Then you're smart to avoid them - even when they're screened legally.
Germany dubs everything as well, and most Germans English pronunciation is terrible as a result, because they never heard how English should be spoken growing up.
The fact that we don't dub in Scandinavia is, I believe, the main reason English speakers believe we all speak English well - because we at least sound more like them.
That's not to say we all speak fluent English by any means - we don't. But the words we do know, most of us at least know how to pronounce better then Germans it seems.
"which started not because of issue of slavery alone"
It really did. Apologists for the Confederacy have been trying to claim otherwise ever since they lost the war, but the simple fact is that if you read the rebelling states declarations of succession from the Union and other relevant documents from the time, slavery is basically the only issue they talk about.
Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, for instance gave a speech defending the creation of the Confederacy in the weeks before open hostilities began. This has since been dubbed "The Cornerstone Speech" for his description of what the very foundation of the Confederacy was:
"Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."
But of course that became an inconvenient fact as soon as the war was lost, so other excuses had to be invented - and have been perpetuated ever since.
Of course there are individuals in all nations - stupid nationalists most often - who always refuse to admit any negative historical facts about their nation.
But there are also other, usually smaller groups of people, that for different reasons refuse to admit that some group they feel allegiance to ever did anything wrong.
But only if these group become a very large minority of even a majority of the population, they become a real threat to the country's future.
Because not accepting the historical truth and the mistakes you've been through as a nation means you can't move on from them.
Racism is still such a huge issue in the US, because the south after the civil war was allowed to basically ignore the results of their defeat and continue mistreating their black citizens. They where freed by federal law, but still treated terribly for another 100 years before the civil rights movement. And still today of course, the US is a far more racist society then western Europe.
And now, of course, they've even gone and elected themselves a president who can't unequivocally denounce ACTUAL Nazis, marching under ACTUAL Nazi flags, chanting ACTUAL Nazi slogans.
If the US had dealt with that shit back then, there wouldn't be any Confederate statues to fight over now, because everyone would know it's a fucking stupid idea to honor racists, traitorous, losers.
"Absolutely, people were never vanishing from history or being replaced by somebody else."
The examples you give are all from ancient times (when different rulers did, unsuccessfully, try to eradicate people from history), and the communists dictatorships of the Soviet Union and China (the second copying the first).
But none of these attempts succeeded - otherwise you couldn't post those links.
Try as they may, not even dictators can actually erase history. They may suppress it for a time in the country they control - but eventually the truth will come out.
At least now in modern times.
If we go back to antiquity and before, there may have been important people successfully erased from history - we can't know that for absolutely sure as there are very few sources to go by.
But today we can be sure it not only can't happen - but also that no credible person even argues for it to be done.
No one has ever said "let's erase all trace of the Confederacy from history" - that would be just stupid. What people have said is "let's take these statues down, honoring racist, traitorous, losers".
And that's of course something completely different.
"Wrong. Statue is not a thing person earns purely through good accomplishment. Sometimes statues - are works of art, and sometimes they are works of art that are just showing something that sculptor viewed as important to memorize in stone or metal. Not always it is something honorable, or pleasant. Though, much easier is to show that in paintings. But statues - exist too."
Actually it's not.
Statues are, according to Merriam-Webster, defined as:
"a three-dimensional representation usually of a person, animal, or mythical being that is produced by sculpturing, modeling, or casting"
Now we can forget about animals or mythical beings here, since they're not the issue - so we're talking about statues of "a person".
What you're thinking of is sculptures, which is a wider concept.
Now I don't know what almost any of the links you depicted are supposed to represent - but only the last two are actually statues to begin with.
Many of them show more then one person, at which point they are known as a "sculpture group" and others are either not a person or a statue (the girl in the block of stone is a relief for instance).
But the last two are statues of individual persons.
I have no idea who the first one is, but I guess you can tell me. My guess is he wasn't despised by the people who made the statue of him either - even if he seems to have fallen out of favor since.
