In the grand Media Research Center tradition of complaining about media coverage by pointing to some random, vaguely related thing, Tim Graham complains in a May 21 MRC post that Washington Post reports about the removal of Confederate statues in New Orleans don’t mention a statue of Lenin in Seattle:
Black Americans can obviously look at the history of slavery and Jim Crow and argue the Confederate generals represent oppressors. But what about other oppressors? A friend of mine named Wayne from Texas pointed out another monument The Washington Post could campaign against if they were all about cheering on the removal of men who embody oppression. Seattle has a large bronze statue honoring Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the mass-murdering Soviet regime installed in the Russian revolution of 1917. How does the Post strike a pose on that?
Graham misses the obvious point that the Lenin statue is in Seattle — rescued from the scrap heap in Czechoslovakia — as something of an art project, complete with the irony of being located in the midst of a capitalistic business district. It’s also for sale and can be moved and/or melted down for the right price. The statue is simply tolerated; nobody stakes it seriously. Graham acknowledges this, whining that the statue as viewed from the lens of “ironic detatchment.”
The Confederate statues, by contrast, were installed for the express purpose of celebrating a cause rejected by the rest of the country that was driven by the oppression and even slavery of an entire race.
Graham would be hard pressed to find anyone who will celebrate Lenin the man in Seattle, while racists and white nationalists are fighting — unironically — to keep Confederate statues.
If Graham wants to see the Lenin statue go, all he has to do is pay the family that owns it $250,000. But it seems he’d simply sit around and invent specious arguments.