Scandinavia and the World
Scandinavia and the World

Comments #9786556:


They did their best 1 9, 12:46am

@StuckovertheAtlantic And just to clarify in case someone is a bit confused (and as some have already pointed out), much of the talk right now is about Confederate monuments erected long after the Civil War ended. The memorials at battlefields and other notable locations, which were made right after the war in the 1860s and 1870s, those are not in question; 99.9% of Americans, left and right, agree that they are there to memorialize soldiers who died and should stay there as historical markers.

What is being debated is the fate of Confederate statues that were erected in the 1910s and 1920s, those were made specifically to promote white supremacy and degenerate African-Americans. For example, the "Silent Sam" statue at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which was pulled down by protesters (and I assume is the basis of this week's comic, I could be wrong), a speaker at its dedication ceremony bragged about "whipping a Negro woman." Almost all these statues made at that time were not about honoring Confederate soldiers, but rather to promote the Anglo-Saxon race and tell blacks that they are not people worthy of human rights.

Imagine if in the 1970s, monuments honoring Nazis were erected across West and East Germany and dedication speakers bragged about gassing Jews and slaughtering Slavs and gypsies. Sort of like that.