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PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   35128 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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Statues are explicitly symbolic, and tearing down the Lee statue, melting it down, then recording the melting and publicizing it after the fact, is also explicitly symbolic. I don't think it's a stretch at all.

I'm not questioning that it is symbolic, but the question is what it is symbolic of. The Occam's-razor interpretation is that it's intended to be symbolic of removal, melting down, liquidation or whatever of what he is associated with by the vast majority of people: the Confederacy, and the Confederacy's cause of slavery.

Maybe if you're in $CURRENT_YEAR, sure. But the kinds of people (Nimarata Haley, anyone?) expunging American history aren't interested in the Civil War, they're interested in putting nons over Americans. The actual Americans reconciled from that war

Really? I don't think the South was ever rehabilitated or seen in a positive light by most people not associated with it. Is that reconciliation? To me, it looks like vanquishing an enemy, and absorbing his subjects.

and put up monuments to that reconciliation. Hyphenated Americans in $CURRENT_YEAR have a decided interest in tearing down the history of this country which doesn't include them. I think that's pretty obvious, and it certainly fits the facts well enough to be a working model.

Why would a "non-hyphenated" Northerner not be interested in tearing down the history of his ancestors' enemies?

It's unfortunately not easy to find a perfectly fitting parallel from other countries, but if for example the PRC started melting down statues of Chiang Kai-shek (wherever such statues may still be found on the Mainland, or after a future reconquest of Taiwan), would you take that to symbolise the "liquidation of Han China", given that at least nominally Chiang's nationalists were for Han supremacy while the communists in their propaganda claimed equality for the different ethnic groups?

To me, it looks like vanquishing an enemy, and absorbing his subjects.

You are wrong, this is, again, $CURRENT_YEAR brain worms. It does not reflect reality, it is a fever dream.

Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States, in 1913, when this picture was taken:

We have found one another again as brothers and comrades in arms, enemies no longer, generous friends rather, our battles long past, the quarrel forgotten—except that we shall not forget the splendid valor.

Eisenhower had a picture of Lee in his office. He was not the only one, but rather one of many admirers of the American heroes on both sides of the war.

We reconciled. It took time, but we did it. We Americans. Tearing down and melting the statues symbolizing that reconciliation is part of a larger movement to discredit most of American history in order to erase the white history of this nation, the better to steal it from its rightful inheritors.

would you take that to symbolise the "liquidation of Han China",

China is still predominantly Han, and nobody is gleefully tracking the diminishing population of Han in China. It's not the same ballpark, it's not the same league, it isn't even the same fucking sport.

Please actually acknowledge what the SPLC is rooting for: I am being driven out of and replaced within my own homeland, that my forefathers built, by ungrateful and bitter foreigners, with the cheering of pretty much every black, asian, and mestizo who happens to be born within the borders and carries paper citizenship.

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