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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

Are they also going to go through all kinds of expressions of art and looking for unacceptable views in their libraries?

Movie catalogues, books and destroy them too? We used to make fun of authoritarian regimes and how they were week for trying to stamp out art and thought they didn’t like, but it’s like we’ve become them.

I’m a bit surprised they haven’t revived Gore’s PMRC to ensure music lyrics represent correct orthodoxy.

I mean, I can understand renaming streets. Streets are renamed for various reasons, and some commemorate dubious people, but the street remains. I wonder...

...Will one day all the Mission cities get renamed because they were named by Evangelizing Spanish Missionaries. Is that where we’re headed? We can name them after tribes or chiefs, perhaps. I propose Ohlone for San Francisco.

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> Mission cities...

Last week:

"In partnership with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, UC Santa Cruz will be removing the mission bell that is located on campus. The bell was originally donated to the campus by a local women’s club many years ago ..."

"Mission bells, which were installed across the state to memorialize the California Missions, are viewed by many populations as a symbol of racism and dehumanization of their ancestors."

https://news.ucsc.edu/2019/06/mission-bell.html

Yes. This has been going on for a while. There were several civil war statues of various generals that have been pulled down because of their politics at the time.

They tried to do the same to the Statue of Cecil Roads which I believe is in Oxford University.

There is also ideas of "Colonial Science" or "White Science" which reminds me of movement of removing "Jewish" Science and Mathematics in preference to "Aryan Science" before World War II.

The civil war generals thing is different. Traitors should not be honored, and the honor was put in place reinforce the ideals and make it clear that those ideals still ruled. That is, black people need to know their place.

If someone wants to put up a statue of a confederate private soldier, who was kept poor by the exploitation of slaves in a feudal system, and answered the call and sacrificed anyway, that’s also different. And would say more about southern culture than the worship of Lee or a monster like Forrest.

The content of your politics doesn’t change whether folks are assholes or not. People pushing for eliminating challenging art are feeding their ego first.

> Traitors should not be honored

And that's precisely why those generals were being honored; to proactively show that, despite them being on the losing side, we would not be regarding them as traitors! This kind of thing used to be seen as an important part of peacefully reabsorbing and reconciling the South with the rest of the nation. It strikes me as incredibly foolish to renege on this deal today even as cultural divides within the country are widening to the point where they might essentially split it apart all over again. (Not on racial or ethnic lines however, but, loosely speaking, on ones pitting "elite intellectualism" against the "common man's good sense". And I say this while fully acknowledging that the latter is at least as flawed as the former.)

> ...the ideals... That is, black people need to know their place.

Not so. The Civil War was indeed "about" slavery in many ways, but the "confederate private soldier, who was kept poor by the exploitation of slaves in a feudal system, and answered the call and sacrificed anyway" you mention above would be able to tell you plenty of reasons why he was going to fight the Yankees with full conviction no matter what.

Slavery and "keeping black people in their place" were important to the opportunistic elite of the South; but in the common man's view, what was being threatened to the point of wholly justifying their sacrifice was their culture and way of life. And this viewpoint is still one way that the war is understood in many parts of the South.

> This kind of thing used to be seen as an important part of peacefully reabsorbing and reconciling the South with the rest of the nation. It strikes me as incredibly foolish to renege on this deal today ....

Except the South reneged on the deal almost as soon as the war ended, violently suppressing and oppressing the formerly-enslaved.

The Reconstruction was badly bungled on both sides. Many Southerners even today object far more to what happened to the South "as soon as the war ended"[1], than to the war itself. This is not a justification of Jim Crow and the like of course, but an account of how the folks in the South who wished to "violently suppress and oppress the formerly-enslaved" for their own benefit managed to get away with it, despite having just lost a war with the North over that very issue.

[1] Well, not quite; the "Radical Reconstruction" was a bit of a later development. But then, the truly nasty politics on the other side, with a "Redeemer" movement working together with violent, paramilitary organizations (including the 1st 'Klan') to ensure that white Southern democrats would dominate the South and impose overt white supremacy, was itself enabled and triggered by a backlash to the Radical Reconstruction.

Bollocks.

Many of them were put up in the 60s, as a reaction to the civil rights era. Most of them were put up in the 1910s, for similar reasons.

https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2017/08/18/southern-poverty...

They were erected to rewrite the history exactly as you are presenting it.

While what was going on in the 1960s is indeed suspicious (though it was very obviously a time of political upheaval in the South as a whole, and this may have very well been what was being "reacted" to, more than civil rights themselves!), the 1910s was well within living memory of the war itself as well as the rather problematic "Radical Reconstruction" era. What's more interesting in the chart you link to is the way the monuments drop sharply in the 1970s and especially the 1980s, precisely as the "New South" starts really taking off. Not exactly consistent with the common viewpoint that "politics in the South didn't really change in that time frame, they were always dominated by racism and white supremacy"!

I respect your perspective, but the underlying assumption is heritage for white southerners. It’s a dangerous thing to honor.

The 1910s were also within living memory of people who were born as chattel, property of someone else. What did the heroic statue of Forrest mean to them? This was put up with because the political machinery of the south was incredibly powerful, and northerners, particularly immigrants weren’t exactly woke to the troubles of former slaves either.

