While Removing Confederate Statue in Richmond, Excavators Discover Two Time Capsules
While tearing down racist Confederate statues, excavators found time capsules of much more historical worth.
www.themarysue.com
Two time capsules discovered underneath removed Confederate time capsules
- Thread starter Cicada 5
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www.themarysue.com
Wow, it's too bad removing those statues has caused me to magically forget the entire period of history in which they were created, otherwise this would be kind of interesting.
Kind of telling actually. 1865, Civil War ends. Did they put up that statue to Lee then... no. 1870 Lee dies. Did they put up the statue then... no. 1887, very early in the Jim Crow era as southern whites were passing laws and committing terrorist acts to threaten and intimidate blacks to disenfranchise them. Did they put up the Lee statue then... yes. It sure seems like the timeline suggests the purpose wasn't to commemorate Lee and celebrate southern history. After all if that was the case, why wait 17 years after his death? Actually the saddest fact is the number of those confederate statues that went up in the 1950's and 60's, waiting kind of a long time to celebrate southern culture there.
Precisely why I don't believe these statues should be destroyed. Removed, yes...but relocated, preferably to a truth and reconciliation museum, or Smithsonian exhibit.
What this is about,
isn't the Civil War or slavery. It's about Jim Crow, the role of the lost cause narrative in perpetrating it, the socioeconomics of the war and its aftermath, and the blind eye turned by former Union states to it while perpetrating their own, less overtly severe but far greater in perfidy, forms of white supremacy. Forms of white supremacy that continue to this day, while Jim Crow was merely reformulated into a publicly-acceptable form and consent manufactured around it.
Destroying the legacy of Jim Crow, obfuscates those historic threads that implicate the country's collective guilt in it. And that's not a sin borne exclusively by former Confederate states -- far, far from it.
Statues don't serve a pedagogical purpose.
Statues are a form of political aesthetics.
Looking at a statue won't teach you anything about guilt or white supremacy or, indeed, anything. Looking at a statue, all you are seeing is the power of the state that created it. Statues are these huge monolithic and ultimately useless objects, they require money and labour to build. The only question they prompt is "why". The only answer to that question is "because we can". That's why authoritarian regimes love statues so much. They serve to remind everyone living under them (literally or figuratively) of the power that put them there, and continues to keep them there.
Destroying the legacy of Jim Crow should be the objective of any sane human being. If it's necessary to learn or feel guilt, it should be done in museums or classrooms where the power of these objects can be explained and contextualized, ideally in the most abstracted way possible. Forcing a black person to look at a heroic equestrian statue of someone who fought to keep their ancestors enslaved every day in the vague pretext of servicing white guilt isn't actually an end to white supremacy, it's just a different form of white supremacy.
Imagine a "holocaust" museum that was just a collection of Nazi memorabilia and propaganda. You would immediately see the problem, right?
They're a primary historical source. As a historian, allow me to say that's the death of your argument right there. Primary historical sources don't stop being primary historical sources, just because the bad guys as ordained by history and contemporary morals made them.
And that informs us of the predominant norms and values of the society that erected them, and the beliefs of the constituent members of it.
And here's a statue of some woman in a chariot.
That statue of a woman in a chariot is of Boudicca, an Iceni woman who led a failed rebellion against Roman occupiers in England around 60AD. Not two shits were really given about her, and indeed her name and existence had been lost to history, for about 1500 years. That is, until the Spanish Armada set sail and the Brits suddenly needed a figurehead and rallying symbol compatible with the current monarch, who happened to be Elizabeth I. Just, never mind after 1500 years of conquest and cultural assimilation, the modern English people had about as much in common with the Iceni people, as I do the Jomon people.
It'd be about 300 more years before that statue would be made...under Queen Victoria.
It may come as a surprise, but to someone who knows the context, that statue has more to say about Brexit than the last five years of reporting by every major news outlet put together. You just gotta figure out "why". "Why", as it turns out, is pretty fucking important. "Why" is the only question of importance.