The other is a picture of a statue of a Confederate soldier torn down in the US last year - I remember seeing it being torn down when it happened.
That statue was erected to HONOR Confederate soldiers - men who fought to keep others enslaved.
"Tell me, how many memorials to soldiers of Germany that perished in WWII do you know?"
I know one I've seen personally in Crete of all places. It was erected by the Germans during the war and for some strange reason the Greeks never tore it down after it. It has the German eagle on top of a stone obelisk (looks something like your fifth link above) and is as such no statue.
There are probably others left in strange places around Europe as well, but I venture to guess there are none that are in the form of statues.
The most common memorial to "soldiers of Germany that perished in WWII" is no doubt their tombstones. There are thousand of them on Crete alone, in the German war cemetery.
"Were crimes of their commanders and of some of them so dire, that *none* of them deserves being remembered as a human being, and not a stereotypic "bad guy" from movies and video games..?"
I think the most fitting monuments to memorialise them is their tombstones. It says all that is needed outside the history books.
"And where *else* do they even appear mentioned, at all? Exactly."
In the thousands upon thousands of history books, memoirs, TV documentaries and everything else written and produced about that war. There is certainly no need to erect statues over them to remember them.
"You plan to wait until the thermal death of the universe itself?"
If it takes that long it's perfectly fine by me - I see no need for there ever to be wax figures of Hitler, really. There are plenty of books, documentaries and even film of the real man from when he was alive.
I don't really see the educational point in making wax figures of him as well.
"Reduced unemployment, stabilized national currency, gave the start to construction of "Autoban", increased state industry and introduced "marriage loans" for newly created families. That is to name few things he brought to Germany along with racism, genocide, war and destruction."
And none of that mattered when he then utterly destroyed the country, murdered millions of it's citizens and left it split and occupied. Stalin was a brutal mass murderer as well, but at least he won the war, and he didn't start it (against Germany anyway).
Hitler was an abject fucking failure in every single way - and Germany paid a very high prize for ever putting their trust in him. Mere self-preservation dictate that they do all they possibly can to avoid ever going down that road again.
"Like it or not, even monstrous persons sometimes do things right, and it is also important to remember because sometimes people do things right - and you forgive them some amount of corruption, calculating that their accomplishments compensate their crimes."
If we where talking only about "corruption" I'd be willing to agree with you - but we aren't, are we?
No, we're talking the deliberate mass murder of millions upon millions of people - in both the cases of Hitler and Stalin.
Napoleon didn't manage to rack up that body count, because his resources where limited at the time - and Boudica even more so, of course.
But beyond that - neither of them actually deliberately sought to exterminate entire population groups or massacred their own peoples.
Napoleon was just like any king before him - he conquered as much as he could and passed out the lands to his relatives to start a dynasty.
He didn't intentionally seek to exterminate people - as long as they where loyal subjects and didn't rebel he was fine with leaving them be.
If he had come along earlier he most likely would have gotten away with it too, but seeing as the force of nationalism was starting to grow, people no longer accepted being ruled by foreign kings.
If you look further back in history, before nationalism, most people didn't mind who ruled them - as long as they weren't treated too harshly.
But Boudica and the Celt where treated very harshly by the Romans - and as a result they rebelled against them. That was a war of national liberation (even if they didn't call them that back then) and those wars are always particularly brutal since the people revolting are fighting against a foreign oppressor that they believe they must rid themselves of at all cost.
So when a people take up arms in a national liberation like that, they will fight with any means possible until the bitter end, accepting any losses.
You saw the same thing in Vietnam and Afghanistan - two wars the worlds only superpowers lost - because they where simply not willing to accept the losses the defending, nationalist liberation forces where.
"Every tyrant, every monster in our history achieved their high position not through the crime and treachery alone, nobody is 100% pure villain, all the evil made by these people goes hand by hand with some good. Some right decisions, some good traits, some wise ideas - which in eyes of people living at the time could outweigh or obscure the crimes."
You're conflating two different things here.
