—
Imagine walking down the main street in your middle class American town, and seeing a statue of Saddam Hussein. You turn the corner and run into a statue of Ho Chi Minh. Sounds like a bad dream, or a plot from a post-apocalyptic movie, but hundreds of Southern U.S. towns and cities are littered with monuments to people who were enemy combatants of the United States.
I understand the pride Southern people have in their history. It is a unique history that is much more complex and rich than just the scars of slavery. I am not from the South, and as a Yankee I don’t believe I have the right to lecture from any moral soapbox, nor do I pretend to know better than those who are immersed in that culture.
But I don’t understand why any city or state government would memorialize enemies of the United States. The unspeakably grotesque institution of slavery that the confederacy fought seems to be the main reason for taking the monuments down, but we have former slave owners on our currency. There aren’t any movements to take Ben Franklin off the $100 bill.
◊♦◊
Anyway, I was pleased to see the statues come down; they are a symbol of racism and a symbol of separation. Not only a literal symbol of separation from the United States, but a philosophical point of separation among southern citizens as well.
They belong in a museum, where that period of time can be studied and taught to the next generation. This would be more beneficial than just having their unexplained presence left open to interpretation, or as a rallying point for dangerous margins of white society.
But for the people who want to take these statues down, and erase them from history, I emphatically disagree and find that dangerous.
We can’t do what we always do in America – cover up the scars of the past and pretend that they didn’t happen. We’ve done that with a good deal of our history, from atrocities committed at home – those against Native Americans – to our clandestine and dubious activities overseas, including the long list of democratically elected regimes we’ve toppled through the years.
Covering up the past leaves the door open for it’s horrors to happen again. In Germany, for example, the Holocaust is taught extensively and without restraint. Students are shown pictures of concentration camps, and hear stories from those who survived. The history becomes real and visceral, rather than some distant event that took place eighty years ago.
In America we have a bad habit of covering up the uglier parts of our past. It is not only an injustice to the people who are lost to history, but hurts our present and future. Entire generations of children who are ignorant to the mistakes of the past will inevitably repeat them. We should lay our whole truth out on the table, good and bad. We need to be teaching the mistakes of the past – towards Native Americans, towards African Americans – overseas. The first step in fixing a problem, is identifying the problem, and when we start teaching our truth, rather than the story we wish history was; the next generation will be armed with the knowledge to take us farther than we have ever been before – physically and morally.
Get the best stories from The Good Men Project delivered straight to your inbox, here.
—
Photo Credit: Getty Images
Which of our current heroes do you think future generations will want to de-memorialize?