Poll: Majority Of Americans Oppose Removal Of Confederate Statues

Wreath_laying_at_Confederate_Memorial_Day_services_-_Confederate_Memorial_-_Arlington_National_Cemetery_-_1922-06-05The push to remove confederate statues has been spreading across the country after the protests in Charlottesville, Virginia.  House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other leading Democrats have been making the removal of such statues a priority issue.  Pelosi has called for statues to be removed in the Capitol even though those statues were there when she was Speaker of the House of Representatives.  A Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll, however, has found that 54 percent of adults said Confederate monuments “should remain in all public spaces.”  Only 27 percent said they “should be removed from all public spaces” while 19 percent had no opinion.

 

donald_trump_president-elect_portrait_croppedThe poll also appears to support Trump’s view that there was blame on both sides in the violence in Charlottesville.  Some 31 percent agreed that the rally as “an even mix” of rioting and intimidation by both white supremacists and left-wing counter-protesters.  Some 28 percent blamed the white supremacists as the aggressors while 10 percent mostly blamed the left-wing counter-protesters. That means that 41 percent blame either the counter-protesters or both sides.  The remaining 32 percent had no firm position.

177 thoughts on “Poll: Majority Of Americans Oppose Removal Of Confederate Statues”

  1. A hero is a hero is a hero, even if he’s fighting for the side that wants slavery, the side that loses. Perhaps we should be putting up statues of Rommel, Werner Von Braun, Joseph McCarthy, Attila the Hun, Jim Inhofe…..

    In the end it has less to do with the Constitution, free speech, etc and more to do with the desire to shove it in the face of humanity, that one is a ‘rebel’.

    1. Charles Manson was a hero to many. Maybe it would be appropriate to have his statue gracing the public square. It’s ll in your opinion of ‘hero’.

      1. Charles Manson was a hero to many.

        No, to the collection of women in his household.

    2. issac – during the first Gulf War many of our tanks had picks of Erwin Rommel in them to remind them what a great tank officer was. In fact, Iraqi prisoners would comment on why they would have a picture of an old enemy in a place of honor in their tank.

  2. Who cares what a majority of random people think. These statues weren’t put up by majority vote. Each local town, city or state should decide what to do with them if they’re on public property. If they’re on private property the owners can decide. Baltimore’s city council and Maryland’s governor and other elected leaders decided to remove theirs from public property. That’s how democracy works.

    For myself, I know that most of those statues went up as much to demonstrate the south’s defiance to equality as to honor the war dead. They also present a false version of history in which confederates were somehow noble and honorable and the cause they fought for, just an annoying footnote.

    I am glad they are at last coming down. It shows we are maturing as a nation.

  3. I think that a stone statue of a dork in his military outfit riding a horse and the guy is holding his sword is something that glorifies war. Those who glorify the Civil War for one side or the other are war mongers.
    Mine eyes had seen the glory of the coming of the Afghan War. I expect some statues down the road but not of American generals standing up in towns in Afghanistan.

    1. Great! So everyone gets to tear down anything they believe symbolizes something they consider offensive or “inappropriate?” We’ve gone from
      paternalism controlling maternalism! Disgusting!

  4. Somebody explain to me why the American left always associates Confederate sympathizers with Nazis. Okay, I get the fact that the Confederate sympathizers often, but not always, waive swatztikas. So, I guess they deserve whatever guilt by association they receive.

    But, whey you think about it, Confederates were as much like the American socialist left of today as Nazis of Hitler’s Germany. Socialists, in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, oppress workers, do not allow freedom of labor or of movement, punish recalcitrant labor often physically, restrict freedom of speech, and tightly control all means of production. Sounds like slavery to me as it existed in the antebellum South.

    The term Nazi is short for National Socialist. So, Nazis and Socialists are basically the same, right. The Charlottsville riot was between two groups of National Socialists. Ironic? Do you think the knuckleheads involved in the affray realize that?

    1. Vince, communism in The Soviet Union was, indeed, far worse than feudalism. But it was not worse than the peculiar institution of chattel slavery. Owning human beings as private property by birth to be bequeathed to one’s heirs and bought and sold in the marketplace is nowhere near morally equivalent to the State-operated feudal system over which The Soviet Union presided–as bad and wrongful as that was. Slavery in America was still worse.

      P. S. There is no American socialist left of today.

      1. Have you read anything about cultural Marxism that has taken over so many of our institutions, especially the universities?

        1. Spengler, Adorno, Weber . . . Mopey German cracked-pots. We won that war, too, you know. David Steinberg has the skinny on those guys . . . Booga! Booga!