The fact that people at the time these tyrants first rose to power, could see something positive in their actions is obviously true - otherwise they never would have come to power.
But we can acknowledge that, and still judge them today based on their entire record - not just what people knew back then.
Knowing what we know now, it's unquestionable that tyrants like Hitler and Stalin - who both murdered millions of their own citizens - did not posses "good traits" or "wise ideas" that in any way can mitigate for their heinous crimes.
Because nothing they ever did, or frankly could have done, could of course balance out the cold blooded massacring of their own people. In neither case was this in any way rational or efficient policy, but simply deeply destructive actions for their own nations only taken by these tyrants because of their personal paranoia and racism.
Stalin's emphasis on heavy industry or Hitler building autobahn isn't in any way unique to them - both those things had been done in other countries and by other leaders before them, and could certainly have been done by other leaders in their country, if they had not come to power.
If the Bolshevik revolution had failed and the more moderate Mensheviks stayed in power, it's entirely possible they had been just as effective in modernizing the Soviet Union as the Bolsheviks where.
Or even if the Bolsheviks and Lenin did succeed, but Stalin had lost out in the power struggle after Lenin's death.
Another Soviet Communist leader might well have made the exact same investments in industrial development as Stalin did - but if he hadn't also murdered millions of his own citizens, including the officer corps - the Union might actually have been able to better defend itself against Nazi-Germany, which would have meant less casualties in the war and possibly a shorter war over all.
In the case of Hitler, the Holocaust of course diverted necessary resources from the war effort - and murdering your own people, when there is a acute shortage of soldiers and workers for the war effort - is obviously just self destructive.
So no - neither Stalin nor Hitler have enough "good traits" to in any way compensate for their other actions. As they also actively HURT their own nations in many ways by the completely illogical and self-detrimental policies they pursued.
It doesn't matter one bit that they also instituted some policies that where good - just as we don't say about a doctor that deliberately murders some of his patients that he wasn't all bad.
0
@Ninian
"Pretty much."
Then you're smart to avoid them - even when they're screened legally.
Germany dubs everything as well, and most Germans English pronunciation is terrible as a result, because they never heard how English should be spoken growing up.
The fact that we don't dub in Scandinavia is, I believe, the main reason English speakers believe we all speak English well - because we at least sound more like them.
That's not to say we all speak fluent English by any means - we don't. But the words we do know, most of us at least know how to pronounce better then Germans it seems.
"which started not because of issue of slavery alone"
It really did. Apologists for the Confederacy have been trying to claim otherwise ever since they lost the war, but the simple fact is that if you read the rebelling states declarations of succession from the Union and other relevant documents from the time, slavery is basically the only issue they talk about.
Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, for instance gave a speech defending the creation of the Confederacy in the weeks before open hostilities began. This has since been dubbed "The Cornerstone Speech" for his description of what the very foundation of the Confederacy was:
"Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech
So yeah - it was all about slavery, really.
But of course that became an inconvenient fact as soon as the war was lost, so other excuses had to be invented - and have been perpetuated ever since.
Of course there are individuals in all nations - stupid nationalists most often - who always refuse to admit any negative historical facts about their nation.
But there are also other, usually smaller groups of people, that for different reasons refuse to admit that some group they feel allegiance to ever did anything wrong.
But only if these group become a very large minority of even a majority of the population, they become a real threat to the country's future.
Because not accepting the historical truth and the mistakes you've been through as a nation means you can't move on from them.
Racism is still such a huge issue in the US, because the south after the civil war was allowed to basically ignore the results of their defeat and continue mistreating their black citizens. They where freed by federal law, but still treated terribly for another 100 years before the civil rights movement. And still today of course, the US is a far more racist society then western Europe.
And now, of course, they've even gone and elected themselves a president who can't unequivocally denounce ACTUAL Nazis, marching under ACTUAL Nazi flags, chanting ACTUAL Nazi slogans.
