If such proposals exist, I've never seen them, aside from that "no, we never had a street named after stonewall Jackson, no sir, we're a nice modern progressive city who never did anything racist like that!" thing I mentioned before.
Also, I don't agree that tearing down a memorials honoring fallen confederates and replacing it with one honoring unionists or civil rights leaders is right, that just sounds spiteful. If you feel those people deserve memorials of thier own, then make one for them, but there's no reaso to tear another one down first.
Of course it's spiteful--that's rather the point, isn't it? Why should the victor be expected to afford the defeated pride and dignity? Why should the remnants of the old South which have so firmly rejected so many of our attempts to civilize and develop them--attempts which have allowed the rest of the South, the new urban centers like Atlanta and what not, to enrich themselves greatly and reach an economic and cultural standing comparable to the rest of the country--be afforded anything other than spite?
I don't think that would be best either, and as I've asked several times and not gotten an answer (that I can find, anyway), I don't see how any of the monuments celebrate the CSA.
I would think that my post answered this pretty well already--they celebrate the CSA simply because they stand. By standing, they tell future generations that there were Confederates worth remembering, Confederates whose faces and names and legacies ought to be preserved by future generations. That, in of itself, is a celebration.
Er....who were the other .75 million people? I'm sure both sides had the odd foreign volunteer or so, but not to the point they made up nearly 1/3 of all combats.
The Confederates, of course--a war has to have two sides, obviously.
Why does George Thomas get to be more important and more worthy than the common soldiers, but Lee doesn't, in your view? Also, did you know that both common soldiers and leaders get memorials and statues made in their honor?
George Thomas deserves statues for his exceptional valor and generalship, and also for his moral courage in resisting the temptation of treason that so many of his peers fell to. Union soldiers
also deserve statues, likewise for their valor and sacrifice. Lee and the Confederate soldiers on the other had, do not deserve statues--they were traitors, enemies, of the United States, and savage barbarians of a repulsive, verminous culture whose existence in of itself defiled the face of the world and of the United States, and should only ever be remembered as such.
As for you second question, their home state does in fact commemorate the 1st Alabama calvary specifically (which is remarkable in its own way, specific units usually aren't singled out like that):
The First Alabama Cavalry U.S. Army - Hamilton, AL - American Civil War Monuments and Memorials on Waymarking.com
And while the specific cities you mention don't have a statue of George Thomas, he has at least two, including this massive one in DC, set in a square that's also named after him:
He's not exactly forgotten.
That's good! As I've said before, it is heartening to see that so much of the modern South is not like the old one that we fought, and that our efforts to civilize and develop the region have indeed born some fruit, as uneven and incomplete and feckless as it was, to the point where many of the people of the South are so happy to celebrate their liberators!
Because, leaving aside that whole problematic "we fought hard to force our values on you, why aren't you grateful?" thing of yours, those union soldiers killed a lot of those people's friends and families to do that, and people might want to commemorate thier fallen loved ones too?
Why does anyone have a right to commemorate the ancient loved ones of their ancestors of those ancestors were by their very nature and existence as well as their treasonous action antiethical to the spirit of the United States? If Osama bin Laden's grandchildren lived in the US and wished to erect a shrine to him in public space, should we allow them to?
As far as I know, many these were erected by private citizens, not the local government itself. Also, I'd rather like it if we had a big statue showing the SEALS kicking in Osama's door and shooting him in the face. Just because it promotes a narrative doesn't mean it's pushing a bad one, and thus far your case against the south has managed to inadvertently paint them as heroes who resisted conquest and subjection by a foreign power, which I'd say is commendable enough.
You should have fact checked your rethotic here, because the fact that the south
does in fact commemorate union soldiers as well as southern ones undermines your whole point here rather badly.
I don't see why it would? Insofar as the South commemorates Union soldiers, that is good. Insofar as it commemorates Confederate soldiers, that is bad. I support the continued commemoration of Union soldiers and oppose the commemoration of Confederate ones. More monuments to Union soldiers should be erected and monuments to Confederate soldiers should be torn down. It really is that simple.
If people put up statues of Osama bin Laden, is it OK for them to do so because they also put up statues to the SEAL team that killed him somewhere else a few miles away?
Holy shit dude. The confederates were still Americans, that was the entire fucking point of the war. This is just....vile, if actual civil war soldiers and civilians, people who lost friends and comrades and loved ones to the war, could look past that and, to paraphrase Grant, see the rebels as thier countrymen again, you have no excuse to go around acting like the experiences of those people, of those states, don't matter to the rest of the country, that only the northern perspective on the war matters. Fucking hell, your logic here legitimizes the southern view of the war more than a million old statues ever could, given that you portraythe CSA as not just rebels, but a genuinely separate country the north forcefully conquered to "liberate" from thier ideas that the north didn't like.
I don't think I've ever seen someone hate the CSA so much they start arguing that not only was it was it actually the war on northern aggression, it was the war of the totally justified to save you from yourselves you uncivilized barbarians northern aggression. Do keep going, I want to see if you somehow make it all the way to "The South will rise again!".
Have you ever read any examinations of the culture of the original colonies? I particularily enjoyed Fisher's
Albion's Seed in this respect--it's analysis of the permanent cultural effect of the original colonies is incredibly deficient pop history that ignores all the centuries of changes and the influence of immigration that came from the centuries since the Colonial period, but to the extent that it's an examination of the original culture of the colonists I found it to be both very accurate and incredibly illuminating. Given that the South was also generally less affected by immigration or changes in culture brought about by societal dialogue given its distinct lack of either of those things, I'm also fairly confident that it's depiction of the original Virginian/planter and Borderer cultures remained accurate into the Civil War in a way that doesn't similarly apply to the North.
