The pseudonym "Philo Vaihinger" has been abandoned. All posts have been and are written by me, Joseph Auclair.

Sunday, September 3, 2017

Monumental issues

Wiki loves monuments

Everyone deplored the recent destruction of ancient Buddhist and Roman religious monuments and ruins that had stood for long in Islamic lands by Muslim zealots.

Though it was the site of horrific abuses of slaves, animals, and religious minorities - notably, Christians in particular - , pretty much everyone would deplore any proposal to destroy the Roman Colosseum on that or any account.

Most of us would find it odd for the Republicans of France, Germany, or Italy to demand statues of and other monuments celebrating past French, German, or Italian princes or monarchs, or to or of their past monarchies, be torn down on that account.

The Versailles Palace?

The Brandenburg Gate?

Mad Ludwig's castle in Bavaria?

Even of monarchs who resisted republicanism, or those deposed by republicans.

But everyone approved when Europeans throughout the Eastern Bloc tore down monuments celebrating Lenin, Marx, and Communism.

Nearly everyone today approves retrospectively the destruction of monuments celebrating Nazi and Fascist leaders, or Nazism, or Fascism in the immediate aftermath of World War Two.

Only the most hardened of the politically correct deplore the destruction by the Spanish conquerors of Aztec temples and monuments involved in the practise of human sacrifice.

Is it that we generally oppose destruction of monuments to politically or culturally dead causes or belief systems, no matter how deplorable they may have been, but approve destruction of monuments to wicked causes or belief systems we regard as all too much still alive?

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