UVA to remove Confederate plaques and ban open flames

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UVA is taking steps to avoid a repeat of last month
 

Spoiler

The University of Virginia will remove two plaques honoring Confederate soldiers and ban open flames on campus after white supremacists marched on the campus with torches last month.

The university’s Board of Visitors voted unanimously on both issues Friday after students demanded that officials take action after white supremacists gathered on the campus ahead of the violent rally in Charlottesville, Va., last month to protest the removal of a Confederate statue, The Washington Post reported.

The two plaques honored students and alumni who died fighting for the Confederacy in the Civil War and will be moved to another location.

The measures also designate the university’s Lawn, its largest and most prominent outdoor space, as a residential facility, meaning that open flames will be banned from the area.

Awaiting the various displays of reich wing snowflakery after this;

[sawasdee]

There are ways of honouring the bravery of individual enemies, without offending others.

In WWI, the junior officers took disproportionately high casualties in the British Army. Many were drawn from the University Officer Training Corps, and the lists of those lost are heartbreaking - and very long.

In New College, Oxford, as in most colleges, there is a memorial wall in the chapel, listing the dead. 

Most Americans know of Rhodes Scholarships to Oxford for US students, but there are also scholarships to German students - they predate WWI. Three German students who had studied at New College died. There is a small plaque, at 90 degrees to the main memorial, which lists their names, and underneath, says "They too died for their country". Inoffensive, and not making judgment on whose cause was right - just that young men's lives were wasted.

That's a memorial to an enemy I can live with.