Sectarian Review: Monuments and Memory

Episodes 17 & 18: Monuments and Memory

8/14/2016

In this, the first of two episodes about cultural monuments, Danny Anderson is joined by Jay Eldred and Jordan Poss. The three discuss the indeterminacy of symbols in collective memory. From the Confederate Flag to the erasure of dissent in Stalin’s Soviet Union, we explore the controversies inherent in our cultural monuments.

Topics discussed:

Part I

Memento Park in Budapest
The problem with Rhodes in Britain
College Campus protest culture
The Confederate Flag
Jay gets philosophical
The lack of unified memory
White Pride
Jordan: Vexologist
Italians and the American Confederate Flag
KKK and local power
The Confederate Flag, the Swastika and “controlling the brand”
Confederate Flag(s) and their history
Monuments not an Aristotelian process
ISIS, Rome and the Damnation of memory
Stalin and making “history”
The Crusades: Churches into Mosques, Mosques into Churches
Should we even remember?
Memory as Mourning
In Praise of Forgetting

Part II
Protesting Building names
Audience Homework! Figure out where Jay and Jordan went to college
Chief Wahoo's demise
Clemson's racist history?
Pitchfork Ben
Best practices in naming things
Nazis and NASA!
Hitler's house
The Twilight Zone!
The pain of our being
Lincoln's pragmatism
Wernher Von Braun, Project Paperclip, and more Nazis at NASA
Freestyle Christianity Podcast - Marika Rose appearance
De-complicating history is bad
John C. Calhoun
Danny hates Oberlin
Jay hates feedback
Safe spaces
Memory is individual
Social media
Jordan's hall-of-fame quote
Danny's critique of the Left
Stone Mountain
Ozymandias

Suggested Reading

Books:
In Praise of Forgetting by David Rieff
Why Study History? by John Fea
The Monuments Men by Bret Witter and Robert M. Edsel
Nations Divided: America, Italy, and the Southern Question, by Don H. Doyle

Online Reading:
Who Are Public Monuments For? http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2016/06/who-are-public-monuments-for/
America’s War On The Confederacy Is Really A War On The Past. http://thefederalist.com/2016/05/24/war-on-the-confederacy-is-a-war-on-the-past/
A God Who Remembers by Elie Weisel. http://www.npr.org/2008/04/07/89357808/a-god-who-remembers
Hope, Despair, and Memory - Elie Weisel’s Nobel Lecture upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1986/wiesel-lecture.html
To Be a Historian is to Speak Over Gravesides by Chris Gehrz. https://pietistschoolman.com/2016/04/25/to-be-a-historian-is-to-speak-over-gravesides/

Video:
Rod Serling’s Deaths-Head Revisited Narration. https://youtu.be/2WwyvTY7M4w

“Wernher von Braun,” Tom Lehrer

Freestyle Christianity interview with Marika Rose

2 Comments

Chris E

9/1/2016 06:24:17 am

Not quite finished listening to episode 2 yet, though I thought I would pitch in with a couple of comments:

On names of buildings/grants, I think the underlying concern would be that the name itself - in isolation - becomes part of how history is being shaped and re-told. Which makes it easier to understand the impulse towards explaining the wider historical context in some way.

Of course the problem is at the Godwin end of the spectrum; where a particular name becomes inextricably linked with a set of ideals [most people would balk at memorialisation of Hitler's construction of the autobahns], and the problem where different communities associate names with different sets of ideals.

On your comments on Wernher Von Braun's life in the US; this podcast episode might be interesting listening. It centres on how the town in which the imported German scientists lived adopted their food and culture, but there is an illuminating tangent on what happened when one of the scientists was prosecuted for war crimes:

https://www.southernfoodways.org/gravy/schnitzel-and-the-saturn-v-gravy-ep-42/

danny

9/1/2016 11:43:56 am

Thanks for the comments and for the link, Chris. These are great tangents to follow out of our discussion. You are a super-listener! And I will listen to that podcast with great interest.

Episodes 17 & 18: Monuments and Memory

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