Free Republic

The City of San Francisco, where Vice President Kamala Harris started her political career, is set to evaluate roughly 100 monuments to determine whether they should be removed or replaced. The San Francisco Chronicle reported: San Francisco is about to embark on evaluating its nearly 100 statues and monuments to figure out which ones no longer represent the city’s values and should be removed from view, relocated or re-interpreted with explanatory plaques. The debate over the city’s monuments began in 2018 with the removal of the “Early Days” sculpture from the Pioneer Monument in the Civic Center because it represented...

<p>NEW ORLEANS (AP) — At a time of intense scrutiny in America over who is commemorated in public parks or in front of courthouses, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundationannounced Monday it is spending $250 million over five years to build new monuments or memorials, add context to already existing ones and relocate others.</p>

This coming week, the University of Houston will be displaying the sculpture “Witness,” a massive (18 feet by 13 feet by 13 feet) nude woman with braids shaped like rams’ horns, tentacles for arms, and a large hoop skirt marked with Arabic writing in stained glass. Although the description on the UH website claims, “The large-scale sculpture Witness (2023) is a grand allegorical female figure that allows for multiple meanings and possibilities,” the group Texas Right to Life has deemed it “satanic imagery to honor abortion and memorialize the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” For her part, the...

Last week I wrote about the concerns of a pair of North Korea analysts that something had changed in the tone of the rhetoric emanating from Kim Jong Un. Of course North Korea has a long history of belligerent talk and threats against the US but something about this seemed different and more urgent. Kim said he was giving up on reunification with South Korea. Instead, South Korea would now be considered the North’s top enemy.But it’s more than just empty rhetoric. Sometime over the past few days Kim ordered a monument meant to symbolize hope for reunification torn down.Kim...

The transgender daughter of House Minority Whip Katherine Clark, D-Mass, was sentenced to just one year of probation Wednesday after reaching a deal with a Boston court concerning a number of charges she faced stemming from her role in a violent protest in January. Riley Dowell was arrested by Boston police during the protest after allegedly spray-painting a monument and assaulting a police officer. She was ultimately charged with assault and battery on a police officer, vandalizing property, tagging property, vandalizing a historic marker/monument, and resisting arrest. According to local Fox affiliate WFXT, Dowell, who was 23 at the time...

Confederate monuments and others would be protected from removal, defacement and historical contextualization. Legislation in the House and the Senate would protect monuments of war from not just defacement and removal, but attempts to offer historical context. The “Historical Monuments and Memorials Protection Act” (HB 1607) was filed in the House by Rep. Dean Black, a Jacksonville Republican. It is the House companion to SB 1096, filed last month by Sen. Jonathan Martin, a Republican from Fort Myers. “We must defend and learn from our history,” Black told Florida Politics Tuesday. This includes protecting historic monuments across the state of...

The names, below, are a few of the 375,000 Confederate soldiers about whom Union soldier and president of the United States, William McKinley, said: . . . every soldier’s grave made during our unfortunate civil war is a tribute to American valor . . . And the time has now come . . . when in the spirit of fraternity we should share in the care of the graves of the Confederate soldiers . . . The cordial feeling now happily existing between the North and South prompts this gracious act and if it needed further justification it is found...

It doesn’t matter who is buried, digging up the dead body of anyone laid to rest (besides forensic investigators cracking a cold case) is extremely disrespectful. Richmond, Virginia Democrat Mayor LeVar Stoney ordered a grounds crew to dig up the decomposed body of Confederate General AP Hill. The move by Stoney comes a day after General AP Hill’s statue was taken down and due to his statue being used as a tombstone, his body was removed the very next day.

The Moscow-installed authorities of the port city of Mariupol, which fell to Russian forces after a devastating siege earlier in the year, took down a monument to Ukrainian victims of Stalin's famine on Wednesday. Kyiv has been calling the 1930s man-made hunger under Josef Stalin a "genocide," while Moscow has been downplaying it as an episode of famine all over the Soviet Union. The state-run RIA Novosti news agency published a video of a truck uprooting the monument in Mariupol. "We are not taking out a memorial, we are getting rid of a symbol of the political disinformation of the...

The Estonian government wants to ban the memory of the Soviet past from public life. Riots and Russian cyber attacks cannot be ruled out. At the center of the controversy is an old tank. Lenin got it: his statue still stands in Estonia’s third-largest city, Narva, but it was moved to a secluded, walled-in corner in the courtyard in the 1990s. In the summer, the Russian revolutionary leader was surrounded by an ugly construction site fence. If the Estonian government under Prime Minister Kaja Kallas has its way, all Soviet monuments in the small Baltic state should disappear from public...

