Erasing the past then you will repeat in the future

Should the United States of America Emulate the Soviets?

I am upset and disappointed that the U.S. Military (U.S. Government) is not planning to rename ships that recall Confederate victories – the cruiser USS Chancellorsville (CG-62), USS Harpers Ferry (LSD-49), or USS Fort Fisher (LSD-40) immediately comes to mind.

But slavery – which the Confederacy fought to preserve – was such an abhorrent practice that the U.S. Military also should rename ships that honor slave owners: the ballistic missile submarine USS Francis Scott Key (SSBN-657). The aircraft carrier USS George Washington (CVN-73) and the attack submarine USS Jefferson City (SSN-759), that locale having been named for another slave owner; the 3rd President of the United States Thomas Jefferson and do not forget the USS Jacksonville (SSN-699), that locale named after the 7th President of the United States who supported slavery and signed the Indian Removal Act; which relocated most members of the Native American tribes in the South to Indian Territory which resulted in their widespread death and sickness.

• Also during WWII the Navy named the following Liberty ships after Confederate generals; SS E. Kirby Smith after General Edmund Kirby Smith, CSA; SS John B Gordon after Major General John B Gordon, CSA; SS A. P. Hill after Lt General A. P. Hill, CSA; SS D. H. Hill after Lt General D. H. Hill, CSA; SS Edward P. Alexander after Major General Edward Porter Alexander, CSA; SS Fitzhugh Lee after Major General Fitzhugh Lee, CSA nephew of Robert E. Lee; SS Nathan Bedford Forrest after Lt General Nathan Bedford Forrest, CSA; SS J. Johnson Pettigrew after Major General J. Johnson Pettigrew, CSA; SS James Longstreet after Lt General James Longstreet, CSA; and SS Joseph Wheeler after Lt General Joseph Wheeler, CSA. Let’s not forget the SS Jefferson Davis after the President of the Confederacy; SS Robert M. T. Hunter who was the Confederate Secretary of State; SS George Davis who was the Confederate Attorney General; and of course the USS Robert E. Lee (SSBN-601). I am sure there are more examples of the U.S. government honoring Confederate generals and government officials. For example Duncan Nathaniel Ingraham was an officer in the USN who later served in the Confederate States Navy; four ships of the USN have borne the name USS Ingraham, named in honor of Captain Duncan Ingraham; a Wickes Class, a Gleaves Class, an Allen M Sumner Class destroyer those three were during WWII and the last an Oliver Hazard Perry class frigate, launched in 1988 and decommissioned in 2014.


Also, we must determine if any U.S. military bases or installations carry the names of Confederate heroes. Fort Lee, Fort Pickett, Fort Bragg, Fort Hood, Fort Gordon, Fort Benning, and Camp Beauregard come to mind all named after Confederate generals. Then of course there is the tradition of the military to name equipment after Confederate heroes; i.e. M3 Lee medium tank named after Robert E. Lee and the M3 Stuart light tank named after J.E.B Stuart. I am sure there are more.

And, overseas schools operated by the Department of Defense must be purged of any text books that mention slavery – we must not expose the children of service personnel to such a reprehensible practice.

If there is any doubt about how to purge these names, places, and practices from our history, one need only look to the methods that the Soviet dictators employed to rewrite that nation’s history. They had text books and encyclopedias rewritten, deleted disgraced heroes from photographs, renamed towns and cities, tear-down statues and memorials, etc. Dissidents were executed, jailed or exiled to Siberia.

Should we let this to happen? I say no. How do you learn from history if you erase the past?

Why do you think that honoring slave holders and traitors who fought a losing war against the United States is a good idea?
What did they do that was worthy of such honor?

And, overseas schools operated by the Department of Defense must be purged of any text books that mention slavery – we must not expose the children of service personnel to such a reprehensible practice.

Where did you get that bs from?

...and eventually we get people pushing things like slavery as an option because "We've looked through history and it's never been done before. It should prove great at keeping us in power..."

Or "Well, we can try to wipe out this particular group in order to remove the threat they pose. No-one's ever wiped out an ethnic group before, so no-one will recognize what we're doing..."

We need history to tell us what not to do...

Michael Everett wrote:...and eventually we get people pushing things like slavery as an option because "We've looked through history and it's never been done before. It should prove great at keeping us in power..."