No, the objective of any sane human being is to learn from it and move beyond it in a way that prevents it from happening again. Iconoclasm does nothing but perpetrate the same wrongs, and provide room for the same historical sins to repeat. Which is precisely how we still have the contemporary carceral state, teaching about slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow, Civil Rights, and systemic white supremacy in all its forms across all regions of the country, have become so far dissociated from the greater historical context of the United States, people are unable to see -- or in some cases, deny -- how that legacy continues to this day, however distant historically or geographically, and directly relates to them and their lives.
Did you just not read the part where I said, and I'll quote, "...truth and reconciliation museum, or Smithsonian exhibit..."? Or, are you just here to play straw man games?
Imagine one that doesn't have any. You tell me if there's a problem with that, in teaching how the Holocaust happened and how to prevent it from happening again.
By that metric, everything that ends up in a landfill each year is a primary historical source.
As a historian, I would stress that we have no particular obligation to the past. We have an obligation to the present. The goal is not to preserve for the sake of preservation. The goal, especially when it comes to conveying history to people who are not historians, is to cut away everything that isn't relevant, to discover the signal in what would otherwise be noise.
Minor (yet very relevant) correction. It is an image of a statue of some woman in a chariot.
This image would survive the destruction of that statue. All the meaning you have ascribed to this image would survive the destruction of the statue. The meaning is not incarnated within the bronze of the statue itself, it is a narrative. A narrative that, in and of itself, is quite separate from the heavy object to which it tangentially refers. It's a story that was carved out of the meaningless noise of historical information by cutting out the irrelevant details to leave only what is meaningful to answering the concerns of the present, because that's what history actually is.
The statue has nothing to say at all. It's a big lump of metal. The truth of what you have said does not necessitate the physical existence of a big lump of metal.
But "it" is happening again.
It never stopped happening. You pointed this out previously, and you were entirely correct.
The events which require remembrance to ensure they "don't happen again" are typically the events that retain some political possibility of happening again. The holocaust must be remembered because the political forces that made the holocaust happen are still a part of our world. There are people out there, quite a lot of people, who do not look at the holocaust with any great revulsion, and would gladly see it happen again. Genghis Khan's conquest of the Khwarazmian Empire, as bloody and atrocious as it was, does not require remembrance to ensure it does not happen again.
And here is the danger of statues, because statues are not stories. They do not have built in moral information. They do not lead to any particular conclusion. They are just big lumps of metal. You can put a statue in a museum, you can surround it with whatever contextual information and stories you like, but a person looking at it might just see the big lump of metal, and read whatever they want into that lump of metal, and come away feeling galvanized or reinforced in the knowledge that others, seeing the same statue, would have seen the same thing they did.
Symbols, in general, are polyvalent. They can be taken out of their intended context and used for all kinds of purposes. They can become rallying cries for causes that would stand in complete opposition to the reason they are being put into the public eye.
And that's why, sometimes, symbols should just be destroyed. Because sometimes the best way to ensure historical atrocities don't happen again is to render them meaningless. To deprive them of symbolism by which they might find value, to starve the beliefs that motivated them.
The fact that these statues are being destroyed is not erasing the historical consciousness of Jim Crow so that racism can continue unchecked, it reflects a hereto unprecedented historical consciousness and consequent desire to abolish the continuity of the ideas those statues represent, one that is being actively opposed by people who don't look at those statues and think about how terrible it was that Jim Crow happened, and who probably never will think that. Those people aren't going to be redeemed or fixed by a museum, the best we can do is to make them irrelevant.
I would suggest that using the propaganda and symbolism by which an atrocity was justified to "educate" people on why it happened is the worst way I can think of to prevent it from happening again.
What I think is often so beautiful about holocaust museums is that they don't generally bother interrogating the motivations of those responsible, because what does it matter? There is no legitimate answer to the question of why this thing happened. There is no meaning to it that is genuinely worth considering. People who orchestrate events like the holocaust do not deserve the luxury of understanding.
