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C-Was published 2017
R-It relates to my topic because  it shows how some monuments are being taken down and been destroyed due to public statement and I think it should not be taken down.
A-It is by John R. Vile and it is a .edu
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A statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee is removed from the University of Texas campus, early Monday morning, Aug. 21, 2017, in Austin, Texas. University of Texas President Greg Fenves ordered the immediate removal of statues of Robert E. Lee and other prominent Confederate figures from a main area of campus, saying such monuments have become "symbols of modern white supremacy and neo-Nazism." (AP Photo/Eric Gay, used with permission from The Associated Press)

Civilizations build monuments to honor leaders and heroes.They may celebrate local or national heroes, or seek to bind an empire (as do the many statues throughout the British Commonwealth to Queen Victoria).

Monuments have occasionally been destroyed due to public sentiment

On occasion, popular sentiments will result in the destruction of monuments, as when the statue of King George III was destroyed after the Declaration of Independence was read in New York City.This is hardly an American phenomenon. Russians destroyed many statues of Lenin and Stalin after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and Iraqis destroyed statues of Saddam Hussein after American troops captured Baghdad.

One complexity is that statues clearly commemorate the values of the time and place where they were constructed and thus might illumine the history of such periods.Moreover, individuals may react differently to statues depending on their region, their race, or their historical understandings.

Critics note the difference between monuments to Founding Fathers and Confederate leaders

In a 2017 press conference in which he defended Confederate monuments, President Donald Trump observed that early presidents, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, were slaveholders, and yet most people do not think that their statues should be dismantled.

Critics noted that such men (in contrast to Confederate leaders and generals) had worked to establish, rather than to destroy the nation.They might further note that the historic sites of the homes of such presidents are increasingly weaving the stories of their slaves into the narratives of their lives.

Some see Confederate statues as honoring past; others as an affront to freedom

Hundreds of southern towns, which have long renounced the institution of slavery, have generic representations of Confederate soldiers in town parks on town squares.For many, they recognize the heroic sacrifice of ancestors for what they believed, which may have included anything from a desire to defend their homes, to a defense of states' rights, and issues other than the perpetuation of slavery. Some may celebrate idealized versions of Confederate leaders who never actually existed or may recognize such leaders (General Robert E. Lee, for example) for attempting to heal the nation after the Civil War ended.

Many of these statues to Confederate leaders were erected from 1890 to 1925, a time which marked the birth of Jim Crow segregation laws throughout the South, the suppression of black voting,and the rise of increased violence against blacks.African-Americans who approached such statues on public property, especially in front of courthouses, may well have questioned whether they could expect the "equal protection of the laws" promised by the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.Similarly, African-American children attending a school named after a Confederate General, or a mascot designated as a rebel, might well wonder whether they will be equally accepted as white students.

Individuals are free under the First Amendment to construct Confederate memorials on private property. There is a large statue to Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest in Nashville, Tennessee. Forrest, a Tennessean who was generally regarded as a great tactician, also was the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. While the private monument remains, there is renewed debate about whether a bust of General Forrest in the State Capitol Building (public property) should be retained. Under the government speech doctrine, the government can display or not display certain monuments. However, the government may have to follow certain legally specified procedures before it can remove monuments. In this photo, the statue of Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest is put up along Interstate 65 in Nashville, Tenn., in 1998. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey, used with permission from the Associated Press)

Government entities grapple with Confederate monuments on public property

Individuals are, of course, free under the First Amendment to construct memorials on private property.

There is a large statue to Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest in Nashville, Tennessee.Forrest, a Tennessean who was generally regarded as a great tactician, also was the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.While the private monument remains, there is renewed debate about whether a bust of General Forrest in the State Capitol Building (public property) should be retained. Under the government speech doctrine, the government can display or not display certain monuments. However, the government may have to follow certain legally specified procedures before it can remove monuments.

