As a side note, his home town, Charlottesville, canceled the holiday celebrating Thomas Jefferson's birthday[0][1]. It seems to me that our society is too focused on condemning historical persons for their flaws than celebrating them for their noteworthy deeds.
Well, yes. It was unmitigated praise for men like Jefferson for a lot of years, which sent the message that those flaws you mentioned were nonexistent or unimportant. Now our society is attempting to demonstrate to people of color that those flaws as you say, which constitute extremely egregious crimes against humanity no matter how commonplace they were amongst the aristocracy of the time, were in fact real and were in fact important. The country remains rather divided on the subject but it sounds like these city officials are trying to say that black lives do, in fact, matter.
The country fought a bloody war 160 years ago to settle that dispute and it was pretty resoundly settled.
Not only that but there isn't a country on the planet that doesn't have equally horrific past. But that's horrific to us only because Jefferson and the colonists won. And their philosophy won. There's nothing inevitable about the destruction of monarchy. We might have been ruled by Kings and lords for another 2000 years. Who the hell knows?
The people aggravating other people for celebrating American heritage have sick aims. No amount of time or human sacrifice will be enough until all pride in U.S. is snuffed out. And then, what are we left with?
Yes and yet Americans helped save the Jews from extinction and yet they defeated Nazism and imperialism and held off communism and prevented South Korea from being dominated and won two world wars that could have ended in all of the Western hemisphere being conquered.
Of course, there's nothing black and white about history, it's all shades of grey. That goes without saying.
If it's "all shades of grey", I feel like that leaves a lot of room for the feelings and discussion for how and what light they want to view their historical figures. I think "Never meet your heroes" is a popular saying for reasons like that.
I'm not American, albeit, so I might be missing something on a deeper level though. My opinion here probably deserves some grain of salt.
Yeah I know Stalin and the Russians had a lot to do with it too. But the U.S. fought on two fronts. As if the imperial Japanese and their slaughter of Chinese people was any better than the Nazis.
And suppose the U.S. stayed out of that war, what would have Stalin done with Europe, supposing they won outright?
Yes, the Democrat party resisted the outcome of the civil war for decades. Republicans enacted the anti-slavery and equality amendments. Republicans integrated the federal civil service and military. Democrats created the KKK, Jim Crow, and resegregated the federal government first chance they got (Woodrow Wilson).
There has been a heck of a fight, but thankfully, both parties have moved past that, and one of the reasons is the aspirational words in the Declaration, which has inspired generation after generation to live up to what it says, and make a more perfect union.
> Yes, the Democrat party resisted the outcome of the civil war for decades
Large parts of the Democratic Party did so for about a full century, until the parties flipped positions on race with Johnson’s support of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and the subsequent Republican Southern Strategy to exploit the disaffection of (mostly Southern, hence the name) racists that resulted from Johnson's move. The same group still resists the results of the Civil War, but now they are key part of the Republican base rather than the Democratic base, which is why the South is now a Republican stronghold rather than a Democratic one, why the Democrats that continued in Congress from that time over the next several decades were often either repudiating past positions or switching to the Republican Party, why the KKK has voiced it's support for Trump, etc.
> There has been a heck of a fight, but thankfully, both parties have moved past that
No, they realigned and switched sides (or the factions active in the fight switched parties, to look at it a different way.) They didn't move past it at all: the same fight is still happening.
The KKK is a footnote in history at this time. The last KKK member of congress was a Democrat. Obama said the eulogy at his funeral, and Hilary Clinton said he was "a friend and mentor".
The Civil Rights Act had bipartisan support, but it had been filibustered for years by Democrats. In fact, the modern Senate is based on cloture, which was finally used to break the decades long delay.
