Statue you'd tear down

[EmilyAlexandra]

I’m not sure what you mean by posting my sources. It’s not usually a requirement on an internet forum to provide footnotes and a bibliography. I am just saying, Tito undoubtedly did many bad things, but he did help to defeat the Nazis and he did keep Yugoslavia out of the Soviet sphere of influence. There are some people in history who are wholly bad (e.g. Pol Pot), but there are few people in history who are wholly good. Often the best that you can hope for is that somebody did more good than harm or that they prevented a greater evil from happening. Even people like Churchill and Eisenhower would fall into this category.

Speaking of statues, I remember taking an American friend to see the old American embassy in London (a very impressive building in Grosvenor Square). I pointed out the statue of Eisenhower, thinking she would be pleased to see that we have a fitting monument to one of her country’s greatest heroes, especially as she is a Republican (Eisenhower’s party) and a graduate of Columbia University (of which Eisenhower was president) and her family has a tradition of serving in the armed forces. Well, I turned out to be wrong! What I had not reckoned on was that my friend despises Eisenhower because he failed to take the United States into a war with the Soviet Union in response to the invasion of Hungary in 1956.

 

[JanR]

In all fairness to Eisenhower, having been a general in WWII, and seeing firsthand how devastating a world-wide conflict could be, he may have felt it wiser to avoid a war with an adversary as powerful as the USSR. It might have gotten us into a bigger conflict than we could have handled, after losing millions on all sides in the last global war.

Both we and the USSR were developing nuclear weapons at that time, and war with the USSR could have been worse than any we had previously fought.

The beef I have with Ike is that he would shoot cats on his property. He apparently didn’t like kitties. A petty objection, sure – and certainly not worth negating his contribution to winning WWII and helping restore peace in the world.

 

[RuthAnne]

RuthAnne:

He started a war without the consent of Congress

South Carolina started the war when they shelled Fort Sumter

Don’t have an argument against the rest, but South Carolina unequivocally started the civil war.

Let me rephrase. He declared a war on the South without the consent of congress. Sure, South Carolina fired the first shot. Japan dropped the first bomb on Pearl Harbor. And what did we do? Congress declared war on Japan, just as it is required in the Constitution. FDR did not declare war. It would have been illegal for him to do so. And it was illegal for Lincoln to do what he did.

 

[RhodesianSon]

The vast majority of US military interventions didn’t involve a declaration of war from congress. Even Thomas Jefferson fought the Barbary wars without a declaration from congress.

 

[RuthAnne]

Thomas Jefferson fought the Barbary wars without a declaration from congress.

Yes he did and wrong is still wrong. And when my kids use the “everybody’s doing it” argument with me it doesn’t work either.

 

[Mike_from_NJ]

Any reason why you’d tear down a statue of Nelson Mandela?

 

[RhodesianSon]

He was a terrorist. And he accepted aid from the USSR. However noble his cause initially was as soon as he got in bed with the communists and allowed attacks on civilians he became worse than what he fought.

 

[Irishmom2]

Jews obviously were enemies of German nation.

Well, that’s news to me.

 

[Inbonum]

@Irishmom2 Please read all posts, sometimes it’s not how it looks like.

 

[Inbonum]

I’m not sure what you mean by posting my sources. It’s not usually a requirement on an internet forum to provide footnotes and a bibliography.

It is not, that is just my question. It isn’t forbidden to ask for source of somebody’s words.
As I wrote before, I heard these things many times from x type of people and I am interested to know who is the historian who teaches that.

I see your point but again I cannot agree.

 

[billsannie]

Interesting sculpture, that. It makes me think of a Dalek Ku Klux Klan member riding on horseback.

 

[BlueKumul]

Any statue of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin or Joseph Stalin.

 

[EmilyAlexandra]

he may have felt it wiser to avoid a war with an adversary as powerful as the USSR. It might have gotten us into a bigger conflict than we could have handled

Absolutely. By the time of the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the USSR had nuclear weapons capable of attacking Britain (and thus all targets en route). It successfully tested its first ICBM (thus becoming the first country to possess ICBMs) the following year. If the USA had begun a war with the USSR in late 1956, the consequences for western Europe and north America would have been beyond imagination.

Also, the United States and its allies were hardly likely to begin a war with the Soviet Union on behalf of Hungary. The Western Allies didn’t put up a fight over the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland, nor allowing Poland to fall within the Soviet sphere of influence, when the Poles had just spent six years helping us defeat the Nazis. (And on a smaller scale, one could say the same about Czechoslovakia, or at least the Czech half of the country.) So we were hardly going to risk kicking off a global nuclear war to help out a country that only a decade earlier had been fighting against us and committing genocide. Not to say that we should approve of the USSR going around invading its neighbours, nor that the Hungarian people deserved to be invaded, but we also have to be realistic and say that if we weren’t able to stand up for some of our bravest allies, we were hardly likely to begin World War 3 on behalf of our enemies.