It's past time to take down Tucson's Pancho Villa statue

[Ptah]

It's past time to take down Tucson's Pancho Villa statue

By Tom Danehy

To the best of my knowledge, despite the fact that there are millions of Americans with Italian heritage (myself included), there aren't any statues of Benito Mussolini anywhere in the United States. Likewise, there aren't statues of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto or Herman Goehring or Osama Bin Laden, even though there are millions of Americans who can trace their roots to Japan or Germany or the Middle East. The reason that we're never going to have statues of these people in the United States is that each of these people directed operations that killed Americans.

Why, then, is there a statue of Pancho Villa smack dab at the entrance to Downtown Tucson...Arizona...USA? Why does this vile swine, who deserves only a gravesite to be pissed upon, instead get a statue? He doesn't deserve one in his own country, let alone in ours. He killed dozens of Americans, calmly and coldly, on more than one occasion. And yet, there it stands, after all these years.

If you asked 100 Tucsonans who (and what) Pancho Villa was, those who would claim that he was somehow a "revolutionary" are prone to defining things so broadly that they probably believe that a phallic symbol is anything that's longer than it is wide.

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And then there's his killing of Americans. After suffering that ass-whuppin' at Agua Prieta, Villa's men attacked a train near Santa Isabel, Chihuahua. They slaughtered 17 Americans, including 15 who worked for the American Smelting and Refining Company. (Villa admitted to having ordered the attack.) In 1916, Villa attacked the town of Columbus, New Mexico. Eighteen Americans died in the raid, which was carried out for no reason other than the fact that Villa was a pissy little bitch.

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