Protests surrounding statues turn dangerous

The issue came to a head in August 2017 when the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, home to the University of Virginia, which was founded by Thomas Jefferson, decided to remove a statue of General Robert E. Lee from a public park.This decision led to a Friday night torch-light parade through the grounds of the University of Virginia by Neo-Nazis and members of the alt-right, who while ostensibly there to protest the statue's removal (and who had a First Amendment right to protest), chanted Nazi and anti-Semitic slogans.

The next day, demonstrators and counter-protestors confronted one another in downtown Charlottesville, and one of the demonstrators, who appears to have Nazi sympathies, plowed his car through a group of counter-demonstrators resulting in the death of Heather Heyer.

President Donald Trump subsequently held a press conference in which he appeared to be criticizing all sides equally (Shear and Haberman, 2017).This sparked further outrage and charges that he was morally equating those who had been violent and those who were not.Protestors subsequently demolished a Confederate statue in Durham, North Carolina, and the mayor of Baltimore, Maryland ordered the removal of a number of Confederate memorials in the city.

Other proposed solutions have included simply leaving the statues as monuments to history, moving them to parks or museums where they can be placed in historical context, or adding disclaimers or other monuments (to, for example, former slaves) that would provide a wider context.

The case of Walker v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans (2015) established that a state does not have to make its license plates a forum for the display of Confederate flags, but it did not mandate that they prevent it under the government speech doctrine. For now, at least, most such decisions are likely to be made at the state or local level. In this Wednesday, April 18, 2001 file photo, a Confederate supporter who identified himself as "Bonzo" of Enterprise, Ala., pays homage to the statue of former Confederate President Jefferson Davis at the Alabama Capitol in Montgomery, Ala. (AP Photo/Dave Martin, used with permission from the Associated Press)

Government speech doctrine grants free speech rights to government

The case of Walker v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans (2015) established that a state does not have to make its license plates a forum for the display of Confederate flags, but it did not mandate that they prevent it under the government speech doctrine.For now, at least, most such decisions are likely to be made at the state or local level.

Christopher Ingraham reports that Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol (where each state has designated two monuments) contains 12 statues of Confederate leaders, including Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, and only four of African-Americans.

John Vile is professor of political science and dean of the Honors College at Middle Tennessee State University. He is co-editor of the Encyclopedia of the First Amendment. This article was originally published in 2017.

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A statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee is removed from the University of Texas campus, early Monday morning, Aug. 21, 2017, in Austin, Texas. University of Texas President Greg Fenves ordered the immediate removal of statues of Robert E.

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C-Posted August 23, 2017 at 5:00 AM
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In cities across the U.S., calls to take down monuments to Confederate leaders are growing louder since the deadly events in Charlottesville, Va.

One of the most dramatic monuments to the Confederacy is called Stone Mountain, in northern Georgia. It's sort of a Confederate Mount Rushmore, with Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis carved into a mountainside.

Andrew Young, a former mayor of Atlanta and lifelong African-American civil rights activist, says the memorial should stay. Young served as a congressman from Georgia and ambassador to the United Nations. He was with Martin Luther King Jr. the day he was assassinated.

"That is a tremendous carving. And I don't want to see that destroyed. I don't care who it is," he says.

Young is not alone. An NPR/PBS NewsHour poll released this month found that 44 percent of African-Americans believe Confederate memorials should stay, compared with 40 percent who say they should be removed. Nationwide, 6 in 10 Americans say the monuments should remain. Still, Young's comments come as prominent Democratic and African-American activists call for the monuments to be removed or "contextualized," to avoid celebrating the leaders who supported slavery.

Interview Highlights
On how removing Confederate monuments alienates potential civil rights allies
We made progress in the civil rights movement as 12, 13 percent of the population at most. We couldn't have made any change with that. In order to make change we had to build a majority of at least 60 percent. We could build a majority around lunch counters. We could build a majority around jobs.
On the Black Lives Matter activists calling to dismantle Confederate memorials
I'm saying these are kids who grew up free, and they don't realize what still enslaves them - and it's not those monuments.

