Lenin wasn't the proximate cause of generational misery for an entire community of Americans (and yes, I realise there is also a sizeable group of escapees from Soviet communism here, but I hope that I don't have to point out the obvious differences in scale and effect).

As a Lithuanian-American, I'm appalled that you would shrug off the hate implicit in that statue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_deportations_from_Lithu...

"Deportations of the civilians served a double purpose: repressing resistance to Sovietization policies in Lithuania and providing free labor in sparsely inhabited areas of the Soviet Union."

While I certainly wouldn't 'shrug off' anything, there is a very material difference between a privately held statue to a foreign historical figure with a ruinous effect on a large segment of the world's populations and a public commemoration of an actual traitor to the nation, responsible for attempting to defend the actual enslavement of a large population of Americans. Especially when the main utility of the former in this context appears to be to distract from the latter.

If it is a distraction to the latter, then shouldn't it come down? Next, you're going to defend the Gandhi statue on the Embarcadero in San Francisco, I suppose!

http://www.gandhism.org/san-francisco/

> I'm appalled that

Therein lies the problem. Why can't we all just have friendly conversations without being so upset all the time. Not everyone has the same information as the other person.

Is it because the scale of the demise he caused, or because he caused it to non-americans?

If it's the former, Lenin is no saint worth a statue: http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Quotes/leni...

If it's the latter, it's a sad example of US-centrism. By that token, <insert any other non-US dictator here> would be acceptable.

It's the latter, and it's not because of US-centrism, but because of the context in which the question was asked, which is the desire to remove statues to Confederate soldiers.

> the obvious differences in scale and effect

What do you mean? More people were killed by communists than by Nazis.

I was explicitly talking about American communities, which is the context in which the comparison between Confederate statues and the one of Lenin arose.

We should probably include the leaders inspired by Lenin as well, which leads to significant communities of Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Cuban, and other nationalities as well as the Russians.

Also the Eastern Europeans who escaped the Iron Curtain, or who still had families behind it.

The number of Americans whose families suffered because of Lenin and his followers is hard to count.

My thoughts:

a) Lenin didn't fight wars to preserve his right to literally enslave people.

b) This is still irrelevant to the issue of whether statues of Robert Lee should stand erected in public spaces.

> Lenin didn't fight wars to preserve his right to literally enslave people.

Some have argued that communism enslaves everyone.

> This is still irrelevant to the issue of whether statues of Robert Lee should stand erected in public spaces.

Agreed, especially if the statue is privately owned, but I do wonder if groups like Antifa are calling for the owner of the Lenin statue to be fired.

That one is def in poor taste, but it is private property.

Why does Seattle have a Lenin statue?

From [1]:

> Initially installed in Czechoslovakia in 1988, the sculpture was removed after the Velvet Revolution and brought to the United States in the 1990s.

> Lewis E. Carpenter, an English teacher in Poprad originally from Issaquah, Washington, found the monumental statue lying in a scrapyard ready to be sold for the price of the bronze

> ... Carpenter approached the city officials with a claim that despite its current unpopularity, the sculpture was still a work of art worth preserving, and he offered to buy it for $13,000. After many bureaucratic hurdles, he finally signed a contract with the mayor on March 16, 1993.

> ... the statue was cut into three pieces and shipped to the United States at a total cost of $40,000. Carpenter financed much of that via mortgaging his home.

> The Carpenter family continues to seek a buyer for the statue. As of 2015 the asking price is $250,000, up from a 1996 price tag of $150,000.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Lenin,_Seattle

Or the US flag and almost every statue in the country. A native american friend in college said the US flag represents the same thing to them that the swastika represents to jews. Should we take down all the flags?

After a certain point, you have to forgive and forget and move on or society is going to break down. Especially a nation like ours filled with the unparalleled horrors.

Everything from our money, our schools, our cities, etc honor a slave owner or someone who participated in the genocide of the natives. Even MLK was an abusive wife beater and we have a day named for him.

Having said that, I can see the other side. A native american certainly has a lot of valid grievances when it comes to the US. I can see how a A black person doesn't want to go to a school named for a slave owner.

It's hard to see how we fix things. Do we have a wholesale purging like germany did after ww2 when they removed all glorification of the nazis? How practical is that in a nation like the US?

Where is the happy medium? Can a divisive issue like this ever lead to a common ground or a compromise?