There’s nothing religious about the beehive. It was a symbol Brigham Young liked because it represented being productive and producing something desirable. The Beehive is also a symbol used by Freemasons which Brigham was.

There is a movement a foot about removing history and selling a new narrative. I believe in accurate history warts and all. People need to know who Brigham Young was. They can decide themselves whether he was a good guy or a bad guy.

We are creeping towards Pol Pot’s Cambodia when we want to rewrite history and erase what existed before. Such things are always sold as good, they hardly turn out that way. We don’t need a nanny sterilizing the world for our safety.

Rubicon Wrote:
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> There is a movement a foot about removing history
> and selling a new narrative. I believe in accurate
> history warts and all. People need to know who
> Brigham Young was. They can decide themselves
> whether he was a good guy or a bad guy.
>
> We are creeping towards Pol Pot’s Cambodia when
> we want to rewrite history and erase what existed
> before. Such things are always sold as good, they
> hardly turn out that way. We don’t need a nanny
> sterilizing the world for our safety.

You forget that for many years, much of the past you speak of was washed out and ignored, and a fable put in its place. Some things should go, and some things can stay -- with appropriate explanation.


As an amateur historian, history is open to interpretation, and statues are about who we chose to celebrate.


You mentioned Pol Pot. Way back when, there was a Vietnamese shopkeeper in Houston who put up a poster of Ho Chi Minh.


Needless to say, this was an insult to many Vietnamese who fled for their lives to escape the North Vietnamese Communist regime, and it made national news at the time.


Think about what would happen if you wanted to put up a statue of Adolf Hitler or Hermann Goering in Germany? I don't think that would go over very well either.


Now we come to the American situation. The vast majority of the Confederate monuments in the USA were erected from around 1890-1920 to honour the so-called "Lost Cause" and white supremacy. We don't have to guess because the people who paid for and erected them said so at the time. We also don't have to guess that the Civil War was about slavery, either -- because the men who started the war said so themselves.


So, yes, it's a judgement call. There's no reason to put statues of slave holding traitors in prominent places in the 21st Century. Robert E. Lee didn't even want statues made of him, and he said so publicly. The only place they belong today is in a museum or cemetery. You have to balance the good with the bad. If you wanted to put up a monument to honour *Colonel* Robert E. Lee, US Army, for his leadership during the Mexican War, you could do that with the acknowledgement that yes, he owned slaves as many others did -- but a not monument to both a traitor and slaveholder. For someone like George Washington, you show both the good and the bad. Without him, there would be no United States of America, he is the father of the nation, but he also owned slaves. Wagner wrote great music, but he was a rabid anti-Semite. R. Kelly was an influential artist and groundbreaking musician, but he's also a serial rapist and abuser.


I've seen the Enola Gay at the Air and Space Museum. You don't need to do a lot of interpretation, just present the aircraft as an historical artefact. That's how you handle stuff like this. We don't know how much of the ancient art that survives was erected for propaganda purposes, so we judge it based on artistic merit.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 03/26/2023 12:05AM by anybody.

Anybody wrote in part:

"Think about what would happen if you wanted to put up a statue to Adolf Hitler or Hermann Goering in Germany? I don't think that would go over very well either."

According to stories I've heard on NPR and elsewhere, if you tried to publicly idolize Adolf Hitler or the Third Reich in Germany, you would be arrested and sent to prison. That's because (according to NPR again) after World War II, the new West German government, with the blessing of the U.S., made it illegal to publicly eulogize or discuss the Third Reich in any other context than the terrors they sowed on the rest of humanity, especially the Jews.

This was something that the U.S. did not do after the Civil War, and the fact that the U.S. didn't make it illegal to praise the Confederacy and its leaders enabled and allowed the statues of Confederate generals to be raised in later years. It also led to myths being created about the South (such as the one I read in grade school that Robert E. Lee didn't own any slaves himself though he supported the Southern cause). Also, the inability of the U.S. to deligitimitize the cause of the Confederacy helped, I would argue, pave the way for Jim Crow in the South and over a century's worth of both public and private prejudicial behaviors against African-americans. And the fact that we *still* haven't made it illegal to legitimize the Confederacy means that we are going to have these kinds of racial problems for the foreseeable future.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/25/2023 10:39PM by blindguy.

Correct, Blindguy :)

Rubicon, you just prefer one sort of "cancellation" over another. That's all that's happening here.

I think Rubicon means "damnatio memoriae" a'la Charlton Heston being led away in chains while Moses' name is expunged in "The Ten Commandments."

That's not what's happening.

There are plenty of people in history who are well-known who don't have statues or memorials.

There are also plenty of people who should be in history books and who were deliberately left out and never had a statue nor memorial.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/26/2023 12:24AM by anybody.

Rubicon contradicts himself. On the one hand he always tells us that the victors write the history, then here he insists that we must continue to celebrate history's losers. Which is it?

His argument is oversimplification in either event. The victors were unable to preclude our understanding of the Mountain Meadows Massacre and the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust. Meanwhile removing Robert E. Lee from public squares will no more erase that chapter of American history--or the subsequent Jim Crow debacle--than the removal of Hitler statues from Berlin or Stalin statues from Eastern Europe have stopped us from understanding the phenomena they represented.