            1. Squeeky, neither Oswald Spengler nor Max Weber were Marxists. But they both heavily influenced Teodor Adorno who was a Marxist, a professor of cultural history at Columbia University and, therefore, the butt of David Steinberg’s Booga-Booga joke.

      2. It’s truly remarkable that you have to explain to someone that American slavery is worse than Soviet oppression.

      3. If you ask the slaves in the gold mines of Kolyma, Siberia, if their servitude was better than chattel slavery, you might get a different answer. They were literally worked to death in one of the coldest places on earth on a diet that was calculated in its inadequacy, and with no medical care worthy of the term available. You would have been hard pressed to find a Kolyma survivor to ask, even 20 years after the camps were closed, because most of the slaves died. The few that survived long enough to be released returned with their health so damaged that it affected their longevity.

        1. Oh, and knowing the MO of some of the commenters on this site, I would like to make this clear: Chattel Slavery in the American States, including slavery in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, was an evil, odious institution unacceptable to civilized people. I am glad the ‘boys in blue’ won, and that slavery was abolished forthwith. My ancestors fought on both sides.

          A little fact for the morally smug: in 1850, New Jersey had more slaves per square mile than Mississippi. My source is an old almanac which gave a summary of the U.S. Census, broken down by slave and free. Slavery did exist in several Northern states, it simply was abolished a few years sooner.

          1. Roger J what ever in the world does the density of slaves per square mile have to do with moral smugness?

        2. Roger J, were the children of the Kolyma miners born into chattel slavery? Could those children or their parents be bought and sold in the marketplace generation after generation?

      4. We are talking about a matter of both degree and kind here. The Soviet Union slaughtered 15,000,000 of its own people, some through intentional starvation, some through execution, some through exile in Siberia. True, the Politboro did not own those 15,000,000 people in the sense of having title to them. They are dead nevertheless. They were owned in the sense that others had control over their lives to the point of ending them.

        The Soviet Union enslaved tens of millions more people through occupation of Eastern Europe. Plus, the Soviet Union precipitated WWII and the Holocaust by signing the non-aggression treaty with the Nazis. Add another 50,000,000 lives to the total. The Confederacy, traitorous, misguided and evil as it was, never did any of those things. So, comparing the Soviet Union to the Nazis and/or the Confederacy is not so out of line after all.

        And, yes, there is an American socialist left. It is led by Bernie Sanders that lover of the Soviet Union.

        Sorry, but I must respectfully disagree with your assessment.

        1. According to a politician in the Norwegian Conservative Party, Bernie Sanders would fit right in.

          1. According to a politician in the Norwegian Conservative Party, Bernie Sanders would fit right in.

            Either the Norwegian Conservative Party recruits opportunists, or the politician is trolling you, or you’re recycling yet another nonsense meme.

        2. Vince, according to The Chronological History of the Negro in America, the slave trade depleted the population of Africa by 50 million [Carter G. Woodson] to 60 million [W.E.B. Du Bois] people of whom 15 million were delivered to market leaving a middle passage death toll between 35 and 45 million people. Although, the necrometrician Mathew White puts the figure at 40 million.

          Conversely, Matthew White attributes 29 million unnecessary deaths to forced collectivization and forced industrialization under the five year plans of Stalin from 1929 through 1953. White also gives a total of 89 million unnecessary deaths under all communist regimes in The Twentieth Century.

          Be advised Vince: If you think I’m apologizing for communism, then you leave me no choice but to accuse you of apologizing for slavery by the same chop logic. A pox upon all of our houses!

          1. I am definitely not accusing you of being an apologist for communists, and I am definitely not justifying slavery. Indeed, I am a capitalist and one of those (borderline) libertarians who believe in free markets AND free labor. However, many socialists and others on the American left, including Comrade Sanders, while correctly condemning slavery, fail to see the parallel between their own ideology and slavery. I try to keep the moralizing out of the picture, but, for me, freedom is the key both morally and for efficiency sake. Funny how it works out that way.

            I was merely pointing out that socialism can be and has been as deadly as slavery and as morally corrupt. The stats you express establish that point. Tens of millions of people die either way.

            1. Vince, I apologize for the misunderstanding. Orwell was right: Freedom is NOT slavery. War is NOT peace. And ignorance is NOT strength. The best way to avoid repeating the mistakes of history is to learn from them.

