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Tuesday, August 15, 2017

They're Just Statues

We're back to the drive by the left to remove "offensive" statues and memorials.  It's another of those meaningless symbolic moves that are so important to the left and so ridiculous in reality.  Tell me, does it matter that a statue of Robert E. Lee is standing on a pedestal somewhere in North Carolina?  Whose life does it change?  And who is helped by go to the trouble of pulling it down?  The upset reminds me of what ISIS did in Syria and Iraq.  In those countries, ISIS captured cities or towns that had ancient buildings left from 2500 years ago.  Since these Assyrian or Babylonian ruins had statues of ancient gods or kings, ISIS had them destroyed as sacrilegious.  A 2500 year old statue of an Assyrian king, a wondrous example of ancient history, was destroyed by ISIS because they thought it offensive to their views.  About 15 years earlier, the Taliban in Afghanistan blew up enormous Buddhist monuments that had survived over 1000 years.  Those monuments too were deemed offensive to the Taliban.

And now we're back to deciding whether statues of Confederate leaders must be taken down.  Also, memorials to Confederate war dead are on the chopping block.  Can't we accept that the people depicted in these memorials lived in a different age?  These are not inherently evil people; rather, they are people who lived at a time when societal views were quite different.  Let me put it this way:  there's a big difference between a memorial depicting Adolph Hitler and one in memory of Germans who died in World War II.  Hitler was the epitome of evil and ought not be honored.  The soldiers, however, gave their lives for their country.  It's just not the same.  If the survivors wanted to honor their fallen family members, it would be terrible to pull down such monuments.  That is true whether or not there are people who suffered or whose families suffered at the hands of the Germans.  The Confederacy is no different.  The men who died for the South are just Americans who fought on the wrong side; they are not monsters.  Remembering them is not an affront to anyone else.

The truly saddest thing in this debate is that there really seem to be people who think that by erasing history, it changes history.  It doesn't.  The Civil War is long over.  We know what happened.  Every American knows what happened.  That ought not change.  A maniacal push to remove the history of that era is just insane.  We need to focus instead on what is happening today.

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