What is at issue here is not what society wants to forget but what it wants to remember more accurately. The point he fails to see is that moving the statutes of American traitors from public squares and courthouses to museums actually *corrects* the historical record both by putting those miscreants in their proper perspective and by shifting some of the focus back to the innocent human beings whose liberty and dignity they stole.

It is wrong to portray greater fidelity to the past as its opposite.

> We are creeping towards Pol Pot’s Cambodia when
> we want to rewrite history and erase what existed
> before.

Really? Changing the flag is the equivalent of killing two million people out of a total population of eight million? Do you really think the new Utah flag will lead to 80 million dead Americans, which is the corresponding figure?

And how exactly is history being rewritten? Was US history rewritten when the 49th and 50th stars were added to the national flag? I ask because I've seen the older flags going way back to the 18th century and I can't for the life of me see how anyone deprived me of any history.


--------------------
> Such things are always sold as good, they
> hardly turn out that way. We don’t need a nanny
> sterilizing the world for our safety.

The Khmer Rouge as a "nanny state."

My heavens!

I hope it's not too late, Nanny or no nanny.

This stuff is why I like the simplicity of Colorado's state flag.

Yes!  The Pac-Man flag!!!

I don't mind the inclusion of the beehive, which reflects Utah's Mormon history, and is a nice symbol of industriousness. I also like the inclusion of mountains. However, in my opinion, the flag is colossally ugly. What does red, white, and blue have to do with Utah, apart from being our national colors? How about the tans, deep reds, greens, and blues of Utah's magnificent natural environment? And the beehive symbol that they chose is very unattractive. IMO they could have done so much better.

summer Wrote:
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> I don't mind the inclusion of the beehive

I'm glad you clarified what that is. Because, sorry to say, it closely resembles something else, something distinctly unappealing. A person could mistake the bees for flies on a quick look, so then the image becomes even more unfortunate.

Uh-oh! I didn't see that until you mentioned it, and now I can't unsee it. lol

The beehive is an appropriate symbol for Utah because

(1) Mormons are indistinguishable drones, sacrificing everything for the collective, and

(2) Church leaders yearn for the days when it was a trendy hairstyle.

> (2) Church leaders yearn for the days when it was
> a trendy hairstyle.

Don't we all!

er, NO!

Don't sell yourself short, GNPE. I'm sure you looked quite fetching when you had your hair in a beehive!

Although the blue coloring works nicely too. . .

Getting back on topic, Lenin stands strong and stalwart in Seattle.

Appropriately, someone painted his hands red.

alternate suggestions-

*BY at home being served by African American slaves. Others outside doing hard labor in the sweltering SLC sun.

* BY in a wagon at the site of the MMM saying: "This was the Lord's vengeance"

* Juanita Brooks sitting at her typewriter struggling as BY ties her to her chair & puts gag on her.

* Nelson as Scrooge sitting with the other apostles on endless piles of gold coins gorging themselves with caviar
Shoutinng "Let them eat Cake"



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 03/25/2023 10:10PM by GNPE.

The original flag was described as a bedsheet with a rorshach test in the middle. It probably had a US flag and a train and an eagle and god only knows what else. A lot of state flags were bedsheets with the state seal in the middle.

They are all completely unmemorable.

I rather like the new flag. The beehive has been on Utah state police vehicles as far back as I can remember, and it is decoration on several older Utah buildings, including a large one on the roof of the former Hotel Utah across the street from the SL Temple.

The three sort-of stripes for blue sky, white mountains, red rock represent the state well, are memorable, and are the US flag colors. What's not to like?

I see no reason to think the new flag has anything to do with theocracy. FWIW, the old flag had a beehive too.

ETA: Here's an article with a photo of both flags. You decide.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/03/22/new-utah-state-flag/11520526002/

And here are the other finalists. I kind of like the ones with the crossroads motif. I-80 is the most quintessential of all the interstate highways IMHO (Silicon Valley, San Fran, SLC, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, NYC - not a bad roster). I-15 goes through sparsely populated land, but it is a major highway between Mexico and Canada, with SLC almost smack in the middle. Crossroads of the West, and all that.

https://www.ksl.com/article/50471916/does-one-of-these-flags-say-utah-to-you-utah-unveils-20-semifinalists-for-new-state-flag



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 03/26/2023 01:58AM by Brother Of Jerry.

If the flag had the words "BUZZ OFF" next to the beehive, I would approve.

Did the CITIZENS OF UTAH get to vote on whether or not to change?

If not, WHY NOT ????

They might get the chance

https://www.fox13now.com/news/local-news/new-state-flag-critics-want-referendum-to-let-utahns-vote-on-whether-it-will-fly

Should have been done up-front !

Why?

When Alaska and Hawaii became states, I didn’t get to vote on the new arrangement of the stars on the US flag. Life went on.

On the other hand, I was only eleven at the time.

Hive-mind

anybody Wrote:
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> n/t


Where are the birds?
Maybe in the bees?

They could honor Joseph by adding some laurels.