h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's probably a good idea at this point to try and explain the Confederate statue business to the rest of the wondering world. So here's the last 150 years, as I see it.

A brief chronology:

1861-1865: The United States of America came unglued at the seams. Half the country seceded from the other half. War broke out. 600,000 people died. It wasn't pretty. The South (Confederacy) lost the argument, big-time. Many movies have been made about this, most of them bad. Except for the one Florida Sailor was in.

1877-1920s: After the failure of Reconstruction - an attempt to reorganise society in the South - the original 2% reestablished themselves as the leaders in the region. They passed a lot of laws to segregate society by race. Various societies put up monuments to their heroes from the Civil War, such as Confederate generals. Most of these statues look classical and noble, and most of the time, younger people passed by them without a second thought.

When the US decided to deface Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, the diehard Confederate brigade couldn't rest until they had a Confederate Mount Rushmore. So they carved the world's largest bas relief in Georgia: you can read about it at A5404141. I've been there. I even made a phone call from a booth on top of the mountain. The monument has clear Klan connections. It's more important as a unique ecosystem, though, so I hope they don't storm up there with protest marchers. I suggest auctioning off the sandblasting rights, and let Disney duke it out with George Lucas as to whether Mickey Mouse or Darth Vader ends up on the rock.

1950s: The Civil War and its aftermath set the South back about a hundred years. When I was a kid there in the 1950s, it was just beginning to climb back out of the mess, but it was still labouring under an apartheid system. Ask Willem: that's a scary way to live.

1954-1960s: You probably know about the civil rights movement. Some very brave people put themselves on the line to stop a lot of that nonsense and break the back of segregation. We have, quite rightly, some cool monuments to them, too. If you're ever in Greensboro, North Carolina, go see the Lunch Counter Museum and find out what it had to do with everything: http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1159229

2017: Numerous municipalities have been discussing whether to remove leftover Confederate monuments. Their reasoning is usually that the monuments imply approval, send the wrong message to the young folk, and offend a lot of people. Whenever this is suggested, some other people pop up and yell that this is 'erasing history'.

People have been arguing in this fashion since the first Ancient Egyptian took the first chisel to a bas relief. Rewriting history is a human cottage industry. Besides, those who claim to be defending history quite often know very little about it. This is not to say that the monuments' opponents have all the right info, either.

SINCE LAST WEEKEND: LAST SATURDAY the KKK, Neo-Nazis, and some other generally right-wing people staged a march in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the proposed removal of an equestrian statue of Robert E Lee. Robert E Lee was the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. He also had a pet chicken: A87805588 Lee didn't want to be on statues, as I understand. He probably wouldn't care if you took him down. The protestors and counter-protestors clashed. One counterprotestor was killed and 19 injured when somebody drove all the way from Ohio to ram the crowd with his car. Two state policemen were killed when a monitoring helicopter crashed. People are angry about all this, and spend a lot of time on Twitter bickering about what the President said about it, what he should have said, etc, etc.

YESTERDAY an angry crowd in Durham, North Carolina, toppled the Confederate veterans' statue in front of the old courthouse. The leader of the group has been arrested. This removal might be more controversial than the equestrian generals': it was just an ordinary soldier, standing.

LAST NIGHT the City of Baltimore got pre-emptive. They removed all of their Confederate and Confederate-related monuments under cover of darkness. One of the statues removed was of Roger Taney. I've mentioned him in the Guide: A87884770 Taney had to swear Lincoln in, and the two didn't like each other one little bit. Taney was the Supreme Court Chief Justice responsible for the Dred Scott Decision. The Dred Scott Decision said African Americans weren't real people under law. Taney definitely doesn't deserve a statue. Lincoln and everybody else were relieved when he died in 1864, because Lincoln needed to pass the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, outlawing slavery and saying that African Americans were, too, people. And he needed a new Supreme Court justice to do it. Read more about this in the New York Times:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/15/the-death-of-taney/

Now, that's about all for today. Until they tear down some more statuary. Personally, I don't think the statues are the problem. But pulling down statues gives them something to do with their hands.

The problem is people trying to weaponise history, rather than come to terms with it. I really hate to say this, but that's how the NSDAP got started in the first place. People, take this advice I learned from my ancestors: if you lose a war, move on.

