Well well. American conservative personality cult status confirmed - Trump Golden Calf Statue WORSHIPED at CPAC 2021 by Supporters
•Feb 27, 2021
Christo Aivalis
A Donald Trump Golden Statue will be at the CPAC 2021 Conference, showing that in the eyes of Republicans and Conservatives, Trump is a false idol like the Golden Calf from the bible. This, along with Mitch McConnell telling Bret Baier that he will back Trump 2024, means the Republican party is essentially all about Trump
History is littered with the shattered remains of toppled statues, and more are toppling now in the American South.
A violent rally this weekend in Charlottesville, Va., centered in part on the city’s plan to relocate a statue of the Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. A memorial to Confederate soldiers in Durham, N.C., was pulled down by protesters on Monday. Four Confederate monuments were taken down by the city of Baltimore on Wednesday; New Orleans did the same earlier this year.
But stiff opposition remains. Debates are raging over whether the statues should fall because they commemorate those who fought to uphold slavery, or stand because they remind us of a history that cannot be erased.
The United States has been dismantling statues since its very foundation.
One of the earliest recorded instances came in 1776, just five days after the Declaration of Independence was ratified. In a moment that was immortalized in a mid-19th-century painting, soldiers and civilians tore down a gilded statue of Britain’s King George III in Manhattan.
A painting by Johannes Adam Simon Oertel depicted the destruction of the statue in 1776. New-York Historical Society
That dismantling was more than symbolic. The leaden king was to be repurposed “to make musket balls, so that his troops will probably have melted Majesty fired at them,” during the Revolutionary War, said a letter from Ebenezer Hazard, New York’s postmaster, to Gen. Horatio Gates.
Globally, iconoclasm has been practiced at least since ancient times. Instances were recorded in the Bible. Medieval Christians smashed sculptures of Ancient Rome. Spanish conquerors destroyed temples of the Aztecs and the Incas.
More recently, in 2001, the Taliban destroyed giant statues of the Buddha in central Afghanistan. And this year, Islamic State militants toppled ancient structures in the historic city of Palmyra, Syria.
Parisians express their feelings toward a defaced portrait of Adolf Hitler, the day after the surrender of the German garrison in the city on August 26, 1944. FPG/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images
Symbols — including flags and portraits — of reviled leaders like World War II Germany’s Adolf Hitler were destroyed after a fall from power.
Venezuelan demonstrators place a rope to take down a Christopher Columbus statue in Caracas, on Oct. 12, 2004. Jorge Silva/Reuters
These acts of destruction can function as propaganda. What else could signify a smashing victory — or a new and brilliant future — so succinctly as the likeness of a vanquished leader, smashed to rubble on the ground?
But propaganda built around individuals can be misleading.
“Making sculptures into public monuments conveys the idea that history is made by individuals. We have a very individualized sense of personal agency and activism today,” said Lucia Allais, a Princeton historian writing a book about the destruction and preservation of monuments in the 20th Century.
“But these events make clear that history is also made when individuals mobilize into movements and masses.”
One of the best-known topplings of a statue in modern history might be the 2003 dismantling of a bronze Saddam Hussein in Baghdad during the American invasion of Iraq.
At the time, many of the media reports from the scene told a story of a giant statue felled by jubilant Iraqis.
A crowd pushes the head of a dismembered Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad in April 2003. Oleg Nikishin/Getty Images
But later accounts told a more nuanced story .. https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/toppling-saddam-and-a-wars-coverage/ . Peter Maass, a journalist for The New York Times Magazine who saw the statue fall, wrote in a 2011 ProPublica article, published with The New Yorker .. https://www.propublica.org/article/the-toppling-saddam-statue-firdos-square-baghdad , that U.S. Marines who were present helped drag the statue down, in part, because they understood the mass appeal of such an image. He did not personally see it as a defining moment, and he added that the square was less crowded, and the Iraqis present less enthusiastic, than it had appeared in many photographs and live broadcasts from the scene.
At the time, “I had little awareness of the media dynamics that turned the episode into a festive symbol of what appeared to be the war’s finale,” Mr. Maass wrote. “In reality, the war was just getting underway.”