What worries me is that this country will turn to the right so that it'll - be taking down Martin Luther King's statue next when the racist majority takes over. And I'm saying that a minority can't be provoking a racist majority that is still underemployed, undereducated and dying faster than we are - that the issue is life and death - not some stupid monument.
On adding to - not removing - the Stone Mountain monument
I would only consider adding to it a freedom bell because Martin Luther King said in his speech, "Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain [of] Georgia." He named that specifically.

Morning Edition editor Daniella Cheslow and Web producer Heidi Glenn contributed to this story.

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Civil Rights Activist Argues To Keep Confederate Monuments

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In cities across the U.S., calls to take down monuments to Confederate leaders are growing louder since the deadly events in Charlottesville, Va. One of the most dramatic monuments to the Confederacy is called Stone Mountain, in northern Georgia. It's sort of a Confederate Mount Rushmore, with Stonewall Jackson, Robert E.

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C-May 16,2019
R-It agrees with my claim that statues should stay.
A-I is by Beth D. Jacob
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Though it is historically accepted that the Confederacy was established to preserve slavery, monuments still exist throughout the United States honoring the Confederacy.

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C-It came out August 22, 2019
R-Yes the article does agree with my claim.
A-It was by Patrik Jonsson, staff writer and it is a .com
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Erected in 1911, Atlanta's Peace Monument depicts a winged goddess calling to a Confederate soldier, "Cease firing - peace is at hand."

Is that a representation of reconciliation - or oppression? Vandals defaced the monument in 2017 after a violent white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, sparked nationwide protests.

Why We Wrote This

"The past is never dead," William Faulkner wrote. "It's not even past." Many communities are wrestling with that lesson today, as they debate what to do with Confederate monuments - underscoring how their meaning is shaped by the 21st century as much as the 19th.

This month, Atlanta added an explanatory plaque at the Peace Monument site, saying the monument "should no longer stand as a memorial to white brotherhood," its original intention.

Two years after Charlottesville, many locales continue to struggle with how to properly present Confederate statuary.

In Georgia and other former Confederate states, state laws prohibit monuments from being removed. That's led cities to look for ways to better explain the stone monuments and their role in history.

Atlanta is beginning with a quick approach: plaques. Besides the Peace Monument, it has added signs at the "Lion of the Confederacy," a stone statue in a city cemetery.

Even writing a plaque can be a fraught process. But officials say the important thing is that just addressing the issue can bring history to life.

"These statues are no longer static. They are now evolving," says Sheffield Hale, president of the Atlanta History Center.

Put up in 1911, the Peace Monument in Atlanta's Piedmont Park features a winged goddess calling to a Confederate soldier: "Cease firing - peace is proclaimed."

At the time, the monument was meant not to glorify the Confederate cause, but to urge reconciliation, a rekindling of a national bond stretching from Atlanta to Boston. It was built to commemorate peacekeeping trips to the North made by members of the Gate City Guard, Georgia's first militia, in previous years.

But 2019 is different historical country than 1911. What seemed progressive then can today strike some as an oppressive symbol. Vandals defaced the monument following the August 2017 violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a "Unite the Right" rally clashed with counterprotesters.

Why We Wrote This

"The past is never dead," William Faulkner wrote. "It's not even past." Many communities are wrestling with that lesson today, as they debate what to do with Confederate monuments - underscoring how their meaning is shaped by the 21st century as much as the 19th.

Atlantans suddenly faced some thorny questions, says Sheffield Hale, president and CEO of the Atlanta History Center: "Why is a peace monument a problem? What's wrong with peace?"

This month, the city of Atlanta installed a sign that presents one answer: the memorial's idea of reconciliation excluded African Americans. "This monument should no longer stand as a memorial to white brotherhood; rather, it should be seen as an artifact representing a shared history in which millions of Americans were denied civil and human rights," the sign states.

Two years after the Charlottesville march and its aftermath, states, cities, and citizens all across America continue to struggle with how to handle and interpret the artifacts of the past in the present day.