Hope this helps.

I'm viewing these developments with alarm. Don't folks in the US watch what's happening in other countries? I thought us in South Africa would have provided a sufficiently cautionary message ...

You have an excellent point, Willem. I wish my countrypeople would listen to it.

Sometimes, I'm reminded of the Scottish Highlands solution to the problem of feuding factions, in which the hotheads would be herded together into pens in equal numbers to duke it out with sheild znd claymore to the last man left standing on one side or the other.

Typically there would be two or three men left standing on the opposing side.

Unfortunately, this approach has been abundantly proven to be a failed approach for recucing excess population, one of its rationales, high rates of violence instead stimulating increases in the birth rate.

If instead, one segregates the factionals successfully, they turn to fighting among themselves within their own commumity.

Further, reason also fails with the violently inclined as a means of curbing violence.

Ultimately, only physical restraints work appreciably well towards curbing violence and the process has a potential for deteriorating into open melee which increases with the numbers of people involved.

On Trump castigating both sides in connection Charlottesville, he is correct.

Both sides apparently think that the police are supposed to be on their side, while properly the police are charged with keeping the peace irrespective of factionalism and the factions to conduct themselves peaceably in cooperation with the police.

As remarked above some people simply aren't capable of reason and there is no very sizeable factionalism which hasn't its share of the unreasoning.

Keeping their own people under control is an important function of a faction.

If their leadership hasn't a strong sense of this, elevated lawlessness follows.




On revisionist history, old saw, those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it.

I personally find an idealization constructed in denial of the facts objectionable and historically, such constructions have more often than not been instruments of tyranny.




Similarly I find political return to womb fantasies objectionable.

Historically, such have been invariably characteristic of tyrannical regimes.

Violence, or at least unpredictability and instability is inherent in crowds. We see it to a lesser extent at football matches, and even in our cities on Friday and Saturday nights.

The key to preventing it is to prevent the crowd forming, but this need to be done in a way that folks don't feel they need to gather together in the first place. They need to be listened to, so that local community leaders shoulder some of the responsibility for them. Efforts to control crowds are invariably counterproductive and stoke passions.

But it's not easy.

Measuring degree of force employed on a five point scale:

1. Presence (Standing in the way or simply making a show of presence.)

2. Assault (Verbal demonstrations short of laying hands on.)

3. Battery (Laying hands on, short of inflicting permanent or lasting bodily harm.)

4. Mayhem (Inflicting permanent or lasting bodily harm.)

5. Lethal force;

plotted against the ordinary sociological scale from micro-level (personal targeting at the individual level) to macro-level (targeting of entire populations); its best to respond in the least degree of force necessary to resolve the situation.

If one responds in the same degree of force or higher, that tends to escalate the situation.

A decisive intervention in a lesser degree of force is de-escalatory.

British police emply a tactic called 'kettling', which they believe is stage 1 on your list, but which is actually a lot worse. They contain the most active protesters within a square of riot officers and try to keep them there for hours. They won't let anyone through the line, not even any innocent bystanders caght up in it, and it can get pretty ugly. It rapidly provokes the protesters into viloence againt the police, who then feel justified at upping it to stage 3 or 4.

I don't know anything about crowd control myself. I imagine you're right - that it takes finesse to keep violence from escalating. Particularly in August temperatures. From what we've seen in New York City, one new technique for foiling these car attacks is to surround the area with large lorries filled with sand.

The only good thing that's come out of this is that a few more people are finding out at least a little bit about who these people were, and what they actually did. That might end some of the glorification.

One man who has a pretty good take on this is the Reverend Robert Lee. The general on the statue is his ancestor. Rev Lee wants them to take those statues down before anybody else gets hurt, and he preached a good sermon, called 'The Providence of a Silent God - A Response to the Events of the Weekend of August 12-13, 2017':

http://revroblee.com/2017/08/13/the-providence-of-a-silent-god/

I particularly liked:

'Because in the kingdom of God there is no racism allowed, and the last will be exalted.'

I'm less impressed by what Rev Lee's great-great-great-great-uncle did, and more impressed by what the general's great-great-great-grandnephew is doing.

