one of the most interesting/amusing/frustrating things about the people screaming about the erasure of history when statues commemorating terrible people are dismantled or destroyed, whether by official means of removal or by frustrated activists who have in nearly every case tried for years to get them removed without mob action, is of course that the majority of those who actually study history/art history/architecture/archaeology, particularly those of younger generations, find these arguments ridiculous
people with actual training and experience and knowledge of these statues generally recognize that the act of their destruction is without question the *most significant part of their object biography* whether it's the mass produced bronze statues of Confederate soldiers, generals, and political leaders erected as symbols of Jim Crow and post-Reconstruction terrorism of African-Americans, 19th or 20th century effigies of Christopher Columbus erected for the same purpose despite claims of being about Italian heritage, or statues of slaveholders like Edward Colston or even post-war statues of Churchill that made him into a figure of heroic nationalism while ignoring his colonial attitudes and actions and the fact that he wasn't actually a very good prime minister, these statues are significant *because of the messages they send*. correspondingly, the message sent by their destruction is the only other thing really worth caring about. those events tell us about the society that erected and destroyed them. little other information is there to be gathered, or lost.
putting aside the fact that history is not taught by statues, and that throwing a statue of Columbus in a lake is not going to cause us to 'forget' that colonial atrocities are Bad so we then massacre the indigenous peoples of Alpha Centauri, and the books and libraries like, exist, and that ISIS destroys statues thousands of years older than the United States or the United Kingdom as political entities, the only history that can be taught by them is to put a plaque on their empty pedestals explaining the horrendous social movements that put them there in the first place. If people want to look, they can. meanwhile, human beings descended from the victims of their atrocities don't have to walk to work with the statues of those monsters constantly reminding them that they aren't full members of the societies that tolerated them for so long
dededos
areudirty
vaporwave
romaincrisis
titsay
germansingergirl
snowghoul
blakekathryn