In that struggle, different narratives clash with modern distributions of power. Conservative Southern state legislatures have passed laws protecting historical monuments, including Confederate statuary. More liberal local jurisdictions are trying to rethink and reframe the meaning of these relics by surrounding them with context, including explanatory material such as signs and plaques.

The result, as in Atlanta, is a riveting and consequential debate that is about where the nation is going as much as where it has been.

"We are in the process toward a dream," says William Ferris, associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "These statues are markers along the way of how we address both the past and the future as a people. It is an ongoing conversation that in the 21st century is taking an interesting turn as the country is becoming predominantly nonwhite."

Monumental contested meanings

Richard Straut is one of the Atlanta Peace Monument's sworn protectors. He has a different view of its meaning than that expressed by its new accompanying sign.

The former Atlanta detective spent a career in both the police and military working for and with African Americans. He is a former commandant of the Old Guard of the City Guard, entrusted with the monument's care. The Old Guard's patch - a boar's head with an oak leaf in its mouth - now decorates the state National Guard uniform.

"I'm a soldier in the Old Guard, the precursor to our National Guard," says Mr. Straut in a phone interview. "It is integrated. We are not some white supremacist nonsense."

In 1911 the Old Guard wasn't trying to undermine the government in the United States with a peace monument that referenced a Confederate soldier, according to Mr. Straut.

"It was trying to bring the brotherhood back together again, and we succeeded. We are equal. And all races are involved," he says.

The Peace Monument is far from the only memorial whose meaning is contested today, of course. From small town squares to battlefields, the South is strewn with stone memories.

They range from innocuous cemetery markers to obvious paeans to the Confederate Lost Cause, including 75 "Johnny Reb" statues - most crafted after Reconstruction in Northern forges - that stand in public places, by intent, as sentinels of white power.

As of February 2019, 114 Confederate monuments have been taken down since the 2015 attack on a Charleston, South Carolina, church by white supremacist Dylann Roof, including General Robert E. Lee from Lee Circle in New Orleans and Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest from a park in Memphis. Some 1,747 still stand, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Many of these monuments are shielded from removal or extensive alteration by state laws passed in the former Confederate states, including Georgia, according to the SPLC. Some cities in these states are challenging the legality of these restrictions. Norfolk, for instance, has sued Virginia to lift the state's removal ban.

Other localities are focusing on adding context. But that process itself is difficult. What to say? How to say it? What is the context here, after all?

"It doesn't surprise me that communities are struggling to some extent with conceptualization, because the writing of new inscriptions is always extremely contentious," says Kirk Savage, author of "Monument Wars."

For its part, Atlanta has tried to move quickly, adding low-cost, fact-based panels that contextualize memorial presence, and bottom-line their intent.

"It is a process to turn them from public statues to outdoor museum exhibits, from statement to artifact," says Mr. Hale of the Atlanta History Center. "And it is recognition that these are not Civil War monuments. They are Jim Crow monuments."

Similar discussions - sometimes heated, often thoughtful - are taking place across the South as more and more Americans realize the monuments "are connected to what is happening to me in the present day," says Mr. Savage, a University of Pittsburgh art historian.

The process of contextualization can be fraught. But inaction can have consequences. The failure of the University of North Carolina to heed calls to contextualize its Confederate "Silent Sam" statue on campus may have helped lead to a mob toppling the statue in 2018.

"We started from a premise of some are going to come down, some are going to stay up, but ... what is next is the really important question: How do we start something that is actually more democratic and more representative and more empowering for people than the old monument system, which is an elite-driven system that almost always tends to reflect the power relations on the ground?" says Mr. Savage. "Our political climate has made it a much more urgent issue."

"The statues are no longer static"

Americans seem at a wary impasse over the Confederate monument issue, polls say.

In the South, a majority of white Americans want the monuments to stay, and a majority of black Americans want them removed, according to a Winthrop University poll. Overall, a plurality thinks they should remain. There is little agreement about how, or whether, to contextualize them.

Meanwhile, majorities of both black and white Americans agree that race relations in the U.S. are worsening, according to the Winthrop survey.