The new South era was unique in many ways, including the end of open racial oppression and blacks voting in numbers. LBJ broke the back of the solid south for a few years.

> but the underlying assumption is heritage for white southerners. It’s a dangerous thing to honor.

Actually, I've consistently been trying to make the point that the things being honored in this way do NOT include slavery itself. Yes, it's a weird point of view which involves a whole lot of willful cognitive dissonance on the part of those white southerners who celebrate their heritage today. Yes, it is entirely fair to criticize it on that basis. But it's not any more inherently weird than celebrating Washington despite him being a slaveowner, or celebrating the U.S. itself even though its expansion was accomplished by killing Natives. It's just not fair to be in denial about these nuances, and insist that "Southerners who respect their own heritage are celebrating slavery" in a way that others are not. (Note that one can fairly object to the Confederate flag on other grounds - it has always been an overt symbol of illegal secession, and a secession that was explicitly motivated by slavery - that don't quite apply to the statues of defeated generals.)

> What did the heroic statue of Forrest mean to them?

I'm sure that they had plenty of other things to worry about. And that, by and large, they wouldn't have wanted a South that failed altogether to reconcile with the North. Failed reconciliation after a defeat in war can be very dangerous - and if the "Redeemers" were willing to use paramilitary violence in our timeline as a reaction to a comparatively mild "Radical Reconstruction", can we even imagine how Southerners would have reacted to extreme levels of festering resentment? It would have gotten quite ugly, to say the least.

You should wonder why did ACW did not degenerate into slaughterhouse like Russian or Chinese civil wars..

A lot of people now dream about such a thing, they have not perhaps read what that actually means. US let South get away with this crap because it WAS beaten and peace and unity of the country was worth a lot more.

The “traitors” things is somewhat silly, since even men who served with them Before the war did not consider them such. Most considered their state to supersede the union that is all. If Virginia did not secede Lee would have been happily helping Union put down rest of the states.

Lincoln movie has a great moment at the end of president talking to Grant, they were wise men and luckily for all involved did not turn the aftermath of the war into bloodbath that would span decades and turn US into police state.

> US let South get away with this crap because it WAS beaten and peace and unity of the country was worth a lot more.

To be clear about it, the US let the South get away with plenty of terrible things that they shouldn't have. But yes, the monuments thing that people are objecting to nowadays was a lot milder and more positive in its goals than many people assume. The reality is that at some point, by all appearances, many people in the North did not so much care about the plight of the formerly-enslaved; they mostly wanted to punish the South, no matter how counterproductive this would have been. The 'Radical Reconstruction' was in no small part a result of this attitude, and had the North objected to the Confederate monuments, this too would've been seen as such.

It's interesting to note that Lincoln himself did not make this mistake; it may be fair to blame the comparative chaos following his assassination by a radical slavery supporter (which, it should be noted, was immediately condemned in no uncertain terms by the saner voices in the Southern states, including Lee himself) for the sudden change in attitudes. At the very least, the fact that Andrew Johnson, a Democrat, was thereafter made President (leaving him free to sabotage even that remarkably mild approach to Reconstruction, and to antagonize Congress over the issue to a perhaps unprecedented extent) did not exactly help matters.

It's so easy to forget that authoritarianism is often not brought on against a people, but through their very support. The book burnings of the past were not the product of an unpopular government forcibly purging 'inconveniences'. Burnings were joyous events where people celebrated 'purifying' themselves and their culture by removal of newly unacceptable influences.

"No to decadence and moral corruption! Yes to decency and morality in family and state! I consign [these books] to the flames..." That was spoken by Joseph Goebbels to raucous applause in a crowd of tens of thousands as they celebrated the new and improved morality of the German State, in 1933.

In America we've started down the exact same path, but people accept it because think they believe that banning and burning flags, destroying statues, banning books (see: e.g. Mark Twain), and now destroying art are part of some grand effort to bring about a new morality and new vision for the nation. Instead we just continue down paths that have been tread many a time before yet ever refusing to consider the parallels because, after all, this time it will be different.

> Are they also going to go through all kinds of expressions of art and looking for unacceptable views in their libraries?

Good grief. It's not a library, it's a mural. This isn't an archive of historically important but plausibly controversial artwork being purged for thought crimes, it's a fucking school wall. Kids and staff have to walk by this thing every day. And there's a dead indian on it front and center, and a bunch of slaves working in a field. It's... it's just not appropriate artwork for a public space.

And all this hand wringing is completely insincere anyway. If some random school in Arkansas had decided to repaint a mural with similar content, no one would care. But this is San Francisco, so of course Bari Weiss gets to write about it int The Times and pretend it's some kind of liberal disease.

School kids have to walk by a mural depecting the sometimes ugly history of their country? So what?

So... maybe their school district should feel free replace the ugly history with some more acceptable public artwork without a bunch of internet conservatives freaking out about it?

I mean, it's not like they don't teach the history of slavery or indigenous peoples in California schools. They don't need to celebrate it on the corridor walls if they don't want to, do they?