Or "Well, we can try to wipe out this particular group in order to remove the threat they pose. No-one's ever wiped out an ethnic group before, so no-one will recognize what we're doing..."

We need history to tell us what not to do...

You mean like the whole bit where the american civil war, despite arising from a conflict over whether or not slavery should be legal, was really about "state's rights"?

Like, sure, forgetting or worse, whitewashing history to erase the suffering caused by your ancestors, is bad. A healthy society needs to come to terms with its history.

But when you have these monuments to the traitorous south being erected during times where the civil rights of the black minority are being discussed and the black community asserts their rights to be equals, you have to ask just what the fuck is being commemorated here.

You want to be angry about history being misinterpreted? Fine. Be angry. But at the very least ackknowledge that that misinterpretation has a long history in the US.


There's a reason why you will not find monuments to Nazis in Germany. There's a reason why there's a long-running discussion in german milhist circles about Rommel and whether or not it is appropriate for one of the main Bundeswehr bases to be named after him.
We commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. We remember the atrocities. We do not, most emphatically not, forget that what happened happened. Your (and I mean dear Senior Chief here) whining about your history being continuously reexamined is pathetic. You're upset that our current understanding of history does not permit us to mindlessly glorify the US' founding fathers as paragons of liberty and progressive thought, that we can see that no matter what good came out of their actions, they were flawed and to an extent hypocritical individuals even by the standards of their day.

The US' history of slavery will not be forgotten because monuments to traitors and slavers are removed from the public square. That is a stupid and silly thing to assume; it's a rhetorical gambit that is easily disproved and ridiculed.

So, please: Do answer these questions:

The E wrote:Why do you think that honoring slave holders and traitors who fought a losing war against the United States is a good idea?
What did they do that was worthy of such honor?

You too, Michael. Do make a coherent argument why choosing not to commemorate people we do not deem worthy of commemoration, of honoring, is the same as erasing history.

Oh ffs, can we stop with this idiocy already?

Senior Chief wrote:But slavery – which the Confederacy fought to preserve – was such an abhorrent practice that the U.S. Military also should rename ships that honor slave owners: the ballistic missile submarine USS Francis Scott Key (SSBN-657). The aircraft carrier USS George Washington (CVN-73) and the attack submarine USS Jefferson City (SSN-759),

Do you or do you not understand the difference between honoring someone for significant achievements despite that person also having black marks on their history with which we need to grapple... and honoring someone whose primary achievement IS that black mark?

There is a difference between honoring a founding father of the country while also needing to deal with his severe shortcomings... and honoring some confederate general or someone else whose PRIMARY achievement was treason against the United States in the name of preserving slavery.

You get that right?

• Also during WWII the Navy named.... <<blah blah blah blah...>>

... I am sure there are more examples of the U.S. government honoring Confederate generals and government officials.

Yes, the US has a very long history of making contemptible decisions when it comes to its history of racism. There have been a bunch of people in the streets recently because of this. Maybe you've noticed them?

If there is any doubt about how to purge these names, places, and practices from our history,

...and STOP. Here is where you go full weapons grade bullshit.

The removal of monuments HONORING contemptible traitor white supremacists is not removing their names or deeds from history. It is simply correcting one small part of the nations misdeeds on this subject.

Let's take an alternate example and see if you can grasp this.

Let's look at Germany.

Now, you can today visit a concentration camp in Germany. But when you visit it you will not find statues of the guards who ran the ovens and gas chambers standing all tall and proud and made to look heroic with no mention of their crimes. You will instead find every dark little detail of their crimes detailed and laid out. You will find monuments to their victims, not to their murderers.

You will never walk around anywhere in Berlin and find a statue of fucking Hitler standing tall and proud like he's some kind of fucking hero. Or the streets draped in Nazi flags. Get it?

Those confederate monuments were not put up to teach people a lesson about history so they would not repeat it. They were put up in DEFIANCE of learning those lessons. By pouting tantrum throwing racist assholes who are still sulking that the Confederacy lost and slavery isn't still a thing. They were put up to grind the still second class status of black citizens in their own country into their faces on a daily basis every time they walked by one of those statues, or buildings, or bases, or ships named after some POS whose life's goal was to oppress and enslave them.

So spare us this absolute horseshit about "erasing history". Those monuments don't teach anyone a damn thing about that history. That is taught in history books and museums and nobody is even suggesting touching those.