That raises the stakes for questions about monuments being pondered in places like Decatur, Georgia; Savannah, Georgia; Norfolk, Virginia; and Richmond, Virginia. Richmond's Monument Avenue features famous statues of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. The city's Valentine Museum is currently exhibiting dozens of conceptual drawings of what could be done with the statues, including one idea to bury them to their heads.

"The question for us has become, what does contextualization really mean?" says Bill Martin, the museum's director. "And that becomes a jumping-off point for a conversation that needs to happen."

Two years ago, in Charlottesville, a blue ribbon committee's decision to remove a Robert E. Lee statue sparked the "Unite the Right" rally. It devolved into a riot and street fight that left dozens injured and one dead.

The national tragedy at Charlottesville made clear to many Americans that the nation's legacy of white supremacy had burst into the present, and that white supremacists looked at Confederate statues as symbols of their ideology.

As newspaper reporters flocked to the city, religion professor Jalane Schmidt began holding informal tours of the statuary. The tour continues on a monthly basis, drawing upwards of 100 people at a time.

Ms. Schmidt says she didn't realize until after she began researching that over half of the residents of Albemarle County, where Charlottesville is located, were African Americans the year the Lee statue went up. And her research showed that its installation had little to do with commemoration of soldiers, and much to do with a "lost cause mythology" that advocated a national white brotherhood to thwart the political power of black Americans.

"These statues of metal look like mute monuments, but as we found out they are distilled hatred," says Ms. Schmidt. "They are sending a message of complete disregard for the humanity of black people."

Just a few miles from the Peace Monument in Atlanta is "the Lion of the Confederacy," a stone representation of a lion in repose, clutching a Confederate battle flag. The sleeping royal feline guards hundreds of slain Confederates, including an ancestor of Martin O'Toole's.

Mr. O'Toole is a former newspaper editor, an amateur historian, and a spokesman for the Georgia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Last week, he made his first visit to the "Lion" monument after a contextual plaque was added.

Armed with a camera to document the changes, he immediately spots what he thinks is a mistake. A title says "Lion of Atlanta." The statue is actually called the "Lion of the Confederacy," Mr. O'Toole says.

He notes that Georgia nearly undermined the Confederacy as its key leaders backed national unity in the 1850s. So what happened? News in the South that church bells had pealed in New England in support of abolitionist John Brown's 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry meant that sectional disputes had morphed into "a dangerous moment for Southerners," says Mr. O'Toole. "They were suddenly afraid for their lives. They had to fight."

But even as he quibbles with the Lion's new explainer, he notes, "I'm OK with the panels. They are mostly fact-based and within the law. I just say thanks to the legislature for passing a law to make sure the Lion is still here. Or else it most assuredly would be gone."

Atlanta's confederate statues will stay, at least for now. But all around them, the conversation has shifted, and history, for many, suddenly seems alive - evoking both danger and hope.

"What is important is that these new panels are not permanent," says Mr. Hale, as park-goers gather to read the new panels. "We can change the words. We can add more panels. But that's the point. These statues are no longer static. They are now evolving."

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The future of America's past: Should we 'explain' Confederate statues?

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States are debating how to put Confederate statues in historical context - a reminder their meaning is shaped by the 21st century as much as the 19th.The future of America's past: Should we 'explain' Confederate statues?Confederate statues in context: The future of America's past?

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R-Yes it does agree with my claim.
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In the wake of Charlottesville, a chorus of media outlets, political activists, and random people on the Internet have called for the removal or destruction of Confederate statues in cities across the country. They say we shouldn't honor a bunch of racists who fought to preserve slavery, and that it's long past time for these painful reminders of our past to come down-stow them away in a museum or smash them to pieces, just get them off the streets.

This iconoclastic impulse is a mistake, even after the harrowing events in Charlottesville last weekend. It's a mistake not because there was anything noble about the Confederacy or its raison d'être, which was slavery, but because there is something noble-and, for a free people, necessary-about preserving our history so we can understand who we are and how we should live.