          2. Don’t forget that the Arab slave trade in Africa began hundreds of years before the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and continued long after the West did away with it. Black slavery is now returning to Libya after its “liberation” by Hillary. These days Muslims are presented as our moral superiors to whom we must defer.

    2. Actually, they’d be more close to libertarians or some forms of conservativism today: first, a belief in the sanctity of property rights with minimal regulation. It was Confederates who insisted in an “original intent” understanding of the Constitution that slavery had a right to expand in into the western territories and that the ability of the national government to limit slavery was very narrow and specific.
      Plus, many of the modern neo-Confederates believe that the federal government’s powers had to be tightly limited and specified.

      1. The southern states believed in Jeffersonian principles of sovereign states and a limited central government.

        1. That’s true, Roydenoral. And the reason for that belief was the peculiar institution of chattel slavery.

          1. Why do you always bring slavery up? Jefferson advocated state sovereignty and limited federal government. Hamilton advocated for an expanded federal government and limited state’s rights. This was similar to what the colonists experienced under King George III. Interesting since a war had just been fought to avoid an expanded federal government.

      2. I must respectfully disagree. Slave owners were no libertarians. Libertarians believe in free markets AND free labor. Slave owners needed a strong government to impose restrictions on movement of free blacks, to facilitate return of runaway slaves, and to put down the occasional slave revolt, all very un-libertarian.

        In addition, after emancipation, the former slave owners imposed JIm Crow laws which restricted the rights and liberties of the former slaves. Show me a libertarian that supports segregation. No, slave owners were no libertarians.

  5. Why is it that some of us get up in the morning and go to work, then come home have dinner with our families and go on with our lives. While others get up in the morning and can’t wait to irritate other people.

    1. Independent Bob, some of us are retired and, therefore, old and tired, and sore, and cranky. It’s not about irritating other people. It’s just about irritation-itself–period.

    2. IB, Close to 50% of us get a hand out from the govt. so working is optional for a great deal of Americans. The receivers of stolen property have plenty of time on their hands (or butts) and get agitated when they feel a perceived threat that their stolen handout might be taken away.

      1. IB, Close to 50% of us get a hand out from the govt.

        About 15% collect Social Security. About 15% are on the rolls of federal nutrition programs (for which the mean benefit is about $5,000 per household. About 18% of all taxpayers receive an EITC rebate (averaging north of $2,000 per year), but these overlap a great deal with SNAP beneficiaries. Housing subsidies, TANF, and UI each corral less than 4% of the population at any one time.

  6. The idea that the US allowed the installation of massive memorials to traitors has always baffled me. The south lost the war but you’d never know it. Flag waiving confederate march and whoop and not just in reenactments. Strident announcements that the war had nothing to do with slavery and every thing to do with FREEDOM make my blood boil. The written record is clear about the intentions of the southern leaders.

    Confederate flags and Nazi flags seem an apt combination. I wonder who was polled to get these results and what they actually know about when and why those statutes went up.

    As to the “blame on both sides”, the confederate/ Nazi crowd came with weapons….enough said. They were there to intimidate and terrorize. I thought we had laws against that. Did they have a permit to terrorize?

    I realize that on this thread I will no doubt be a minority view but there you have it.

    1. The southern states believed in Jeffersonian principles of sovereign states and a limited central government.

      1. Roydenoral, The Fugitive Slave Act forced U. S. Marshalls to remand fugitive slaves into the custody of State courts in The South. That’s federal power used to return “private property” to slave-owning believers in State Sovereignty and limited government. Those beliefs were obvious sarcasms.

      1. Roydenoral, the notion that The Confederate States fought to preserve the rule of law rather than the peculiar institution of chattel slavery is risible sophistry.

        1. As I have previously stated, this is an argument that will never be agreed upon. The North and the South have always been two separate nations since the founding of the colonies. However, I do hope the time might come when the 19th century in America can be discussed without so much anger.

    2. There was no violence until the antifa showed up. If any pro-statue protestors came with concealed weapons (all I saw on video were defensive shields) it’s because they knew the antifa record of violence in Chicago, Berkeley, San Jose, DC Inauguration and elsewhere. The initiation of violence seems to the sole purpose of antifa.

      There were “open carry” leftists (Redneck Revolt) carrying assault weapons and “Three Percenter” self-styled constitutional patriots who did the same and are conventionally anti-racist and came as neutral obervers.