Delving into the motivations of those people and what they thought they were doing is a fun exercise for massive nerds, but it isn't really relevant.
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I'd suggest that's a question for archeologists, considering it calls into question the validity of their entire field of study.
We have an obligation to the future.
Well, I suppose it would be of no real consequence should the Mona Lisa burn or be stolen, again. Why rebuild Notre Dame? we had images of it before it burned. Throw all 48 remaining copies of the Gutenberg Bible into a wood chipper? after all, they've been comprehensively photographed and scanned, their images readily available online. What next, the Parthenon? the remaining marble caps to the Great Pyramids would surely go to a better cause, who wouldn't want a toilet made of pyramid marble.
We don't need Auschwitz still standing to remember what occurred there, do we?
A narrative without which the "heavy object to which it tangentially refers" would not exist in the first place.
It's funny you would characterize the statue of Boudicca thus. It was precisely cutting out "irrelevant" details from the information about her rebellion to leave only what was "meaningful" to Elizabethan and Victorian British, that a story about a woman who rebelled against an expansionist imperial power, was used a millennium and a half later to justify imperial expansionism.
And the nature of your political posturing and proselytizing does explain rather neatly why it is necessary.
And martyrdom does the exact same thing.
Really, now. Did the Byzantine iconoclasms prevent sectarian conflict? Did the French Revolution's iconoclasm truly see the end of French classism, inequities, or imperial ambition?
Did the iconoclasm of the October Revolution erase religiosity from the Soviet Union as intended, or end classism and the rural/urban divide in the country? after all, it seems as if dekulakization and forced resettlement occurred regardless, as did the Holodomor and Stalin's purges of Russian Jews. And it's strangely telling that, after the decade of de-Stalinization during Khrushchev's leadership, absent remembrance of who Stalin truly was and what he did, Stalin is once again rising in prominence and popularity as a Soviet leader.
Iconoclasm has far less transformative power than you seem to believe it does. In fact, I'd argue based on the historical evidence, iconoclasm is a force for regression.
It reflects no such thing. It reflects myopic zealotry that will harm the cause in the long run by having destroyed the physical evidence of its past impact. The same as every wave of iconoclasm that happened in the past.
You believe there is no value in educating people in past examples of propaganda and how propaganda operates, so that individuals may learn to recognize it when they see it, and thereby be able to resist it? You'd see all copies of Triumph of the Will or Birth of a Nation destroyed, out of fear their viewers will succumb to their wiles, rather than learn from them to identify how they're works of propaganda, and consider how contemporary media compares and contrasts?
I often wonder what Hannah Arendt might think if she lived to see late capitalism, and if she'd agree her term "banality of evil" would be the most accurate descriptor of it in the entirety of humanity.
Yes, but Triumph of the Will and Birth of a Nation do not stand in town squares continuing to glorify grubby history and ideology with the tacit approval of the state.
If you go to the right place, they get shown in town halls to glorify the grubby present, by representatives of the state. But being I'm one of the few people on the forum from rural red state land, not to mention probably the only one to have been to an actual Klan rally (to counter-protest), I'm also one of the few to speak about it from a place of personal experience.
Either way, that's vacillation. Censorship and iconoclasm solve neither disastrous legacies of the past, nor problems of the present, and if anything they empower repetition given time and distance. Remove the statues, build an actual truth and reconciliation museum, stick the damn things there because they would belong as a part of the legacy of Jim Crow. Something the public must learn about for all its harsh reality, if there's to be any genuine progression from its shadow.
And yet, it would seem that the people who put the statues up were doing so in the (not unjustified) belief that having them up would help the same sins repeat.
I agree. This sort of public art/memorial can be reframed with a different perspective and/or moved. But if some are destroyed, that's really not the end of the world either.