The artist was a communist. Do you really think he was celebrating slavery?

Does it matter? Do you really argue that no one could possibly be offended by this 40 foot long painting of a literally larger than life dead native american?

Let. Them. Decorate. Their. School. Why must everything be a moral lesson with you people? You don't apply that level of finger wagging to anyone else, but Good God if liberals do something then it must be evil.

How could you say it doesn't matter if the artist opposes or supports slavery?

Because the question isn't what the art means! It's whether or not the San Francisco school district and its community should be free to choose what kind of artwork to decorate their school with without knee-jerk conservatives like Bari Weiss and "darkpuma" freaking out about it as it it were censorship.

It's their school, not yours. Why do you think you should get veto power over what they are allowed to change and what they must keep? And why on earth, of all things, do you think they should be required to keep this thing?

We know it is censorship because they're spending $600k to ensure they totally destroy it forever.

If it were merely about choosing what kind of art to show on the wall, they could simply paint over it for $1k.

That's $599,000 that could be used to pay teachers instead being spent to ensure this mural is never seen again.

> "Because the question isn't what the art means!"

Of course it is. You've got a bunch of hysterical people saying the mural is in support of slavery and genocide. How can you say that the meaning of the art isn't relevant? The beliefs the mob have about the meaning of the mural are central to the story, you cannot abstract them away.

Would you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? and violating the site guidelines? For example, the guidelines include: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." The comment I'm replying to here broke that, as have others you posted, such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20299823 from yesterday.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Fair enough, I'll delete the responses here. To be fair, though, we both know that the linked editorial is a deliberate exercise in insincere outrage. Demanding that one side assume good faith while the other is allowed to feign as much outrage as it wants because their media feeds the narrative isn't a good path to clean discussion either.

With no one to challenge the framing (which, yes, includes accusing people of being conservatives) topics like this become echo chambers. I don't want that, and am willing to tolerate some flamage as the price.

But yeah, it's not my forum. Like I said I'll delete the responses here.

Thanks for the reply. It's quite possible to express your points thoughtfully rather than flamingly, and then there wouldn't be any problem at all.

It's not my forum either! We're just trying to preserve it.

We're do our best to demand good faith equally from everyone, or rather to cajole them into it. Outrage—feigned or otherwise—seems pretty evenly distributed as far as I can tell.

It's not just any artwork, it's a piece of WPA art by an independently-notable artist. Yes, it's ugly (if only in the way it freely uses stereotypes that are considered at least somewhat offensive today). But so what. The school district can cover it in a non-destructive way if they don't want the schoolkids exposed to it, but destroying the work altogether would be out of question in a sane world.

This is basically the same argument that southern right-wingers use to defend keeping their confederate statues, but oddly enough many internet commenters seem to have no problems with ripping down those pieces of art since they represented something they didn't like.

I'm not accusing you (mc32) of being hypocritical since I haven't seen you make any comments saying that we should rip out old confederate statues because they represent slavery.

However, (let me reiterate that this isn't an attack on you, mc32), I think we as a collective internet need to rethink how we feel about removing artwork if it represents something bad. It is not okay for us to be okay with ripping out some untasteful art but not others, simply because some bad art is "left" and other bad art is "right."

Before you go jumping on me about how slavery is different than communism, remember that communism is responsible for nearly a hundred million deaths, which puts it near the level of slavery in terms of harm it has done to humanity (even if they aren't directly comparable).

I mean there is the slight difference that the statues intend to glorify the figures they represent, while this mural does the opposite - it's a pointed commentary on slavery and colonialism.

Statues are inanimate. What glorification happens is by people. When you see a statue of something or someone you find distasteful, do you find yourself glorifying whatever it represents or does the statue instead simply serve as a reminder to you of the past for which you make your own judgements? Do statues impose meaning, or do people find their own meaning in them? Of course the answer is self evident.

One reason that purging of the past is so intrinsically tied to authoritarian regimes is because authoritarian regimes do not want people to think for themselves. They want to enforce their views and only their views with no possible ambiguity or counterpoint. This is the danger of flirting with authoritarianism, as I feel we have been doing in trying to purge the past. Once the momentum for 'cultural purification' grows, you may find that where you draw your personal line in the sand is not where the rest of those pursuing such ends choose to.

However poor its implementation has been, the ideology behind communism is based is the idea that people should not be stratified by class. The ideology behind slavery is that some people are subhuman and can be treated like animals. The broad brush you are using to equate the two is inappropriate.

The U.S. freedom loving founding fathers participated in not only the legalization of slavery but also the genocide of native americans. Should we lay those sins at the feet of democracy and capitalism as a whole?

Interwebs is not a "collective mind". A lot of individuals participate. Each with his own ideas.

Why would it be hypocritical to go be against another user of the tool?

Are politicians hypocritical to have opposing ideas?

> Are they also going to go through all kinds of expressions of art

These are public murals. They're on giant walls hundreds or thousands of community members must walk by daily (the kids don't even have a choice). I don't think it's too much to demand that public art not be... y'know, wildly racist.

It's not like we're outlawing private galleries or burning books here. This stuff really is offensive, and "historical context" only goes so far.

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