      Here is a video produced by the latter group:

      :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLA4lEtmH2A&t=442s

  7. The Supreme Court overturned The Voting Rights Act of 1965. It’s entirely possible that The Supreme Court could soon enough overturn The Civil Rights Act of 1964. There are, therefore, alternative explanations for the movement to remove Confederate statues besides the current paranoia about paid agitators attempting to stage a slow-as-molassess coup against The Trump Administration: namely, fear of national atavism.

    1. In what case did the Supreme Court overturn the Voting Rights Act of 1965? Name of case and year?

        1. F. P. Shelby County Alabama v. Holder, Attorney General, et al. Decided June 25th 2013.

          The decision invalidated Section 4 of The Voting Rights Act of 1965. Without Section 4, the federal government has no way to enforce Section 5 of The Voting Rights Act of 1965.

  8. The people who should decide whether the statues stay or go are the people who live in the cities and towns where these statues are standing.

  9. This has nothing to do with social justice and everything to do with whipping the Democratic base into a frenzy.
    Nancy Pelosi was Speaker in 2009, the Democrats had a filibuster proof Senate. Nothing was done. Ask yourself why?

    1. t1317 asks us to ask ourselves why our elected political leaders will not lead us until we whip them into frenzy that they then follow?

      Wait a second . . . That’s one of those questions that answers itself; isn’t it? Fine then; never mind.

  10. Do any of you really think that these political fires lit by leftists (along with their hired Antifa and BLM) will be satisfied with the consuming of every Confederate statue? Do you really think these fires will be satisfied with consuming every statue deemed offensive to BLM/Antifa (eg Rizzo)? Do you really think this is the right time for advancing such leftist driven turmoil? It seems to me that these fires won’t be satisfied until they consume a duly elected sitting president before he can make another ‘Gorsuch’ pick on the SC – one more ‘Gorsuch’ and the Constitution may have breathing room – and these leftist fires are meant to suffocate that possibility. So, please stop throwing gas onto the fire – no matter how noble the fire may look to you at the moment. You may just get severely burnt.

    1. Jacques asks us to ask ourselves why the duly elected sitting president is openly tolerating the political expression of paid agitators who will not be sated till their fires consume that president who refuses to extinguish their fires?

      Admittedly, that is not a question that answers itself; is it? Perhaps the sitting president needs one more Gorsuch before he can extinguish the left and save our Constitutional Republic. Or not. What does Jacques think?

    2. Exactly correct Jacques. There was pressure for Ginsburg to resign while O was still in office – she resisted and I wonder why. They must be furious with her, right? Of course, their efforts removing Trump will fail and he will replace another Justice, and maybe even another after that. I think we are good. However, one wonders if under her robe she is on some sort of life support machine ………

    3. Don’t hide behind “breathing room” for the Constitution. Just admit you’re a cave-dwelling troglodyte who wants women to be put back into their place where they are controlled by men and at the mercy of their reproductive system; just like back in the “good ole days.” Amirite?

      This is to “what’s wrong with back-alley abortions” jacqui

      1. Funny you should mention abortion. I see this current day tizzy fit repeating itself 25/50/75 years from now on the issue of abortion. I have always wondered how historians will describe, to a future citizenry, the chapter in this Nation where women were convinced to kill their own pre-born children, and a law was passed to support it. This too will have to be explained in the context of the Democrat Party.

        I guess everyone will be judged out of the context of the times in which they lived. I’m sure the pro-abortion group of today will want both sides of the story memorialized in the future. Otherwise, historically, they are going to suck really bad.

        1. So, INlegaleagle you envision your remote descendants agitating for the removal Abortion-doctor statues that will erected by someone (we know not who) someday (we know not when) to commemorate something (we know not what).

          Phantasms, INlegaleagle. Phantasms.

          1. Diane, your admission that you are a “life long Democrat” may explain your irritation with the world around you. Attaching yourself blindly to a political party for a lifetime ? Inexcusable for any American. In retirement, maybe work to detach yourself from mindlessly identifying with a ‘political party’ and try a little independent free thinking instead. You will be a better, less irritated, person for it.

            1. I’m glad to read that you’re still open to the possibility of voting for Democratic candidates.

              1. See? These are the things you will learn once you crack open your mind and cut the cord from ideology to candidate. Making progress already! Old dog – new tricks. Proud of you, Diane.

                1. INlegaleagle, you condemned the Democratic party as pro-abortion while professing to be open to the possibility of voting for candidates from the party you condemn as pro-abortion. If that’s an example of independent free thinking, then I must conclude that you’ve not yet learned the difference between independent free thinking versus all-too-obvious sarcasm.