For all the tough talk this week about the problems with these historical monuments, there hasn't been nearly enough discussion of their history. Most of them were built a half-century after the war, as the Civil War generation was beginning to die off. Before the turn of the century, Confederate graves had for the most part not been cared for in federal cemeteries, and erecting a Confederate monument was considered treasonous.

But as the veterans of the war began to die, there was a renewed push for reconciliation between North and South, and with it an outpouring of filial piety. Of course, the monument boom across the South during the first two decades of the twentieth century came at a time of terrible race relations, mass immigration, and the pernicious influence of the Lost Cause mythos, which poisoned the South.

So the monuments reflect more than one current of early twentieth-century America. They served to venerate Confederate heroes like Robert E. Lee, thereby cementing the narrative of the Lost Cause and all its misty-eyed nostalgia about the South. But they were also an outpouring of grief and remembrance for the hundreds of thousands who had died in the war. Nearly a quarter of Southern white men in their twenties were killed or died from disease. Is it any wonder that decades later, as families began to bury Confederate veterans in greater numbers, there would be a push to erect memorials to that generation?

And for as much as Lost Cause mythology adorns so many of these monuments, their purpose was also to convey to future generations why so many people kept fighting, for years and in the face of staggering casualties. For the ordinary soldiers who fought and died, devotion to the Confederate army did not arise primarily from a devotion to the institution of slavery (just as most Union soldiers were not fighting primarily to end slavery) but from a devotion to their home states and a sense of honor and duty to defend them from what they considered to be an invading army.

That they were wrong about slavery does not excuse us today from the burden of trying to understand what motivated them to fight-and what motivated them and their families to undertake a flurry of monument-building decades later as the surviving veterans began to die off.

Speaking on Memorial Day in 1884, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., a Union veteran who saw a great deal of action, talked about the importance of transmitting the emotional weight of the war from one generation to the next, and he specifically mentions the role of monuments: "I believe from the bottom of my heart that our memorial halls and statues and tablets, the tattered flags of our regiments gathered in the Statehouses, are worth more to our young men by way of chastening and inspiration than the monuments of another hundred years of peaceful life could be."

For Holmes, it was also the duty of Civil War veterans themselves to convey the significance of the war to posterity. He said, "the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire... we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after."

This Isn't Really About Confederate Monuments

Nevertheless, a common objection to these statues today is that because they occupy public spaces, they serve to venerate their subjects, who were of course racists and fought to preserve slavery. But if we know the history, why can't we see them in a different light? Why shouldn't we view them as we should, as a haunting and cautionary tale?

Certainly, the statues were not originally meant to educate future generations about the evils of slavery and secession, but that doesn't mean that we can't take them as such today. Indeed, the fact that these statues were erected in prominent public places is itself a powerful lesson in American history-a testament to our turbulent past that would be diminished if they were removed to a sanitized display in a museum. Not every statue or piece of public art has to comfort and console us. Sometimes, they should oblige us to grapple with our nation's history and the vagaries of human nature.

Even so, some conservatives are willing to let the things go. Kevin Williamson at NRO urges conservatives to do nothing. "The Left's vandalism is intended mainly to get a rise out of the Right, in the hopes of getting some Republican to wrong-foot himself over a racial question," he writes. Even if some conservatives sympathize with those who want to remove Confederate memorials-and plenty of prominent right-of-center writers clearly do-there's no need to join them because the iconoclasm sweeping the country, says Williamson, "mainly consists of local authorities making democratic decisions about the disposition of public property," and thus "there is a case for political quietism in this matter."

That would be fine advice if it were true that this is really just about local authorities making democratic decisions about statues. It would even be fine if it were just about the moral preening of Democratic politicians and activists, seizing on an opportunity to shame and embarrass Southerners for gradually abandoning their party in favor of the GOP.

But the iconoclasm on display now is about more than anathematizing the Confederacy or scoring cheap political points against hapless Republicans. It's part of the Left's overarching critique of American constitutionalism, the goal of which is to overthrow that order.