One might note recently in Bristol, UK, local citizens toppled a statue of a prominent city benefactor from yesteryear who made his money from the slave trade. This followed years of trying to have the statue recontextualised, even by something as simple as the plaque being amended to note how he made his money. The Conservative Party members of the local council obstructed it repeatedly, and frustrations finally boiled over. (Incidentally, a jury just acquitted the protestors on the charge of criminal damage for it, much to the intense annoyance of the many Conservatives.)
Statue was thirsty, needed a drink from the river
One of my favourite moments during Britain's statue toppling days was Boris asking "What's next, get rid of statues of Oliver Cromwell just because he killed thousands of Irish people." I was genuinely amazed there are still statues of Cromwell considering he was such a piece of shit they dug him up just to behead him. And then I remembered that Britain has convinced itself that all it's colonialism and genocide was actually grand because reasons.
Cromwell statues have tended to be controversial - he is not a well liked figure in Britain.
The few that were put up date to the 19th century: he was popular in with radical reformists at the time because he symbolised opposition to monarchical / aristocratic and religious privileges. None of them are much loved, but survive through inertia. Boris, of course, would like them - probably for no better reason than Churchill admired Cromwell and Boris fancies himself as a latter day Churchill.
One can at least say of Cromwell that he was an important formative figure in British democracy, so there is some core justification despite his crimes. That's more than be said for hundreds of monuments to little-remembered generals and statemen who far more represent colonialism.
I find statues in generally being some of the stupidiest things man has ever created.
No, I don't find much pedagogical value out of statue. Side note, I saw a statue of Ghandi unveiled by fucking Modi of all people. I don't know if it would be worse to open it in my country or India. Which really reinforces the non-pedagogical nature of statues. Or, rather, the anti-value of statues. They generally make history worse.
Statues are like reading Tolkien and pretending that it's history. Yes, medieval had swords, armies and people. But little else of substantive value other than saying, 'Here is a lie'
No, I don't find much pedagogical value out of statue. Side note, I saw a statue of Ghandi unveiled by fucking Modi of all people. I don't know if it would be worse to open it in my country or India. Which really reinforces the non-pedagogical nature of statues. Or, rather, the anti-value of statues. They generally make history worse.
Statues are like reading Tolkien and pretending that it's history. Yes, medieval had swords, armies and people. But little else of substantive value other than saying, 'Here is a lie'
Maybe. The point is that there isn't a magical line where a thing becomes a historical object worthy of preservation or display. That's dictated by the priorities of the present. We don't need museums to display the empty milk carton I threw out last week. Yes, it's technically a historical object and yes, some distant and future society could probably learn all kinds of things from it, but I disagree that we have an obligation to the future. We have no idea what the future will be or what will be significant to it. For all we know, the future could be worse than anything in history.
But I would say that if the people of the future have reached a point where they are incapable of understanding or appreciating the implications of racism. If it's become so divorced from their reality that they need statues to know it existed, then good.
Stop for a moment and think about the comparison that you're making.
These objects are all symbols. They symbolize something important and valuable, something that people even today enjoy or admire or aspire to.
There are no triumphant statues of Adolf Hitler left standing over streets in Germany or proudly displayed in museums. Because a society that is actually ashamed, a society that actually seeks to correct and grow from the wrongs of its past, doesn't leave monuments that glorify its past intact for the sake of meaningless preservation. The rest of the world could learn a lot from Germany in this regard.
Auschwitz isn't left standing for the sake of it. It is not a fun historical curiosity where you go to learn about the history of the Nazis. Auschwitz is a grave. The desire to preserve it has nothing to do with abstract historical interest. It is a place that is sacred because it marks the deaths of so many people whose absence continues to be felt to this day. You can go to any holocaust museum in the world and learn about the events of the holocaust, or you can go to a library and read a book. People go to Auschwitz to visit a grave.
..or, sadly, they increasingly go there to visit a tourist attraction, because once putting an object in the public eye does not guarantee it will be used as intended. Honestly, at this point maybe it should just be bulldozed, but I don't think that's a decision for historians to make.
