So let’s see if I have this straight. This statue of Robert E Lee has been there since it was erected 1924, 93 years ago. It’s been part of the historical landscape of Charlottesville, Virginia in all that time and people lived with it as it reflected the history. Trouble only arose this year when a high-minded activist council decided that it was politically incorrect and should be removed.
What did they think was going to happen? What if some future council wants to restore it? Or is it only the politically correct left that has a right to frame history how it sees fit and airbrush those aspects that they don’t line up or doesn’t fit their narrative?
The events in Charlottesville over the weekend is where this removal of statues and the rewriting or totally airbrushing of history ends up.
In addition to the Robert E Lee statue removal, in January 2016, there was a failed push to get rid of the statue of Cecil Rhodes from Oriel College in Oxford.
In Australia there’s a general push by some individuals and a more specific push by some councils (City of Yarra being the latest last week) to get rid of or at least move Australia Day.
There are probably other examples.
It seems that anything or anyone that offends the tenets of political correctness or the sensibilities of its adherents is on the block.
But hear them squeal as they did when Trump moved into the White House and a journalist announced to the world that the bust of MLK had been removed from The Oval Office.
It hadn’t.
It’s a disturbing trend.
“…The Charlottesville City Council voted in April 2017 to remove the statue. A lawsuit, based on a Virginia statute dating back to 1902 that protects all war monuments in the state, was filed by numerous plaintiffs including the Sons of Confederate Veterans to block the removal of the Lee statue and another of Stonewall Jackson that the city plans to remove. The city argued that the statues of the two Confederate Generals were not erected to commemorate the Civil War and therefore the Virginia statute protecting war monuments does not apply to them. On May 2, 2017, Judge Richard Moore issued a temporary injunction in the lawsuit blocking the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue for six months, in the public’s interest, pending a court decision in the suit…”
I have a collection of “Bugs Bunny” DVDs containing cartoons made in the 1940s.
Many of the cartoons contain mores and ideas that would be politically incorrect today.
At the start of each DVD, Whoopee Goldberg says that the cartoons are politically incorrect and that to remove any political correctness from the videos would be to say that it never existed.
In regards to the monuments in the USA where some of those honoured people did bad things, removing these monuments is like saying that these people and events that the person was honoured never existed.
So removing these monuments is like saying these people or events never existed.
I don’t see a problem with keeping a monument and placing an additional plaque stating the bad things the honoured person did and that such bad conduct is not condoned today.
Thanks
Anthony of Belfield