Here's how it went down in South Africa. Things were getting nasty in the sixties. The ANC had finally decided to use violence ... having tried pretty much everything else up to that point. So ... you had those big protests, the government at that point had been chronically underestimating the 'enemy' ... you had these thousands of people, police utterly unprepared, sending a few cops to 'control' a crowd ... the crowd hostile as can be, and while the police have firearms, the crowd has rocks, bottles, clubs, all sorts of improvised weapons (but few or no actual firearms). The cops understand that they're facing people who hate them and what they stand for with every fibre of their being ... the crowd is 'toi-toiing' (like a war dance) and chanting essentially war songs in unison, sending chills down your spine ... the crowd gets worked up, the police progress from nervousness to sheer panic ... rocks and bottles start to fly, and a single cop loses it and starts to shoot ...

At that stage the ANC leadership had run out of sh*ts to give ... they didn't 'mind' losing a few foot soldiers (even if those were mere kids ... the youth had been effectively radicalized by then) if it made the Apartheid government look bad ... the government in turn was still utterly underestimating the severity of the forces set loose.

The whole business was getting extremely ugly and it was because the government at that point had been neglecting the core issue for decades. The whole issue should have been settled politically and culturally ages ago. We were dismissing the majority of the people in this country, and their aspirations. The government also believed so much in their own power that they thought they could 'win' and just sweep aside all the resistance to their policies. And that everybody would believe them when they denied and tried to 'white wash' what was going on. How wrong they were.

Of course the situation in the USA is not exactly the same ... but it is still a nasty business that needs to be settled politically and culturally before you have perhaps literally another civil war.

Very well put, Willem. Thanks for giving us the benefit of your experience.

From the times of the Neanderthal Man through the ages to "modern" man, we have gone from stone axes/weapons to satellites being sent far distances in space and all other the wondrous achievements
BUT! that was only by a small portion of humans.
80% haven't progressed mentality wise, even with breeding
so many on this planet will alwys remain 2 brain cells behind plants and continue to pass low standards to future offspring

I do not like getting into things like this, it is a no-win situation.

However I do not like people who insist on removing or destroying things they are not capable of replacing. It reminds me of the Taliban destroying everything that does not support their own narrow point of view.

Since 1963 we have had a movement to put J F Kennedy and Dr. M L King's name on streets and schools in almost every city in the USA. That is a good thing!

We need to all get back to respecting each other – not letting the streets 'run with blood'

just my

F S

P S I don't mind my film being listed as 'bad', it is still only a Hollywood perversion of an historical event.

Like I said, that wasn't a bad movie.

And I'd second the idea of respect. Let's learn from the stupid things people used to do. And try not to do anything stupid today.

When those of us who participated in the film saw the final release, most of us armature military historians, thought the open taunting of the two sides of Cadets was most likely impossible. A search of the historical records proved us wrong. The scene of the escaped slave woman giving birth with the sound of the cannon in the background was a bit of a stretch, as they were hundreds of miles away at the time. But I will give them a break for Artistic License.

The ending did give a good view of the cocked-up skedaddle back to DC

F S

if this has been mentioned before (I'm in a hurry) but if not I think y'all might find this interesting:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/robert-e-lee-opposed-confederate-monuments/

More details here:

http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/saxon/servlet/SaxonServlet?source=/xml_docs/valley_news/newspaper_catalog.xml&style=/xml_docs/valley_news/news_cat.xsl&level=edition&paper=rv&year=1869&month=09&day=03&edition=rv1869/va.au.rv.1869.09.03.xml

"The problem is people trying to weaponise history, rather than come to terms with it." How true.

There appears to be some evidence that the Charlottesville confrontation was engineered and that the police were ordered to stand down. There are some that questions need answering about this event.

Lessons from South Africa - let's hope it doesn't come to that!

up't north hereone of our many sayings is:- manners cost nowt, so why don't more people have them ?

manners also brings respectand vice-verse

Identification between the Nazis and the Confederacy is somewhat puzzling given that there is no relationship between them and non-Germans (under the Guelph Convention) are technically ineligible to become Nazis in any event.

I personally wish we'd simply followed on the European example and outlawed the Nazis `a priori following WW II.

Maybe we should start similar outdated parties, such as the 'Genghis Khan Appreciation Society', or the 'Attila the Hun Fan Club'.

Both already exist and are perilously close to political return-to-the-womb fantasies.