    4. Excellent point. It is about advancing cultural Marxism, not the Confederacy.

          1. Roydenoral, given that cultural Marxism is meaningless bloviation, and if what’s going on in the universities today is cultural Marxism, then what’s going on in the universities today is meaningless bloviation. In which case I would have to wonder how, exactly, such intellectual vacuity poses a threat to our Constitutional Republic.

              1. Roydenoral, criticism is the only permissible remedy for hateful speech. But one has actually to engage in such criticism. When the speech at issue is hateful, the criticism must be harsh and negative. If the hateful speakers interpret such harsh, negative criticism as an attack on free speech, then those hateful speakers must be seeking an immunity from criticism. Were such an immunity from criticism ever granted, there would remain no permissible remedy for hateful speech–but only impermissible remedies. We ought not to leave one another with nothing else but impermissible remedies, Roydenoral.

                  1. Roydenoral – only the left may determine which speech is hateful. They are all knowing.

                    1. Paul, that’s not true; and you know it. None of the harsh, negative criticisms leveled against the left on this or any other blog make any sense on theory that only the left determines what speech is hateful.

        1. Not any more than other phrases, such as “fascism” – – – which nobody seems able to define. Or “white supremacists”, of whom I have never met a one. I have met whites who think American blacks, as a group, are culturally dysfunctional to the point of inferiority. Which seems a reasonable enough conclusion to me, and oddly, one shared by most white Liberals and SJWs, who for example, find it an article of faith that significant numbers of black people can not obtain photo IDs. And that the use of birth control methods is simply beyond the black females’ mental capacity and abilities, and thus the 72% illegitimate black birth rate is excusable.

          I guess there are some Aryan Nation types, but I have never personally met any.

          Squeeky Fromm
          Girl Reporter

          1. Squeeky, fascism was best defined by Benito Mussolini who coined the term. It is the theory that a Nation-state should function in the manner of an organism with a head, a body and limbs; such that the limbs and the body must be made to do the bidding of the head–or else the head shall cut them off for their own good.

            1. In other words, the government has all the power and can do anything. Which would apply to Cuba, and Stalin, and Maduro, and Mao, and even the current manifestations of some of these. I will go with Orwell:

              It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

              Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

              But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.

              http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc

              Which all begs this question: If there is no acceptable definition of Fascism, then what exactly is Antifa “anti” of???

              Squeeky Fromm
              Girl Reporter

              1. Squeeky, thanks for an excellent post. Orwell’s objection is centered on the way the terms fascism or fascist were used in ordinary language. Similar arguments have been made about the way the terms socialism and socialist are used in ordinary language. Arguably Orwell’s grappling and wrangling with the words had a hand in the coining of the terms totalitarian and totalitarianism.

                And that is, in fact, how Mussolini defined fascism when he coined that term. The observation that Mussolini’s definition of fascism applies equally well to Stalinism and Maoism and any other totalitarian regime is both true and inadequate to the task of nullifying Mussolini’s definition of fascism.

  11. Recently in the Ukraine a great many statues of the greats of Communism have been toppled. They have more cause but the pain in the United States is still there.

    I have no answer, but did suggest pairing statues of Union leaders with the others already there. The problem is that some of the Union generals went on to commit atrocities against the Amerindians, some of whom are among my ancestors.

    History.

    1. David, sorry to pester you again, but . . . were some your ancestors Native Americans or Union Generals who committed atrocities against the former–or both? That truly would be owning one’s history.

      1. First Americans. As far as I know none of my ancestors from Maine rose to the rank of general.

    1. Paul, I’m a lifelong Democrat; and my official position is that the removal of Confederate statues is not my battle to fight. I lack standing on the issue. But I don’t think it’s silly either.

      We need a new Jeremiad, Paul. Down by the riverside, down by the riverside. Lay down our swords and shields. And study war no more.

      1. Diane – in your lifetime when was any time there wasn’t war? Not studying warfare means we will not be ready for the next one.

        1. Paul, there has not been an absence of war in my lifetime. However, there has been an absence of civil war in America throughout my lifetime; and the verb, to study, used to be used as a synonym for the verbs, to plot, to plan, to intend and so on. That’s the part I’m getting at, Paul. Let’s not go back there, please.

          1. Diane – every four years there is a revolution, sometimes more peaceful than others.

            1. Diane’s tribe only allows for peaceful revolutions when her folks win.

  12. I am a southern white 61 year old male who thinks that statues to these men should be taken down and destroyed. My reason is simple, these men were all guilty of treason and wanted slavery to be the law of the land. They should all still have their stories told in the history books so that what they did is not forgotten.