For those who do study history, the term Black Lives Matter (which I have no issue with in and of itself) means that All Lives Matter. After all, humanity expanded outwards from Africa, meaning that every single human can (theoretically) trace their ancestry back to the first humans, those who lived in Africa.

All of us are descended from Black people, therefore we are all Black.

Kind of puts things like the KKK and Apartheid into a new light, once you think about it. If we are all Black, then discrimination based on skin color is pointless.

Know your history and you will see that all Races are one.

Cultures, on the other hand...

Michael Everett wrote:For those who do study history, the term Black Lives Matter (which I have no issue with in and of itself) means that All Lives Matter. After all, humanity expanded outwards from Africa, meaning that every single human can (theoretically) trace their ancestry back to the first humans, those who lived in Africa.

All of us are descended from Black people, therefore we are all Black.

What a completely stupid take.

The BLM movement is about institutionalized racism against non-whites in white-majority countries. This whole "we're all the same race" stuff? It's irrelevant. Worse, it's not even true in context: There are marked differences in how members of a given race are treated by society and its various actors and agencies, and demanding that the promise of a fair end equitable society where everyone is treated equally regardless of race or sex is finally realized through public protest is a natural reaction.
This whole "All lives matter" thing? It's a distraction. A smokescreen. It is an ideal we need to strive towards, sure, but it's not a valid response to the entire complex of justified grievances that Black Lives Matter is protesting against.

Gentlemen, you are both saying fundamentally the same thing, but from different perspectives, in very different ways.
Is the whole concept of human race invalid? Of course it is, as the rapidly increasing databases of organisations like ancestry.com prove. As Michael says, trace it back and all of mankind is out of Africa. Plus the races have intermingled much more than people originally expected to find. My own DNA tests indicate that I'm a rare "pure" European with no input from other regions for possibly thousands of years, while I have met Han Chinese who also are apparently not been blended for a long time. Most others do have some admixture from elsewhere. A politician of ours makes her living by being a controversial racist. She even had a DNA test done, which embarrassingly showed that she is about 14% from an Asian background, despite red hair and a pale complexion.
Are people hailing from different regions physically different? Individuals vary, but overall there can be differences like more sickle cell anemia and lactose intolerance in people from Africa.
Is skin colour important? Not genetically, but useful to reduce skin cancer. My own area is peopled with a high proportion of fair skinned people, and having lots of sun makes us the skin cancer epicentre.
Are cultures different? Hell yeah! That's where the trouble starts, as people regard their own "type" as being superior, with others being inferior. Once again this shouldn't be, but it is possibly the biggest problem facing us.
Regarding BLM and ALM, Michael has missed the point. Of course all lives matter, but the BLM people are looking at the instutionalised social injustice facing "people of colour". They aren't literally saying that the only lives that matter are of those with dark skin, but that a much bigger proportion of injustice does occur to them.
People of European background living in China report high levels of negative racial discrimination. This is not a simple black versus white situation.

The E wrote:

Michael Everett wrote:For those who do study history, the term Black Lives Matter (which I have no issue with in and of itself) means that All Lives Matter. After all, humanity expanded outwards from Africa, meaning that every single human can (theoretically) trace their ancestry back to the first humans, those who lived in Africa.

All of us are descended from Black people, therefore we are all Black.

What a completely stupid take.

The BLM movement is about institutionalized racism against non-whites in white-majority countries. This whole "we're all the same race" stuff? It's irrelevant. Worse, it's not even true in context: There are marked differences in how members of a given race are treated by society and its various actors and agencies, and demanding that the promise of a fair end equitable society where everyone is treated equally regardless of race or sex is finally realized through public protest is a natural reaction.
This whole "All lives matter" thing? It's a distraction. A smokescreen. It is an ideal we need to strive towards, sure, but it's not a valid response to the entire complex of justified grievances that Black Lives Matter is protesting against.

Daryl wrote:People of European background living in China report high levels of negative racial discrimination. This is not a simple black versus white situation.

No, it's not. It's a simple majority/minority situation, where the majority creates structures and systems that benefit them and that, whether by design or by mistake, create disadvantages for people not belonging to that majority (And let's be clear: There is a very well-documented history of the current situation in the US being designed the way it is in order to preserve the power of rich white men).

The point being, if one of the central tenets of your political structure is "all men are created equal", then you shouldn't be surprised if your society is a) judged on how well that tenet is being followed and b) that it may be found wanting.