Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

Slam dunk, my ass. The people being protested against in Charlottesville were self identified, and identified by their words and actions, as neo-Nazis, KKK and anti-Semites. Any marcher there for the monuments who decided it was a good idea to march among the MAJORITY of bigoted pricks was a bigoted prick with very bad judgment, at best. Nothing fine about them.

Here's the salient difference that renders your 'slam dunk' into 'traveling', a turnover and a slam dunk on the basket that you're not up to defending.

The majority of the current protestors are not looters. The majority of the protestors marching with Tiki torches were fascist morons. And again, if anyone was stupid enough to fall in with that majority they were not 'fine people'

If they also wanted the monuments to stay up, fuck them for hiding there execrable beliefs behind an even more execrable aim, keeping statues up that were much less about honoring confederate generals than about sending a giant fuck you to increasingly troublesome Negros who simply wanted the equal rights guaranteed under the 14th Amendment.

How the U.S. Got So Many Confederate Monuments

Updated:Jun 4, 2020· Original:Aug 17, 2017

These commemorations tell a national story.

Becky Little

https://www.history.com/news/how-the-u-s-got-so-many-confederate-monuments

Most of these monuments did not go up immediately after the war’s end in 1865. During that time, commemorative markers of the Civil War tended to be memorials that mourned soldiers who had died, says Mark Elliott, a history professor at University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

“Eventually they started to build [Confederate] monuments,” he says. “The vast majority of them were built between the 1890s and 1950s, which matches up exactly with the era of Jim Crow segregation.” According to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s research, the biggest spike was between 1900 and the 1920s.

In contrast to the earlier memorials that mourned dead soldiers, these monuments tended to glorify leaders of the Confederacy like General Robert E. Lee, former President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis and General “Thomas Stonewall” Jackson.

“All of those monuments were there to teach values to people,” Elliott says. “That’s why they put them in the city squares. That’s why they put them in front of state buildings.” Many earlier memorials had instead been placed in cemeteries.

The values these monuments stood for, he says, included a “glorification of the cause of the Civil War.”

White women were instrumental in raising funds to build these Confederate monuments. The United Daughters of the Confederacy, founded in the 1890s, was probably the most important and influential group, Elliott says.

In fact, the group was responsible for creating what is basically the Mount Rushmore of the Confederacy: a gigantic stone carving of Davis, Lee and Jackson in Stone Mountain, Georgia. Its production began in the 1910s, and it was completed in the 1960s.

By then, the construction of new Confederate monuments had begun to taper off, but the backlash to the Civil Rights Movement was spreading Confederate symbols in other ways:

In 1956, Georgia redesigned its state flag to include the Confederate battle flag; and in 1962, South Carolina placed the flag atop its capitol building. In a 2016 report, the Southern Poverty Law Center said that the country’s more than 700 monuments are part of roughly 1,500 symbols of the Confederacy in public spaces.


Protesters and city officials have gradually taken down statues in multiple towns and cities, including Baltimore and Durham, North Carolina. The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that, as of February 2019, at least 138 Confederate symbols have been removed from public spaces since 2015.

In June 2020, amid protests over the police killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia announced he planned to order the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond—the former capital of the Confederacy—to be removed.