There's a confederate monument with a huge coward's flag at mile marker 16 on I-24 in West Kentucky. I hate it and wish somebody would do something about it.
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I think we should start an online campaign to have it removed. It’d be real interesting to see who shows up trying to protest its removal.
I can drive there in 20-30 mins. If the pay is right… just saying
Road trip! I'll bring pretzels!
Especially since the cemetery claims they don’t know who owns it.
If I lived nearby, I'd just show up with a sledgehammer and go to town myself.
Probably dump my cats' litter boxes all over it, too.
All nazi/confederate monuments should be taken down.
The only place they belong, if any, is in a museum.
More confederate monuments were built in 1999 than in 1869. The year with the most confederate monuments built was 1911, 46 years after the end of the war. That's like as if there were now a sudden spree of building Vietnam War monuments everywhere.
Confederate monuments were overwhelmingly built during the Jim Crow era. The Daughters of the Confederacy built most of them as part of their revisionist lost cause project, trying to write slavery out of the war. Then there was also a lot of them built during the civil rights era, to send a message to civil rights activists.
Sure, it's worth saving a few of them to put into places like the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, the National Civil Rights Museum, America's Black Holocaust Museum, or the National Civil War Museum. But there's many more monuments than appropriate museums for them. Getting rid of the least historically s significant ones isn't a big issue.
This one was only erected 30 years ago. It hardly qualifies for a museum.
The only thing more surprising than this monument’s existence is the fact that it took thirty years for people to actually notice and start making an issue of it.
I'm not really surprised. The text is Cyrillic, not something most Americans can read, and it says:
1st Ukrainian division
To the warriors for the freedom of Ukraine
Nothing about the SS unit, only the dates 1943-1945 and the shield of the lion and crowns. It's not explicit.
Also, it's a monument to Ukrainian soldiers who fought for the German endorsed military of Ukraine, serving with the SS. It's a more complex story than just celebrating Nazi collaboration, because while they were definitely collaborators with the Nazis, they were doing so because they wanted a free and independent Ukraine and wanted to fight the USSR.
So, they're recognizing these soldiers because they fought for Ukrainian independence, not because the people supporting Ukrainian independence at the time were the Germans.
They also willingly participated in mass murders of civilian population (Jewish and Polish). By "free and independent" the narrative also stuffs this.
So no, whoever put that there knew very well whom they are celebrating. They are just fine with ethnic cleansing for some perceived benefit of their nation.
Which can be shortened to "a memorial to Nazi collaborators", which is the title.
If you know much history, the dates and Ukrainian symbols, along with the cross should set off alarm bells.
A private citizen with a sledge hammer could solve this in seconds.
In my mind, these things should not be destroyed. They should be moved to a museum, so people don't forget. Erasing history is a bad idea. We can't learn otherwise.
Why tf should they be in a museum, it's ahistorical. It's not erasing history to remove monuments; never in my life have I ever seen a monument to Hitler, but most people can still give a broad strokes review on why he's infamous. You don't need to memorialize something to teach it.
That's what holocaust museums are for.
There's many, many better exhibits there than something like this would be. Pictures of holocaust victims, stories from survivors, artifacts, etc. Auschwitz has a room with tens of thousands of shoes in a heap that had been taken from murdered children.
We shouldn't forget history, but that doesn't mean we need to preserve every Nazi memorial and every peice of Nazi propaganda.
This article was a nice hiatory leaaon on something I didn't know about. While a monument to honor these people should be removed, i think it is important to have something educational come out of this.
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