Did Byzantine icondulism prevent sectarian conflict any better?
This is becoming so ludicrous a comparison that I'm loathe to even indulge it, but even if we were talking about iconoclasm, then iconoclasm (specifically, Protestant iconoclasm, which you of course neglected to mention) is built into the fabric of every secular legal system. Noone is being burned at the stake in the street for desecrating a religious symbol, and you know what. Good.
If iconoclasm is some great evil because it has not resulted in a perfect world in which everyone is happy and there is never any injustice or wrongdoing, then where is the perfect iconodulistic world which accomplished that?
But why are even talking about iconoclasm in the first place? Do we need to understand that a statue of general Lee represents the incarnated essence of the man himself, bound by similitude? Should we kiss these statues in reverence? Should we burn incense before them to signify our love and devotion for the men they resemble? Do these objects need to be preserved and venerated out of love for the things whose images they embody?
If anything attests to the transformative power of iconoclasm, it's that so many people have forgotten what iconodulism even means..
I believe that before you are able to even begin to do that, you first need to acknowledge that propaganda works, that it is as much a part of our world today as at any point in history, and that the ability to resist it cannot ever, ever be assumed.
You can't simply learn to resist propaganda by looking at propaganda, because propaganda doesn't work that way. A group of film students watching Birth of a Nation aren't going to be seduced into being racist or idolizing the KKK, but that one guy at the back of a class who already is a racist might perceive some truth or meaning in the film that is lost on everyone else. Propaganda comes in the guise of the familiar, often it just looks like harmless entertainment (of course, the real reason film students watch Birth of a Nation isn't because it's a pioneering work of filmmaking or even because it was intentional propaganda but because it was the first genuine blockbuster in American history). Propaganda lurks in the assumptions on which a piece of media operates, it's the things you don't really think about because they barely seem controversial at all. Birth of a Nation succeeded because, to a lot of people, it didn't seem controversial at the time of its release.
If I wanted to teach students about propaganda, I wouldn't show them Triumph of the Will or Birth of a Nation. I'd show them Man of Steel or The Avengers. Because the starting point for learning about propaganda is to realise that all the media around you is doing it, and because I hate superhero movies. Frankly, I'm tired of the position occupied by Triumph of the Will or Birth of a Nation. It's not smart to think something is genius just because it's edgy.
I dunno.. I don't remember Arendt getting really mad about all the statues of Hitler being destroyed.
The purpose of iconoclasm -- in the present and past -- is to erase that being destroyed from collective memory, and therefore history. And suffice to say, judging from the entirety of human history to this point, not only does it fail to work, but more often than not, it backfires. What will be deemed historically relevant to those in the future, is for people of the future to decide, not you. And to decide on behalf of those in the future what will be important to them, is precisely the political and social motive of iconoclasm as it is an act of depriving those of the future of context and choice.
"Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it" is not mere cliche.
And I would say if those of the future are incapable of understanding or appreciating the implications of racism, they will have their own social, economic, and political cleavages which form the foundations of their society, they will not perceive because they've been deprived the necessary context by which they might be otherwise understood and categorized. That is not "good".
Oh, shall we?
Well in two of the cases I gave, those "symbols" represent 1,700 years of greed, corruption, hatred, imperial ambition, conflict, oppression, sexual predation, misogyny and patriarchy, slavery, and -- ironically enough, precisely that which you continue harping about -- antisemitism and genocide.
In a third, those "symbols" merely represent 5,000-year-old greed, corruption, hatred, imperial ambition, conflict, oppression, sexual predation, slavery, and genocide. Those "symbols" were literally built by conscripted and indentured serfs (i.e. "slavery with extra steps"), by an empire that actively practiced and idealized slavery and human trafficking. Are the 5,000-year-old monuments to slavery morally superior to the 50-year-old ones?
