Quote Originally Posted by Agent Miles View Post
Read the Proclamation. Unconditional pardon is not ambiguous. You are being intentionally misleading in some ridiculous effort to create an alternate fact. The men were pardoned. Some served as mayors and governors or even judges who understood what a pardon is. They were not mostly pardoned or only 99.9% pardoned. Read it.
For the sake of argument, let's just give this to you.

The irrefutable moral argument, "You're still a traitor, because my mommy says you are!" will always be popular with pre-schoolers. I'll call the 90's so that you and Church Lady can do the superiority dance. Otherwise, thanks for your opinion.
Except by definition, they are literally traitors. Now, the state may choose to not prosecute and restore their rights but they are traitors none the less. I am quite confident that even your wide net definition doesn't include erasure.

Who can say what people were thinking when they built a statue to a person that had been returned to innocense by a lawful Constitutional process? I don't believe that those who hated and despised the men built the statues, which leaves those who loved and admired them. I don't know why the Almighty did not smite the men down immediately after the armistice, but instead some of them actually lived for decades after, only to die in the last century...when the statues were then built.
One of the main beauties of the written word is we know, or can at least infer, what they were thinking. There are a few monuments that were set up by the daughters of the Confederacy which are straight forward memorials. There are a few which are naked displays of defiance against the federal government (The obelisk in New Orleans comes to mind). However,The lions share of the monuments were erected while the black populations of these states were trying to assert their rights as citizens. That is not a coincidence.

Isn't it odd how Mississippi, which had a majority Black American population until the 1940 census, only has statues of European Americans? Actually I take that back. There are probably a few Choctaw monuments around. The enemy you vanquish must always be powerful. These things are very much about ensuring a European power structure.

Of course, Confederate soldiers owned slaves. Well at least there's an 80% chance that the statues were built for the non-slave owners.
The distinction between slave owner/non-slave owner is irrelevant. These things feed a larger European power structure. That is the issue here. The war may have ended, but the confederacy didn't lose.

As I've already posted, some Union statues might be of slave owners. And even though it's an irrelevancy, statues all over the world may be to men who were involved in the slave trade. Good luck cleansing the world's history. That's the real shame. We stand on the shoulders of our ancestors. For centuries, learned people thought that the Sun revolved around the Earth. Fallacies with this and observation lead to the fact we now know that the opposite is true. For centuries, people thought that one race was superior to another. Fallacies with this and observation lead to the truth we now know. Our mitochondrial DNA proves that the ancestors of every human alive today came out of Africa. There's only one human race and we are all Africans. People a century ago could not actually know this. We know it because people in the last century proved it. That doesn't make someone guilty for being born in an age of ignorance. I'm not the least bit interested in the smug version of historical facts.
It is not that people thought differently yesterday. It is that people today are using yesterday to impose the same power structure. Also, our concept of races as we understand them is only a few centuries old.

However, someone who still thinks the Earth is the center of the universe should be the focus of debate to reveal their stupid claim as ridiculous. That goes doubly for racial supremacists. Learn the actual truth and speak with absolute facts to those who use pompous lies to impress their friends.
A fact is useless on its on.