A U.S. soldier watches as a statue of the former leader of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, falls in central Baghdad's Firdaus Square, in this file photo from April 2003. Goran Tomasevic/Reuters
Mr. Hussein was captured in December 2003 and executed three years later. But the country has yet to emerge from years of conflict.
Broken statues and torn portraits figured prominently years later in the Arab Spring. They did not herald peaceful change.
In January 2011, protesters ripped through a portrait of Egypt’s then-President Hosni Mubarak in the northern city of Alexandria as revolts rocked the country. Weeks later, Mr. Mubarak stepped down. His elected predecessor, Mohammed Morsi, lasted a year before his own ouster.
Egyptian protesters tear down a poster of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt during a demonstration in Alexandria, Egypt, on Jan. 25, 2011. Ahmed Youssef/European Pressphoto Agency
In August 2011, Libyan protesters overran the compound of Muammar el-Qaddafi in Tripoli, dismantling the head of a statue in his likeness, and toppling an iconic statue of a golden fist crushing a fighter plane. Mr. Qaddafi was killed two months later, but Libya still suffers from conflict and political chaos.
Rebel fighters kick the head of a statue of Muammar el-Qaddafi after entering his compound in Tripoli on Aug. 23, 2011, in this image taken from television. Associated Press
Syrian protesters dismantled a statue of Hafez al-Assad, the father of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, in the city of Raqqa in 2013. But Islamic State fighters soon assumed control of that city, and President Assad remains in office.
Statues of Soviet leaders have been toppled, too.
One towering likeness of Joseph Stalin came down in Budapest as early as 1956, during the Hungarian Revolution against Soviet control. Pieces the statue were attacked in the streets, but protesters couldn’t dismantle it all. They left a pair of Mr. Stalin’s boots stuck in its old perch high above the City Park.
People view a huge head of a statue of Joseph Stalin in middle of downtown Budapest. Associated Press
Statues of Vladimir Lenin have been erected across continents. But many were removed, in countries including Romania, Uzbekistan and Ethiopia, around the time of the Soviet bloc’s collapse.
Young men in Ethiopia dismantle the statue of the Russian Bolshevik revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin in Addis Ababa on May 23, 1991, two days after the exiled departure of Ethiopia's pro-Communist strongman Mengistu Haile Mariam. Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Still others were dismantled in Ukraine during the more recent Euromaidan protests — including one large structure in the capital city of Kiev in December 2013 — and the continuing conflict between Ukrainian troops and Russian-backed separatists.
A protester in Kieve breaks apart a statue of Lenin in December 2013 as an elderly man lays flowers to honor the broken monument. Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
Another turning point came when Dylann Roof, a white supremacist with an affinity for the Confederate battle flag, killed nine black parishioners in a June 2015 church shooting in Charleston, S.C. Ten days later, an activist, Bree Newsome, climbed a 30-foot flagpole that was flying the Confederate battle flag, removing the banner herself.
Bree Newsome takes down the Confederate flag from a pole at the Statehouse in Columbia, S.C, June 27, 2015. Adam Anderson/Reuters
About two weeks after that, South Carolina officially removed the flag from the State Capitol.
What becomes of these monuments, flags and portraits after they are removed from public spaces?
In Venezuela, the toppled statue of Christopher Columbus in Caracas was replaced by a likeness of Guaicaipuro, an indigenous chief who resisted Spanish conquerors. In Libya, the golden fist that was once in Mr. Qaddafi’s compound in Tripoli was moved to a museum in Misurata. In Ukraine, the thousands of Lenin statues dismantled .. https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/07/17/what-happened-to-ukraines-5500-lenin-statues/ .. in recent years have met all manner of fates; some have been painted over, others smashed to pieces, and still others stored in basements.
Officials in Charlottesville, Baltimore and New Orleans are still determining what will be done with the Confederate monuments that have crowned their public spaces for decades. But stories do not end when statues fall, Dr. Allais said. “We should definitely not think that historical legacies are made, or ended, only by destroying symbols.”
White nationalists carrying torches on Friday night surrounded counter-demonstrators on the grounds of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Va. Edu Bayer for The New York Times
Correction: Aug. 17, 2017 Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the location of a statue of Joseph Stalin that was taken down during the Hungarian October Revolution. It was in Budapest, not Bucharest.
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