One of the most prominent things that you can take away from
Albion's Seed is the sheer extent to which Southern planter culture was exceptionally, irredeemably repulsive. This was a malicious, sadistic, violent culture of cruel, despotic aristocratic cast-offs, who brought to America an even more deeply exaggerated version of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy that had already shackled and tortured the people of England for so long. They were incestuous and condescending ("condescension" is a word that literally originates from the way Virginians would treat people they perceived as their lessers), they stubbornly resisted industry or urbanization or anything that would move the South beyond a backwards slave-agrarian plantation economy to the point of open violence (witness the Southern response to Helperism), they were essentially godless under a thin veneer or Anglicanism, and above all they were a bloodthirsty, violent, savage people kept underneath a thin veneer of "chivalry", reveling in nothing more than bloodsport and cruelty and doing murder and violence and subjugation to their perceived lessers and anyone who they felt slighted them (
this is a tendancy that remains true even today). They were without a doubt clear geneological descendants of the Normans who once raided and looted and raped their way through all of Europe (and the planters were certainly inordinately fond of rape as well--their entire maritial culture was characterized by cruelty to women, in a time when the Puritans established strict provisions against wife-beats and the Quakers went even further).
These were a people who knew nothing about diligent work or learning, and were in fact hostile to both--they believed that as aristocrats they had the active right to live in luxury while doing no labor for themselves, which is why they imported scores of first indentured servants and then slaves to the South to brutalize and make work for them, and they rejected the very concept of learning on many occasions, with Governor Berkeley famously declaring “I thank God, we have not free schools nor printing; and I hope we shall not have these hundred years. For learning has brought disobedience, and heresy and sects into the world; and printing has divulged them and libels against the government. God keep us from both!”. They knew only conquest and subjugation and cruelty, as their ancestors had likewise done to England for so many centuries. I'm not the one claiming this either--
the planters themselves from the period actively embraced this Norman heritage with all its repulsive nature.
Reading about the culture of the antebellum planters really reveals the sheer extent to which there was
nothing positive about their culture--the romanticism of them is almost entirely a postwar invention. They were not, as is sometimes now claimed, more religious than their northern counterparts--in fact, far to the contrary, they were far more faithless, and their religion was used more as a means of social control than an object of genuine faith as the churches of the North were for its own inhabitants. Nor where they particularly polite or honorable in truth--southern "chivalry" was a thin veneer masking the appallingly violent nature of their people, existing because in the world of the south one wrong misstep could have you challenged to a duel or outright murdered, and thus careful politeness was necessary to save maintain one's life. Their "conservatism" was a sham and they were happy to embrace all sorts of moral degradations just as their Cavalier counterparts across the Atlantic were, as their utter faithlessness might suggest. They had all the cruelty and arrogance of aristocracy without any of the noblesse oblige, and all the vulgarity and sentimentalism of democracy without any of the liberty or equality. They were, in every sense, a blight upon the world, a black smear whose very existence polluted the spirit of this country.
Of course, the aristocratic planters didn't form the whole of the population of the old South either, and the people they lorded
over were the Scots-Irish borderers who were little better (and of course the African-American slaves who suffered greatly under the planters' depredations but who are obviously also not very relevant to the character of the culture of the free antebellum South). These were a violent, clannish, barbarous people, characterized by hostility to learning and civilization. Unlike the planters this is at least not their own moral fault--the failings of their culture are largely a result of the deeply unpleasant environment of the English-Scottish border from which they originated--and thus many of them were eventually able to integrate into American culture under the civilizing hands of the North, but it's also not wrong to say that the original culture of the antebellum South poor whites was also deeply flawed and savage, appearing sympathetic only in comparison to the outright malign culture of their planter overlords.
Compare this to the north, where in the early days of this country religious groups like the Puritans and the Quakers built societies that were in their own ways almost the closest you could get to paradise in the 17th century. The North, which achieved an astronomical level of literacy unseen in the rest of the world for centuries early in its history, the North, which built a society of liberty and equality and harmony and tranquility alike in a time when the South had none of these things, the North whose culture of learning and industriousness and commerce built the perhaps the greatest and most prosperous country in the the world by the time of the civil war.
Part of being a conservative means being willing to acknowledge which cultures are greater and which cultures are lesser, and to wish to improve one's own culture and people in accordance with other positive qualities. Should the British, for instance, be ashamed that they worked to better civilize my mother's Hongkongese ancestors? No, of course not--and the Hongkongese were already Chinese, in many ways civilized and learned and developed in their own right, far superior in almost every respect to the repulsive culture of the antebellum South. If that is no shame, then by god, why would the heroic deed that my fathers' ancestors did in the South to civilize the people there and rid the country, however briefly it was, of the cancerous influence of the planters ever be?
I don't think you would be within your rights, actually. Given that anti-theists are allowed to put up thier various mean spirited "neener neener neener, you magic sky man isn't real" statues, plaques, art pieces, etc, and such displays are allowed despite being not just unsightly but actively and personally insulting to much of the populace, I doubt your case against this hypothetical poop statue would go well either. You don't have a constitutional right to never see an ugly thing ever.
I don't have a constitutional right to not see ugly things certainly, but as a citizen of the country I certainly
do have a right to have a say in what statues and monuments my government chooses to put up
in public space. Public space is maintained by public money--my own tax dollars. I, and all the other citizens of the country, have every right to not want to see an obscenity that offends our sensibilities put up there.