I love when some people claim that blacks in the US need to 'get over' slavery because it was over 100 years ago and none of them lived through it. On the other hand when some other people say put the confederate statues in museums and not in the middle of parks and streets, those people from the first sentence get all upset and hurt because it's 'their' history.
I'm not comparing tragedies, however you don't see people telling the Jews to get over the holocaust. Meanwhile in Germany you won't find a statue of Hitler or a Nazi flag anywhere(Maybe in some basements). Again I'm not comparing tragedies, I'm just using an example.
There's a big problem in our country and it's really so sad.
You need to place things like these within the appropriate historical context as even if certain historical events appear the same, you can't just jumble them together like that.
Slavery was during its time considered almost universally normal. Only at the start of the 19th century the slave trade was abolished (at least in the Western world) while slavery itself disappeared during the course of the century. I mean this is already distant history, not that distant for people to not have any connection to it, but still. Also the point of slavery was economic profit, not to kill people. Yes a lot of people died, but that was just a side effect.
The Holocaust on the other hand was even when it happened considered to be atrocious and its purpose was complete annihilation of the Jews. This also only happened half a century ago and many people who lived through it are still alive today. What's more the entire Holocaust-movement is actually quite recent as during the Cold War anything that could affect Germany got ignored. Only after the fall of the SU the Holocaust became a hot topic and it was carried mostly by a new generation of Jews who didn't exist during the war, but wanted to know what happened to their parents and grand-parents.
Same thing with nazi and confederate memorabilia. In the USA you have a distinct southern culture with deep roots and the confederacy is a part of that. In the case of Hitler and the nazi-party however for most Germans their relationship with it was just superficial. As long as Germany was doing fine they went with the flow, but the moment the war was lost everything related to Hitler was immediately removed. Though from time to time a forgotten nazi monument pops up.
Public monuments though are by default difficult to deal with. What most people don't realize is that such monuments often are multi-layered. The circumstances in which a monument was raised decades ago are not the same as the ones in which we view those monuments today and often the associations people make and the meanings they give to them change over time. John Oliver made a segment about this and it was interesting to know that apparently the majority of the confederate monuments were actually raised in the '60 and '70.
Personally I have mixed feelings. Removing public symbols can have nasty side-effects. Take the confederate flag for example. Till recently it had quite a few different values, but by forbidding it, it became an almost exclusive symbol for racists and similar radical groups. It also feels like you're trying to sweep things under the rug. On the other hand it's not a good sign either if you have monuments that have obvious references to notions we don't accept anymore today. Yeah it's a paradox.
