Comment by JohnBooty
6 years ago
People/books/movies/statues weren't "cancelled" before
because nobody had a problem before.
No, you didn't hear the problems before.
Plenty of people found these things lousy for decades, and in some cases centuries.
But not enough listened. So the voices became louder, and more unruly.
It's like when you try to tell your neighbor nicely that his dog's been pooping on your yard. And he does nothing about it for years. Then one day he wonders why you've left an enormous pile of dog poop on his doorstep.
Gross? Rude? Highly non-ideal? Sure. But he didn't listen to reasonable discourse.
> Plenty of people found these things lousy for decades, and in some cases centuries.
So what? Many more found them worthy. A critique is not the measurement of whether statues should be torn down or books censored. Otherwise no art would be produced.
What has changed is that the mob has become emboldened into thinking that things they don't like deserve to be destroyed. It's juvenile intolerant behavior.
A critique? No. A gross violation of utterly basic human decency? Yes.
In many recent cases, we are talking about slavery.
Many monuments glorified military "heroes" of the Confederate Army, a rebel army that sent men to their deaths fighting for the right of white Americans to own black slaves.
In general, I believe the world suffers from a lack of nuanced discussion and understanding. In the case of slavery and monuments to slavery, I find very little need for nuance.
There's a major discontinuity between censoring information and removing monuments.
A statue is not a meaningful source of information.
It essentially yields a single data point that says, "here is something held dear by the society in which this statue exists."
Removal of a statue does not censor information or rewrite history. It merely says, "we're not celebrating this any more." If anything, in the case of the removal of Conferate monuments, it represents a greater awareness of history.
I think some people don't get just how offensive Confederate monuments can be, because most of them are intentionally couched in language that obscured what they represent. This is similar to how, in early US politics, slavery was referred to as "the peculiar institution" or even more vaguely - e.g. the original US Constitution never says "slave", but instead talks of "free persons" and "other persons", or "persons bound to service".
But some of them are just so inherently offensive, the contents overpowers the presentation - e.g. the "faithful slave" monuments and memorials. Perhaps contemplating these might help understand more subtle problems with the rest, so here's a few examples:
https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=42188
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jstephenconn/5136209868
https://docsouth.unc.edu/commland/monument/245/
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Slave_memorial_at_Pr...