The fourth is just a fucking painting nobody cared about, until Italian proto-fascists decided it was a rallying symbol for Italian nationalism, being too fucking stupid to realize the painting was commissioned by a Frenchman.
"Enjoy or admire or aspire to", indeed. Strange that didn't enter into your analysis. I eagerly await your impending appreciation for cultural relativism.
Nah, it's a society under the weight of Cold War hegemony eager to distance and separate itself from its immediate past. A societal effort to exceptionalize Nazism whilst engaging in performative collective guilt, in hope nobody paid particularly close attention to who continued running the country, what their past allegiances were, who kept ill-gotten wealth during the Nazi regime, and who served nominal prison sentences before early release and silently returning to lives of comfort and oligarchy.
And here we are, nearly eighty years later, and far-right extremism and neo-Nazism is once again on the rise.
You may rest quite assured the rest of the world did learn quite a bit from Germany in this regard.
And here's the foreshadowing of that impending cultural relativism I mentioned earlier...
Now, this is a setup for a false dillemma if ever I saw one.
Is that why and how statues of Christian -- specifically, Protestant Christianism -- mythology keep mysteriously appearing on public ground in the United States, despite the clear and undeniable wording of the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses? I could certainly point you in the direction of some maximum prison sentences being doled out for desecrating statues of the Ten Commandments, and rather...vigorous...court and public opinion battles over mosques and statues of Baphomet, in the United States.
But I have to admit, you're right. Nobody's being burned at the stake for it. They're just being bombed and shot up.
False dillemma, part 2.
That's literally why film students watch Birth of a Nation. Exact reason I did in undergrad, same as Triumph of the Will. Birth of a Nation was a "blockbuster" because of its innovations in cinematography, narrative, and editing. Those selfsame innovations are precisely why, same as Triumph of the Will, they're masterpieces in propaganda.
Do you mind if I screencap this for future reference, when and if anyone asks me the definition of irony?
I don't recall her saying anything at all about statues of Hitler being destroyed. The continuing legacy of Nazism despite de-Nazification, on the other hand...
Um...no. Maybe some iconoclasts are trying to delete people from history, but I daresay that most people wanting to get rid of, for example, statues of slave owners in the US are kinda invested in ensuring people know about the history of slavery.
And if that was the goal, there'd be a lot more destruction and attempted destruction at play: slave auction sites, plantations, old state houses, just to name a few. I daresay if that was the goal, BLM protesters would have burned Lafayette Square and St. John's in June, 2020, rather than take refuge in them -- let us not forget, Lafayette Square was a slave market.
No, to date the extent of the destruction has been narrowly, insidiously, and tellingly tailored -- specifically, that of erasing the history of Jim Crow. As has been stated by all sides, and thoroughly agreed upon. Which, of course, obfuscates the existence -- and answers -- to multiple questions, many of which those encouraging statues' removal find rather inconvenient:
1. Why did Jim Crow happen?
2. Why did northerners, abolitionists, and supposed progressives tolerate -- or even support -- Jim Crow for a century?
3. What was going on outside former Confederate states at the time?
4. How does systemic white supremacy outside former Confederate states reflect, and coincide with, Jim Crow?
5. Who raised the funds and commissioned the statues?
6. Did Jim Crow ever really end, or did it simply evolve with the times?
...and the most important one...
7. Why, as materially-interested parties, are those in power tolerating the destruction of these monuments when they enjoy the monopoly of violence and have ample power to put an end to it?
Occupy, the 2014 BLM movement, and the events of summer, 2020, reveal what happens when movements actually capable of threatening systemic white supremacy come into being. They're suppressed with extreme prejudice, using the most violent and demonstrative means available. It's no new, or unfamiliar, phenomenon -- contrast the fates and legacies of Fred Hampton, Malcom X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. The only one of those three men whose birthday is a national holiday, is the one whose message was capable of being censored, subverted, and captured by the state.
When Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, and what his advocacy had become at the time of his assassination, tells the true tale.