    1. You’re entitled to your opinion, no matter how silly it is. But the question is, does a minority of people have the right to violently tear down the statues???

      Because isn’t taking the law into your own hands kind of what the South did, if one assumes that secession was illegal?

      And as far as being treason, let’s look at today! If the Syrian rebels topple Assad, are they traitors? What if Assad topples them, are they traitors? I think that is a fair question to ask!

      Squeeky Fromm
      Girl Reporter

        1. David, history is written by “many sides.” There are “excellent histories” on “both sides.”

            1. David Benson – there are three good ancient biographies of Hannibal. Although they are written by Romans, they are considered fairly accurate.

      1. Ms.? Fromm –

        Assad is the democratically elected president of Syria. Most of the “rebels” are sponsored by the U.S. and Israel. Do you also call the terrorists operating in Europe and elsewhere “rebels”?

        1. Assad is the democratically elected president of Syria.

          We can all taste the crazy.

    2. Over 1/2 the signers of The Declaration of Independence were slave owners.
      Should that be taken out of the history books? Removed from the Capitol?
      Burned? – northern white female,61.

    1. David, your posts keep getting bumped out of context. This heightens the Bedlam effect in the common room.

      May I presume that issue which you deem to be certainly unimportant is the question of whether Syrian rebels commit treason against the Assad regime?

      If so, then consider the possibility for an analogy between Syrian rebels and Confederate rebels on the one side versus Bashir al Assad and Abraham Lincoln on the other side.

      While I would roundly reject such an analogy, I can imagine many more here besides Squeeky who would accept it–at least with respect to amnesty versus conviction and execution on charges of treason.

    2. I was referring to the whole statue issue. It is of no import. That the atmosphere has a large excess of carbon dioxide is of great import.

  13. I read a book about The Gettysburg Address recently (can’t remember title or author) that implied General Lee had not followed the advice of one of his Generals, who insisted Lee’s plan would fail. And it did. Might Lee have chosen his plan in order to shorten the war. Most Generals were graduates of West Point and fighting against each other was anathema.

    1. Hail him a hero he surrendured! A northerner decides to fight for the south and srrenders it…and they wanna tear it down?

      1. jae . . . You cannot be serious. The notion that Robert E. Lee was somehow a Union mole who infiltrated The Confederacy for the sake of capitulation to The Union is far too twisted even for you, jae.

    2. My father had a set of civil war books written by people from that time. He gave me one to read by a General Gordon, who later went on to be a general for the British also. He died in Egypt and was aka Gordon of Karthoum. Anyway, it was a really good book. It had a great writing style.

      Squeeky Fromm
      Girl Reporter

        1. David Benson – That Gordon was always British and graduated from British military schools. He had a reputation in his later life for putting down rebellions, which is what finally got him killed. He was never part of the American Army.

  14. Another Democrat idea to waste money. These are a part of our history. It usually comes to mind when coming upon such a memorial. Leave them where they are so we never forget.

  15. Don’t get why their asses aren’t in jail for destroying federal or city property, damn none of us would ever get away with this crap. Who the hell is running the country, them. None of these loser politicians has the ⚽️​🏀​🏈​⚾️​🎾​🏐​🏉​🎱​ to do anything about it, these are the leaders who can’t even frigging lead. I hope they all get voted the hell out.

  16. A balance, as others have suggested. If these must be generals, then pair the statues, one from each side.

    1. The only people bothered by this crap are people who want to be bothered. Sheeesh, Robert Byrd was a Kluxer, and Bill Clinton had a Rhodes scholarship from a guy who colonized Rhodesia!

      Know how much any of that bothers me, if they have a building named after them??? Not at all. I have more important things to worry about, such as my cats, and the outside birds, and the little possums and raccoons, and the one little rat, who come to eat off my porch.

      Do you realize that I am the one person on Earth who is keeping the forces of evil at some sort of bay? I have been reliably informed that the positive karma force from those coons and possums and birds I feed is the exact little bit that permits good to overcome evil in the whole dang Universe! Kind of like the miniscule amount of matter that was more than the anti-matter from the Big Bang. If there even was a Big Bang.

      And you want me to worry about statues of people dead for 150 years or so.

      Balderdash and tommyrot!

      Squeeky Fromm
      Girl Reporter

      1. And Obama’s white ancestors owned slaves. As good a reason as any to never to erect a statue of him.

        1. Let’s absolutely erect a statue of him……a bronze empty suit. No plaque necessary as
          everyone will know who it is.

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