If the US had dealt with that shit back then, there wouldn't be any Confederate statues to fight over now, because everyone would know it's a fucking stupid idea to honor racists, traitorous, losers.
"Absolutely, people were never vanishing from history or being replaced by somebody else."
The examples you give are all from ancient times (when different rulers did, unsuccessfully, try to eradicate people from history), and the communists dictatorships of the Soviet Union and China (the second copying the first).
But none of these attempts succeeded - otherwise you couldn't post those links.
Try as they may, not even dictators can actually erase history. They may suppress it for a time in the country they control - but eventually the truth will come out.
At least now in modern times.
If we go back to antiquity and before, there may have been important people successfully erased from history - we can't know that for absolutely sure as there are very few sources to go by.
But today we can be sure it not only can't happen - but also that no credible person even argues for it to be done.
No one has ever said "let's erase all trace of the Confederacy from history" - that would be just stupid. What people have said is "let's take these statues down, honoring racist, traitorous, losers".
And that's of course something completely different.
"Wrong. Statue is not a thing person earns purely through good accomplishment. Sometimes statues - are works of art, and sometimes they are works of art that are just showing something that sculptor viewed as important to memorize in stone or metal. Not always it is something honorable, or pleasant. Though, much easier is to show that in paintings. But statues - exist too."
Actually it's not.
Statues are, according to Merriam-Webster, defined as:
"a three-dimensional representation usually of a person, animal, or mythical being that is produced by sculpturing, modeling, or casting"
Now we can forget about animals or mythical beings here, since they're not the issue - so we're talking about statues of "a person".
What you're thinking of is sculptures, which is a wider concept.
Now I don't know what almost any of the links you depicted are supposed to represent - but only the last two are actually statues to begin with.
Many of them show more then one person, at which point they are known as a "sculpture group" and others are either not a person or a statue (the girl in the block of stone is a relief for instance).
But the last two are statues of individual persons.
I have no idea who the first one is, but I guess you can tell me. My guess is he wasn't despised by the people who made the statue of him either - even if he seems to have fallen out of favor since.
The other is a picture of a statue of a Confederate soldier torn down in the US last year - I remember seeing it being torn down when it happened.
That statue was erected to HONOR Confederate soldiers - men who fought to keep others enslaved.
"Tell me, how many memorials to soldiers of Germany that perished in WWII do you know?"
I know one I've seen personally in Crete of all places. It was erected by the Germans during the war and for some strange reason the Greeks never tore it down after it. It has the German eagle on top of a stone obelisk (looks something like your fifth link above) and is as such no statue.
There are probably others left in strange places around Europe as well, but I venture to guess there are none that are in the form of statues.
The most common memorial to "soldiers of Germany that perished in WWII" is no doubt their tombstones. There are thousand of them on Crete alone, in the German war cemetery.
"Were crimes of their commanders and of some of them so dire, that *none* of them deserves being remembered as a human being, and not a stereotypic "bad guy" from movies and video games..?"
I think the most fitting monuments to memorialise them is their tombstones. It says all that is needed outside the history books.
"And where *else* do they even appear mentioned, at all? Exactly."
In the thousands upon thousands of history books, memoirs, TV documentaries and everything else written and produced about that war. There is certainly no need to erect statues over them to remember them.
"You plan to wait until the thermal death of the universe itself?"
If it takes that long it's perfectly fine by me - I see no need for there ever to be wax figures of Hitler, really. There are plenty of books, documentaries and even film of the real man from when he was alive.
I don't really see the educational point in making wax figures of him as well.
"Reduced unemployment, stabilized national currency, gave the start to construction of "Autoban", increased state industry and introduced "marriage loans" for newly created families. That is to name few things he brought to Germany along with racism, genocide, war and destruction."
And none of that mattered when he then utterly destroyed the country, murdered millions of it's citizens and left it split and occupied. Stalin was a brutal mass murderer as well, but at least he won the war, and he didn't start it (against Germany anyway).
