Revising history?

The rush is on. Governments and public institutions are scrambling to remove Confederate war statues and memorials.

It has been coming for a long time. Most recently, Confederate flags were removed from some public property in the south.

The move has picked up dramatically as a result of the protests and violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. That is where racial hate groups and counter-protestors clashed. One young woman was killed when a white supremacist ran her over with a car. The uproar only increased when President Trump first failed to condemn the racist groups.

The violence, verbiage and actions of the white supremacists have offended so many Americans that they are responding with calls to erase all remnants of the Confederacy.

Germany was faced with a similar problem after the collapse of the Nazi regime. It simply outlawed all representations of it.

The answer is not so simple here. More than a hundred years have transpired since many of the statues and monuments were created. The Stone Mountain carvings could be considered a work of art.

The Civil War is a matter of interest to many. Television relates the history of the war regularly. It is a common fare for many Americans. Countless books have been written on the subject.

Most important, for decades the Civil War has been recounted in unbiased terms. It is a matter of history. Although ethical and moral questions have been raised, they are not the center of most retellings.

Still, many Americans are offended by the depictions and the underlying truth that the war was fought by the Confederacy to preserve slavery. The real offense, however, is that these aging artifacts are now modern symbols of white supremacy and hateful racism. As such they are being targeted.

What must be targeted and erased, instead, are the hateful hearts. They are more dangerous than any number of ancient symbols.

Slavery is a scar on our history. Now, we must fight the new scar forming. It is the hatred and bigotry that is boiling up in the country.

Erasing all vestiges of the Confederacy is simply erasing history. As a country, we cannot ignore all that shaped us over the years. We should not try to revise history. We should try to better understand it and learn from it.

There may well be better ways and places to commemorate this painful part of our past. Certainly, monuments displayed on public lands may not be the best.

Just moving or removing old statues will not sanitize our history. Nor will it sanitize our present. For that we have a lot cleaning to do.

Gordon Forgey

Publisher