I understand people wanting to keep what they consider part of their history.
If it was just for the pure symbolism or credentials of the person represented, shouldn't the Seattle Lenin statue be removed too?
If it was just for the pure symbolism or credentials of the person represented, shouldn't the Seattle Lenin statue be removed too?
What do you mean? More people were killed by communists than by Nazis.
Also the Eastern Europeans who escaped the Iron Curtain, or who still had families behind it.
The number of Americans whose families suffered because of Lenin and his followers is hard to count.
a) Lenin didn't fight wars to preserve his right to literally enslave people.
b) This is still irrelevant to the issue of whether statues of Robert Lee should stand erected in public spaces.
Some have argued that communism enslaves everyone.
> This is still irrelevant to the issue of whether statues of Robert Lee should stand erected in public spaces.
Agreed, especially if the statue is privately owned, but I do wonder if groups like Antifa are calling for the owner of the Lenin statue to be fired.
If it's the former, Lenin is no saint worth a statue: http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Quotes/leni...
If it's the latter, it's a sad example of US-centrism. By that token, <insert any other non-US dictator here> would be acceptable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_deportations_from_Lithu...
"Deportations of the civilians served a double purpose: repressing resistance to Sovietization policies in Lithuania and providing free labor in sparsely inhabited areas of the Soviet Union."
Therein lies the problem. Why can't we all just have friendly conversations without being so upset all the time. Not everyone has the same information as the other person.
> Initially installed in Czechoslovakia in 1988, the sculpture was removed after the Velvet Revolution and brought to the United States in the 1990s.
> Lewis E. Carpenter, an English teacher in Poprad originally from Issaquah, Washington, found the monumental statue lying in a scrapyard ready to be sold for the price of the bronze
> ... Carpenter approached the city officials with a claim that despite its current unpopularity, the sculpture was still a work of art worth preserving, and he offered to buy it for $13,000. After many bureaucratic hurdles, he finally signed a contract with the mayor on March 16, 1993.
> ... the statue was cut into three pieces and shipped to the United States at a total cost of $40,000. Carpenter financed much of that via mortgaging his home.
> The Carpenter family continues to seek a buyer for the statue. As of 2015 the asking price is $250,000, up from a 1996 price tag of $150,000.
After a certain point, you have to forgive and forget and move on or society is going to break down. Especially a nation like ours filled with the unparalleled horrors.
Everything from our money, our schools, our cities, etc honor a slave owner or someone who participated in the genocide of the natives. Even MLK was an abusive wife beater and we have a day named for him.
Having said that, I can see the other side. A native american certainly has a lot of valid grievances when it comes to the US. I can see how a A black person doesn't want to go to a school named for a slave owner.
It's hard to see how we fix things. Do we have a wholesale purging like germany did after ww2 when they removed all glorification of the nazis? How practical is that in a nation like the US?
Where is the happy medium? Can a divisive issue like this ever lead to a common ground or a compromise?