no historical value beyond being physical representations of Jim Crow. The guy that commissioned it purchased land and oversaw the creation of a whites only park on the site where it was erected. They were rallying points of hate when they went up and they still are.
It would be nice it it was just now, but those things were built as symbols of hate from the start.