The Real Reason The Left Wants To Forget The Past

President Trump was mocked for suggesting that if we tear down statues of Lee then activists would demand the removal of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson next. But sure enough, later in the week the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC was vandalized with spray paint. A Lincoln statue in Chicago was burned. Al Sharpton said the Jefferson Memorial should be abandoned. A pastor in Chicago asked the mayor to remove the names of Washington and Andrew Jackson from city parks because they owned slaves. A writer at Vice News called for Mount Rushmore to be blown up. One columnist in Philly even argued for tearing down a statue of Frank Rizzo, who served as police commissioner and mayor in the late 1960s and '70s. In some cases, any monument would do.

All this sounds crazy, but jumping from Confederate statues to Lincoln to Rizzo follows a certain logic. For the Left, the Confederacy is just a small part of a much larger problem, which is the past. Iconoclasm of the kind we've seen this week is native to the Left, because the entire point is to liberate society from the strictures of tradition and history in order to secure a glorious new future. That's why Mao's Cultural Revolution in China torched temples and dug up ancient graves, why the Soviets sacked Orthodox churches and confiscated church property, and why various governments of France went about de-Christianizing the country during the French Revolution.

The modern-day American Left isn't as bad as all that, but its ideology about the past is more or less the same. Hence the statement issued Thursday by Seattle Mayor Ed Murray calling for the removal of all "symbols of hate, racism and violence that exist in our city." Murray is at least consistent, as he includes not just Confederate symbols but also a well-known statue of Vladimir Lenin. These symbols, Murray says, represent "historic injustices," and "their existence causes pain among those who themselves or whose family members have been impacted by these atrocities."

He is not interested in the history of the statues themselves, the people or events they depict, or "what political affiliation may have been assigned to them in the decades since they were erected." Don't be fooled by the therapeutic language about causing pain. The statues must go because they remind us constantly of a past that needs only to be overcome and forgotten.

A more mature society would recognize that the past is always with you and must always be kept in mind. There's a reason Christians in Rome didn't topple all the pagan statues and buildings in the city, or raze the Colosseum. Edmund Burke had strong words for the French during their revolution, while they were doing their best to destroy a rich past and slaughter one another in the process:

You had all these advantages in your ancient states; but you chose to act as if you had never been molded into civil society, and had everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you... If the last generations of your country appeared without much luster in your eyes, you might have passed them by, and derived your claims from a more early race of ancestors. Under a pious predilection for those ancestors, your imaginations would have realized in them a standard of virtue and wisdom, beyond the vulgar practice of the hour: and you would have risen with the example to whose imitation you aspired. Respecting your forefathers, you would have been taught to respect yourself. You would not have chosen to consider the French as a people of yesterday, as a nation of low-born servile wretches until the emancipating year of 1789.

That is part of why these memorials and statues are important. Perhaps not all of them need be preserved, but giving into the iconoclasm of the Left, with temperatures running high, will mean we lose far more than we gain by hiding these physical reminders of our nation's troubled past.

Let them stand as a memorial of our ancestors who died, a challenge to understand their time and its troubles, and a warning for the present day.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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Why We Should Keep The Confederate Monuments Where They Are

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In the wake of Charlottesville, a chorus of media outlets, political activists, and random people on the Internet have called for the removal or destruction of Confederate statues in cities across the country.

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US Confederate monuments: What is the debate about?

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We answer the most asked questions on Confederate statues and list those monuments that are being taken down.

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C-N/A
R-N/A
A-It is a .com
A-N/A
P-N/A

# data[].attributes.body
C-N/A
R-N/A
A-It is a .com
A-N/A
P-N/A

# data[].attributes.body
C-N/A
R-N/A
A-It is a .net
A-N/A
P-N/A

# data[].attributes.body
C-May 18,2017
R-It disagrees with me because it is taking down the statues and I don want that.
A-NOLA.com
A-N/A
P-Teach

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Watch New Orleans' P.G.T. Beauregard Monument come down in 30 seconds (Timelapse)