Only six Senate Republicans voted against the bill in 1964, while 21 Senate Democrats opposed it. It passed by an overall vote of 73-27. In the House, 96 Democrats and 34 Republicans voted against the Civil Rights Act, passing with an overall 290-130 vote
A convenient myth. The reality is that once the Southern vote became contestable as the result of Democrat party dominance breaking down, the Republican party managed to mostly grab it without appealing to racism. It's of course fair to criticize Richard "I'm not a crook!" Nixon for his Southern Strategy, but it's not something that describes the Republican party as a whole.
Of course the post-Trump Republican party is indeed very different, so perhaps the parties will have ended up switching after all; and on their overall, broad attitude to 'modernity' in a social sense, encompassing far more than just "race"! Who knows, it all depends on how much sticking power these things have.
> Not only that but there isn't a country on the planet that doesn't have equally horrific past.
And in many of these countries, the role of prominent figures in that history is, for that reason, controversial.
That's why even in the USSR (Which nobody could ever honestly consider to have been blessed with an overabundance of introspection), there's been both a parade with a tank column rolling down the Red Square every 9th of May and official defacement of monuments commemorating one of the 'chief' architects of that victory.
> But that's horrific to us only because Jefferson and the colonists won.
No, it's not.
It's not like slavery isn't viewed as a horrific phase of history in the parts of world that were ruled by Britain and are still under either the British monarchy or a now-separate monarchy that happens to share both the same monarch and the same rules of succession, having never revolted against the Crown and either still being British or having peacefully separated while retaining ties to the monarch.
Nothing says thoughtful engagement like burying controversial subject matter.
It won't be long before right-wingers succeed in building a sustained narrative around MLK's infidelity and communist flirtations that permits them to taint public sentiment. That's par for the course for the vast majority of American Black activists. All the accusations of wrongful equivocation, etc, won't matter, because it's always more convenient to vilify and bury.
I guess it's technically some kind of social progress that traditional American icons are now being vilified and buried.
There's the argument that white guilt is black empowerment. But it seems more like a lateral move and definitely not substantive empowerment of the disenfranchised. What the evolution of victim mentality over the past 20+ years has shown us is that whites and even the rich are able to play the role of victim at least as well as minorities. I suspect there were many more Americans reciting "blue lives matter or "all lives matter" than "black lives matter".
" Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oran-utan [orangutan] for the black women over those of his own species. The circumstance of superior beauty, is thought worthy attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not in that of man?"
-- Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia[1]
He was a disgusting person who should be relegated to the annals of history, not celebrated with a birthday party like a blood relative.
Please keep fiery denunciation off HN, regardless of how good you are or how bad someone else was. It helps nothing, and adds to the toxic fumes already poisoning this place.
I was responding to someone who wrote "It seems to me that our society is too focused on condemning historical persons for their flaws than celebrating them for their noteworthy deeds." That comment seems to imply that we should forgive (or forget) the sexual assault of a slave because she was assaulted by someone who deserves to be celebrated "for their noteworthy deeds". Since you flagged my comment, will you also flag that other comment? Surely that other comment is more offensive than anything that I wrote?
> That comment seems to imply that we should forgive (or forget) the sexual assault of a slave because she was assaulted by someone who deserves to be celebrated ...
I don't think it implies any such thing. It's a reminder that our standards of morality can change a lot over time, so we shouldn't be surprised when some historical figure who is usually praised for their positive accomplishments turns out to have very severe moral flaws from our own POV. It's not exceptional, it's what we would expect to see in the first place.
When the path from another comment to fiery rage is as weak as "seems to imply", that's a good occasion to check one's angrier impulses. The site guidelines include one for just this case: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Even if you're right about another comment being bad, it doesn't entitle you to break the guidelines yourself. Nor is there any promise of consistency in moderation. There's far too much content here for us to even see it all, let alone read closely and weigh on the scales. If you run across something that should have been moderated but wasn't, the likeliest explanation is just that we didn't see it.
Your comment was flagged by users. They were right. High-indignation, low-information comments are what we don't want here. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the spirit of this site?