A VISIT TO MYSTERIOUS MONUMENTS IN GEORGIA BRINGS STRANGE FEELINGS, STRANGER HISTORY We have to admit there's an unnerving sensation at those monoliths known as the "Georgia Guidestones." We visited them on Monday, and while at first they seemed innocuous (plus, at first glance, smaller perhaps than one might expect), an oppressive atmosphere soon enough envelopes one the longer one lingers surveyinging these stones that aren't so small or undaunting once one is at the base (and in the shadow) of them. Widely described as the most mysterious monuments in the United States, or as "America's Stonehenge," the guidestones were...

Ever since the craze of trying to erase the nation’s history by tearing down monuments that some people find offensive got started, there have been repeated demands to “do something” about Stone Mountain Confederate monument in Georgia. Unlike some of the typical statues that cities erect that can be dragged down during a riot with some ropes and chains, however, this one isn’t so easy for protesters to tackle. For one thing, it’s gigantic. It takes up three acres of space and it’s literally carved into the side of a mountain, as the name suggests. It depicts Jefferson Davis, Robert...

President Joe Biden has revoked a string of proclamations by Donald Trump, including an order to punish vandals who destroy monuments. Mr Trump issued the order amid last year's social justice protests as statues were being defaced or toppled. Mr Biden also rescinded Mr Trump's plans for a sculpture garden to honour American heroes. And he canned a 2019 proclamation that sought to bar entry to immigrants who could not afford health insurance. Mr Trump issued an order in June 2020 instructing the federal government "to prosecute to the fullest extent" any person "that destroys, damages, vandalizes, or desecrates a...

From a tourist destination and business oasis that once attracted some of the richest people in the world and gave visitors the illusion of glitz and glamour to a shithole overrun by gangs, degenerate drug addicts, disease-ridden bums, and people bent on destroying our city, Las Vegas now looks more like a third-world country than a place to put on your travel bucket list. Today, you can’t walk the Las Vegas strip without being bombarded by signs telling you to mask up and bizarre recordings telling people to maintain their social distance. But the so-called pandemic is the least of...

A committee reporting to D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) recommends removing the monuments, statues, and inscriptions honoring America's founders and heroes "whose connections to slavery and oppression render them unfit to be mentioned in the nation's capital." The so-called "rogues gallery" includes George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, Woodrow Wilson; Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Graham Bell, and Francis Scott Key. Committee members Bowser advisor Beverly Perry and public library director Richard Reyes-Gavilan asserted that "we believe strongly that all District of Columbia public spaces, facilities and commemorative works should only honor those...

A task force commissioned by the Washington, D.C., government has recommended renaming, relocating or adding context to dozens of monuments, schools, parks and buildings because of their namesakes' participation in slavery or racial oppression. Among the targets are the Washington Monument and Jefferson Memorial. Some of the proposals in the report released Tuesday are definite non-starters, as many of the most prominent monuments and statues stand on federal land, outside D.C. government control. Still, the recommendations have already prompted fierce reactions amid an ongoing national debate over America’s racial history. “As long as President Trump is in the White House,...

The Editor I am not a Southern Partisan (even though I hail from southern Minnesota, the tropical part) nor am I a political partisan having renounced party affiliation in 1988, so I have no particular dog in the fight over historical monuments. That said, I discern some unfortunate (and I hope inadvertent) parallels between the anti-historicists of our current time and numerous misanthropic regimes of the past. In this matter I draw on the wisdom of philosopher George Santayana, who famously said, “Those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat its mistakes.” This debate is not about the “offensiveness”...

My great-great grandfather was a hero of the Civil War--a soldier of the Ohio Cavalry who was wounded and captured. He almost died in the most notorious and horrific Confederate prisoner of war camp. As a child, each Memorial Day, I heard the stories about the War Between the States as my dad put flowers on his great granddad’s grave. The stories were not told with animosity. Just facts. But I developed my own prejudice against Southerners based on those facts.As time went on, I delved into study about the horrors of slavery and spent a great deal of time...

The teardowns get all the attention, Walter “Donnie” Kennedy grumbles. Every time a local government votes to remove a century-old Confederate war monument, every time activists swing ropes around statues and yank them to the ground, “our enemies claim victory again,” said Kennedy, the chief of heritage operations for the Sons of Confederate Veterans. “We know America doesn’t agree with us - heck, they fought a war against us - but we’re going to tell our story.” Their membership might be dwindling, and their popular support seems to shrink by the day, but the guardians of America’s 700-plus Confederate monuments...

he promise of bloodshed coming alongside or following shortly after is an historic certainty. The symbols of a people never satisfy: People themselves must always come next. WASHINGTON, DC — For millennia, King Mob has targeted societies’ icons with varied goals and to varied ends, and few things are more foreboding than his desecration of civic art. Just as the targets have ranged from rulers to clergy, from tyrants to helpless, and from the guilty to the innocent, the outcomes have ranged from victory to defeat depending on the society’s strength and will. The promise of bloodshed coming alongside or...