Geoffrey wrote:No, slavery was not always perceived as "wrong".
It's not a matter of perception. Slavery is wrong: fact. It has always been and it will always be. If I ever fail to see that, then I'm blind and ignorant. Doesn't matter what the norm of the time is. But we are hardly talking about povs here. Robert E. Lee fought for slavery. The guy is a stain on humanity's history along with Davis, Jackson and Stephens. You will never see a statue of Hitler in a park or square in Germany, and that guy basically fought for Germany. These people rebelled against the US.
Anyway enough of me derailing this thread. That was my last post regarding this matter.£
Geoffrey wrote:No, slavery was not always perceived as "wrong". If you Virgo were raised in the 1500s, I bet you'd agree with slavery, because that was just what people learned to think. Slaves were thought of like farm animals today, as inferior to humans and tools for production. Slavery was the norm for centuries and centuries, and unless you were some sort of humanitarian philosopher, you were unlikely to have thought otherwise. Up until recently most people have been prejudiced towards homosexuals, does that mean everyone up until the 20th century was a monstrosity? No.
Obviously by the time of the Confederacy it was more commonplace to think of slavery as wrong, but is it such an issue that century old statues part of history must be torn down? No.
This is really silly, but if Osama Bin Laden was a terrorist from centuries ago who blew people up while terrorism was the norm, led a rebellion when terrorism was outlawed, and then had a statue built for him later down the line after his rebellion failed, I wouldn't look gleefully at the statue, but I wouldn't demand it's removal. It'd just be history to me.
Except most of these statues were not built in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Most of them were built during the Jim Crow or Civil Rights eras as part of a deliberate white supremacist backlash . There's a reason why you don't see museums dedicated to slavery of statues commemorating the millions of people who lived or died in bondage, but see statues glorifying people who took up arms against their own country (!!) to defend an institution that was outlawed in many states for decades and outlawed throughout the British empire (!) for half a century at that point. There's a reason why these statues exist in states that weren't part of the Confederacy or even states yet. The people who put up those statues know why, the descendants of the people plundered by slavery, Jim Crow, etc who are forced to walk past these statues everyday know why. Everyone knows why except those being willfully obtuse about it.