I am absolutely baffled by some conservatives’ support of confederate flags/statues. We have a flag. We don’t fly Tory Loyalist flags. We don’t fight over statues of Benedict Arnold or King George. It is extremely difficult to come to an objective opinion that support for that crap is not racist.
You would have to be a native of the former Confederate states to understand. A union held together by main force really isn’t much of a union....
In Bamiyan Afghanistan there were two Buddha statues carved into a mountain. Why did the western world, which isn’t exactly chock full of Buddhists, object to the Taliban’s destruction of those statues when there haven’t been even Afghan Buddhists in that area in living memory? Why did anyone go through the trouble of trying to restore them?
Because it’s part of the story of mankind.
Why do western archaeologists weep over the loss of Babylonian cultural artifacts when Babylon was notorious for its religious sacrifice of infants - placing them on a bronze basin under which was kindled a fire to cook to death? Because it’s part of the story of mankind.
Why do historians express sadness over the razing and plowing over of Mississippian temple and burial mounds, most in cities that were long empty before Columbus even arrived... when the people who built the mounds practiced human sacrifice and weeping wives and relatives of chiefs were strangled to go with them into the afterlife? Because it’s part of the story of mankind.
In St Louis there’s a statue of French King Louis IX of France. He was a reformer who banned trial by ordeal and introduced the concept of presumption of innocence.
But he was also a crusader.
Now picture this: in the interest of racial and religious harmony, some leftwing nut group linked with muslim activists decides it’s time to pull down Crusader King Louis IX’s rather handsome equestrian statue, rather than just keep stealing his sword, which is what dingbats usually do to it, and leave a vandalized empty pedestal there on which they might or might not propose to erect some abomination of their own?
Should we shrug our shoulders and just allow offended people to destroy anything they find offensive?
What if a bunch of offended Chicago communists [also known as Chicago Democrats] decide that Stan the Ma Musial’s statue offends them whenever Cubs fans visit St Louis and demand it too be hauled down?
It sounds ridiculous, but then ten years ago if anyone suggested local governments would allow mobs of communists to destroy community works of art, or we’d end up with a senate intel committee permitting a Pakistani money laundering ring to operate freely in the capitol, or our military would be buying sex change operations for mental cases... who would have believed it?
There are people alive today whose near ancestors died in that war. It’s close enough in history to have very real meaning and impact upon families - I heard second-hand family stories about it myself, when I was small.