Is there a sensible solution to the conflict around Southern monuments to Confederate heroes?

Move them to museums.

Yes
If you think Lee was a great guy, go give homage at his statue.
If you think he is a jerk, don’t look at it.
Why not tear down the Jefferson memorial D.C.
After all he was a slave owner.
Why not change the name of Washington DC.
After all, he was too.
And chisel their faces off of Mt Rushmore!
Make all the people with German ancestry in the world change their names.
After all, their relatives started WW I and WW II and killed 6 KK Jews
Why not take down the headstones in every cemetery of everybody you don’t like.

Lee was so highly regarded, Lincoln wanted him to head the Union army.

And he was punished fairly severly when they took his farm ( Arlington) and buried the war dead on it.
At any given moment, somebody doesn’t like somebody else.
That really doesn’t mean you have to do something about it. That’s nothing but a return to tribal vendetta.

Tear them out. I don’t understand the homage to leaders of states that were in rebellion, and lost.

The solution is to move them to a place where they can be more easily seen, like in a museum’s lot and/or with federal statues/monuments. Those that were noteworthy enough to keep, that is.

I think a town or community has a right to decide to remove them. I don’t think city councils should be making decisions on this for the people, since the majority may not want them removed. If statues are to be removed, this is something that people should be voting on.

That said, I mostly agree with @josie here. I don’t think statues should be removed and names changed just because these people may be associated with a dark part of history. Don’t gloss over the history, of course—don’t pretend these people were saints. Study the good and the bad about them. But to me these actions are often akin to agreeing to forget history, rather than showing a deeper understanding of it.

You can’t go around erasing everything that someone finds offensive from history…

That being said.

There is also a time, and place though.

When I was a teenager, I had several confederate flags. I suppose it made me feel rebellious, and it felt like I was kind of not accepting being “American.”

As I grew older, and learned how it made some others feel, I threw them all out.

It’s a matter of human decency. If you can look in the mirror, and question your beliefs, you can find the truth. But you have to be able to understand what you are doing isn’t right first. Then, you can grow/change….

A sensible solution, to me, would be for people to pick their battles. Instead of fighting a defeated dead army’s generals, they should focus on the alt-right, and similar people. They are the threat to harmony. They are the ones who are far worse than those dead confederates…

If people truly learn to coexist, these statues will mean nothing really.

Keep in mind also, that the confederate army, was not a foreign invader. They were Americans. As I and most southerners know, the confederate army was not fighting to keep slavery. It was about state’s rights. Yes. Some people actually think that all those poor people fought so the elite wealthy could own slaves…. That would not happen now, anymore than it did then. Can you imagine the south succeeding today, so that the upper 1% could have better tax breaks?...

These generals, and soldiers, we’re not all evil. Not all confederate soldiers were evil. Not all Union soldiers were good. In fact, towards the end of the war, many union soldiers were foreigners/immigrants fresh off the boats on New York, Boston, Philadelphia etc that were forced to fight for citizenship…

I understand that some view these memorials, statues etc as symbols of slavery. But that is not really the case at all. The Union made itself out to be the champions of freedom. But all the while, they were ordering the stealing of Indian land, and the killing or relocating of millions of American Indians.
Lincoln himself ordered the deaths of hundreds of Indians in the Dakotas, at about the same time as the emancipation proclamation.
Take that and what General Sherman did, and both sides are deplorable. I don’t hear about people vilifying Sherman. If you aren’t familiar, he burnt and raped his way through the south. Today, he would be charged for war crimes. And rightly convicted.
Don’t get me started on the American /Mexican war… Sadly, America was not a pure good country that arose from greatness. It was stolen, and created, like every other country, ripped from the natives.

But. History is written by the winners. And so it is, a large part of the nation was vilified.

The real enemy is in the Whitehouse. And his supporters need to be the focus of any ire that the American people have.

@Josie:: How did you feel when this happened?

Erect matching monuments next to the Confederate one of that person’s Federal counterpart.

If it were up to me, I would leave the monuments be, but update or add a nearby placard that accurately (objectively and historically) describes the person in question.

Meaning, I wouldn’t write that Lee “was a hero of the Confederacy who fought against the oppression of the North.”

