this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
56 points (96.7% liked)

Europe

8324 readers
1 users here now

News/Interesting Stories/Beautiful Pictures from Europe 🇪🇺

(Current banner: Thunder mountain, Germany, 🇩🇪 ) Feel free to post submissions for banner pictures

Rules

(This list is obviously incomplete, but it will get expanded when necessary)

  1. Be nice to each other (e.g. No direct insults against each other);
  2. No racism, antisemitism, dehumanisation of minorities or glorification of National Socialism allowed;
  3. No posts linking to mis-information funded by foreign states or billionaires.

Also check out [email protected]

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
56
Pro-Russian parties block Bulgarian parliament over Soviet monument demolition (www.euractiv.com)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
6 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The nearly 45-metre-high monument has dominated the Bulgarian capital’s landscape for the past 70 years. Still, the new pro-EU coalition government began the process of dismantling it after being motivated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

However, the leader of the far-right pro-Russian party Vazrazhdane, Kostadin Kostadinov, called on his colleagues to express their opposition to the monument’s demolition by blocking parliamentary work.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

I’d say for me it would depend what the monument stands for.

The problem with this is that there's often multiple interpretations. Is it a monument to the celebrate the defeat of Nazism, or to glorify the paternalist role of the Soviet Union over the Warsaw Pact countries? You can't really say it's only one or the other - you can only decide which one matters more to the society at a given point in time.

I think that when there's no consensus about an interpretation in a society, a good place to start is with contextualisation. A high-profile but contentious monument should come with a small open-air museum that provides the context of what the monument was intended to stand for, what where the motivations of those who built it, and how it came to be seen as the time passed.

Then, time will tell if the society decides to interpret it one way or the other. At some point it will be clear if it should stay or go.