Hitler was an abject fucking failure in every single way - and Germany paid a very high prize for ever putting their trust in him. Mere self-preservation dictate that they do all they possibly can to avoid ever going down that road again.
"Like it or not, even monstrous persons sometimes do things right, and it is also important to remember because sometimes people do things right - and you forgive them some amount of corruption, calculating that their accomplishments compensate their crimes."
If we where talking only about "corruption" I'd be willing to agree with you - but we aren't, are we?
No, we're talking the deliberate mass murder of millions upon millions of people - in both the cases of Hitler and Stalin.
Napoleon didn't manage to rack up that body count, because his resources where limited at the time - and Boudica even more so, of course.
But beyond that - neither of them actually deliberately sought to exterminate entire population groups or massacred their own peoples.
Napoleon was just like any king before him - he conquered as much as he could and passed out the lands to his relatives to start a dynasty.
He didn't intentionally seek to exterminate people - as long as they where loyal subjects and didn't rebel he was fine with leaving them be.
If he had come along earlier he most likely would have gotten away with it too, but seeing as the force of nationalism was starting to grow, people no longer accepted being ruled by foreign kings.
If you look further back in history, before nationalism, most people didn't mind who ruled them - as long as they weren't treated too harshly.
But Boudica and the Celt where treated very harshly by the Romans - and as a result they rebelled against them. That was a war of national liberation (even if they didn't call them that back then) and those wars are always particularly brutal since the people revolting are fighting against a foreign oppressor that they believe they must rid themselves of at all cost.
So when a people take up arms in a national liberation like that, they will fight with any means possible until the bitter end, accepting any losses.
You saw the same thing in Vietnam and Afghanistan - two wars the worlds only superpowers lost - because they where simply not willing to accept the losses the defending, nationalist liberation forces where.
"Every tyrant, every monster in our history achieved their high position not through the crime and treachery alone, nobody is 100% pure villain, all the evil made by these people goes hand by hand with some good. Some right decisions, some good traits, some wise ideas - which in eyes of people living at the time could outweigh or obscure the crimes."
You're conflating two different things here.
The fact that people at the time these tyrants first rose to power, could see something positive in their actions is obviously true - otherwise they never would have come to power.
But we can acknowledge that, and still judge them today based on their entire record - not just what people knew back then.
Knowing what we know now, it's unquestionable that tyrants like Hitler and Stalin - who both murdered millions of their own citizens - did not posses "good traits" or "wise ideas" that in any way can mitigate for their heinous crimes.
Because nothing they ever did, or frankly could have done, could of course balance out the cold blooded massacring of their own people. In neither case was this in any way rational or efficient policy, but simply deeply destructive actions for their own nations only taken by these tyrants because of their personal paranoia and racism.
Stalin's emphasis on heavy industry or Hitler building autobahn isn't in any way unique to them - both those things had been done in other countries and by other leaders before them, and could certainly have been done by other leaders in their country, if they had not come to power.
If the Bolshevik revolution had failed and the more moderate Mensheviks stayed in power, it's entirely possible they had been just as effective in modernizing the Soviet Union as the Bolsheviks where.
Or even if the Bolsheviks and Lenin did succeed, but Stalin had lost out in the power struggle after Lenin's death.
Another Soviet Communist leader might well have made the exact same investments in industrial development as Stalin did - but if he hadn't also murdered millions of his own citizens, including the officer corps - the Union might actually have been able to better defend itself against Nazi-Germany, which would have meant less casualties in the war and possibly a shorter war over all.
In the case of Hitler, the Holocaust of course diverted necessary resources from the war effort - and murdering your own people, when there is a acute shortage of soldiers and workers for the war effort - is obviously just self destructive.
So no - neither Stalin nor Hitler have enough "good traits" to in any way compensate for their other actions. As they also actively HURT their own nations in many ways by the completely illogical and self-detrimental policies they pursued.
It doesn't matter one bit that they also instituted some policies that where good - just as we don't say about a doctor that deliberately murders some of his patients that he wasn't all bad.