I’m in @DominicY camp, removing historical monuments doesn’t change history. These monuments should be either left alone or removed to museums. History is history, good, bad or indifferent. Nobody is dismantling Auschwitz. I also agree with @MrGrimm888.
Then there is this. v

www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ulysses-grant-launched-illegal-war-plains-indians-180960787/

@DominicY :: Aren’t you all snug as a bug in San Francisco? Imagine Fred Phelps had a statue on Market Street. And you had to walk past that everyday on your way to work. And the statue held a nice big shiny sign saying, “GOD HATES FAGS!!”. Still cool with that? Do you want to see that everyday? And assume this is on a public space taxpayers pay to maintain.

Imagine being black for a single second and having to walk past a statue of a person that fought to keep you a slave on your way to a math class. Could you just shrug it off as “it’s historical”?

^There’s a statue of George W. Bush at the Houston airport. I had to walk by it. I was offended. But I’m not so pompous that I called for it’s removal.

I don’t like statues of Jesus either. But there are plenty of those I won’t be protesting either.

I don’t like the Bull on Wallstreet either, or that fearless girl.

The statue of Liberty probably shouldn’t be here anymore either. Trump’s America doesn’t want ANY immigration.

If ALL statues were removed that were offensive, what would change?

Your link is exhibit A. @johnpowell . Removing Sadam Hussein’s statue did nothing. In fact, when an American flag was put over the downed statue it angered many Iraqis.

Statues are just pieces of metal, or stone… I wish that our problems were so small, that we could focus on such things…

Sorry @johnpowell, I’m going to have to agree with @MrGrimm888 here. There may be statues that I’m potentially offended by, but I’m not going to call for their removal. That said, your “comparison” is not much of one. I don’t think the erection of any statue would be allowed with an overt message of hate on it. Confederate general statues don’t include “FUCK NIGGERS!” emblazoned in bronze on the side. Secondly, what has Fred Phelps done to warrant a statue of him? I can at least acknowledge that Robert E. Lee was an accomplished general. Yes, part of the Confederate cause was maintaining slavery, which I see as morally unacceptable, but most of those Confederates were fighting for their own state. I’m not a Virginian, so I can’t say what it’s like to feel pride in someone who fought for Virginia. But obviously some do. Even if they don’t agree with everything Robert E. Lee was fighting for.

But 600,000 people died in the Civil War (by today’s standards, that’s about 6 million or the entire population of Missouri), and it’s a part of history that I want people to remember, all sides of it.

I can’t think of any country that erect statues of state combatants that lost their rebellion. The fact that these statues even exist is absolutely ridiculous.

Well there is certainly no surplus of monuments to Grant or Lincoln to be fought over in our former Confederate states. To me the strongest argument for removing such statues lies in the need to eliminate the “myths” around the Confederacy. But by that standard, 80–90% of the monuments nation wide dhould also be disappeared.

MrGrimm888 My principle argument for retention of the statue is primarily that Lee deserves and earned it. Grant once considered having a (smaller) duplicate cast for a “private” room in his home. There is also a great need in this country for its regrettably ignorant population to acquaint itself with its history, and any artifact bending even slightly the occasional unwary gawker toward “looking Lee up” is valuable.

Yup

These types of monuments were not erected right after the Civil War. Many of them were erected 100 years later to glorify the Confederacy during the Civil Rights movement. These men have a place in history, yes, but they should not have a place in our parks nor our hearts.

Removing a statue that glorifies hatred is not scrubbing history. Quite the opposite – erecting statues of the enemy/losers 100yrs after the war is an attempt to change history and legitimize their crimes. That is why they were put there in the first place: to intimidate black Americans. It’s long overdue to take them down.

@DominicY :: If you want people to remember this shit fight for a accurate representation of actual history in high school history books.

And yeah.. These statues say fuck niggers exactly. I’m not sure if you will ever be able to see that.

And the Phelps thing was clearly a allegory. If you can’t see that I am sorry.

I can’t believe I am having this discussion with a homosexual.

^ Whaaaa?

He is just making a point.

(Facetious, yes…...but still a valid point…..)

The solution is for city council people who are considering removing (or relocating) a controversial monument to discuss it quietly (but not secretly), and if a consensus is reached, to have it achieved in a relatively short amount of time.

The above was accomplished recently in Orlando, where a statue of some Confederate Civil War soldier stood for many years in Lake Eola Park in the middle of downtown. A few people objected to the move, but it was done quickly, and now nobody talks about it anymore.

Done.

Conversely, if I understand it correctly, the City Fathers in Charlottesville have been debating the removal of that statue for about two years.

Gee, I wonder if that is enough time for Nazis and White Supremists to become indignant and organize, and descend upon the city which is so highly offending them…..

The old adage stands true: “You can please some of the people all the time and all of the people some of the time but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.”