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CONTEXT PARAGRAPHS

Japanese American Internment

In the uncertain weeks after the Japanese surprise at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 many Americans-particularly those on the Pacific coast- feared enemy attack and saw danger in every corner.

These fears, combined with racial prejudice, led to a great injustice. Early in 1942, civilian and military leaders on the West Coast charged that members of the region's large Japanese American community might be working with Japan's military to plan acts of sabotage. Though no serious evidence of this existed, they pushed the Roosevelt administration for action.

On February 19, 1942, FDR issued Executive Order 9066, which led to the forced relocation of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast. More than two-thirds of these people were native born American citizens. They were confined in inland internment camps operated by the military.

Executive Order 9066

FDR's Executive Order 9066 led to the imprisonment of 120,000 Japanese Americans. Abruptly forced to abandon or sell their homes and businesses, many lost everything they owned. Despite this injustice, thousands of young Japanese American men from the camps volunteered to serve in the nation's military, where they distinguished themselves with extraordinary valor in combat. The 442 nd Regimental Combat Team (RCT), comprised entirely of Japanese Americans, became the most decorated unit in U.S. military history for its size and length of service.

ER and Internment

Eleanor Roosevelt opposed internment and tried to stop FDR from issuing Executive Order 9066. Concerned about the potential hysteria against Japanese Americans, she visited Japanese American communities and praised their patriotism. But when she discussed the issue with FDR he was unmoved.

ER did not speak out publicly against her husband's decision, opting instead to work quietly behind the scenes. But many in the Japanese American community knew of her sympathies. In April 1943 she visited the Gila River relocation camp in Arizona. She was impressed by the character and perseverance of the detainees. In a report to FDR she urged him to relax the order and allow detainees to return to their homes. ER's report helped convince FDR to explore releasing some with work permits. By the end of 1943 one-third had been released from the camps. It would not be until January 1945, however, before the Executive order was rescinded and all the internees were released.

The Supreme Court upheld the President's Executive order in two wartime cases. But in the 1980s, the United States Congress acknowledged this gross violation of the civil liberties of American citizens and voted to provide some financial compensation to individuals confined in the camps. The Supreme Court also vacated its earlier wartime rulings.

CENTRAL ISSUE

In times of national crisis individual civil liberties must be weighed against protecting the public at large.

Today, the decision to intern Japanese Americans is widely viewed by historians and legal scholars as a stain on Roosevelt's wartime record.

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI arrested over 1,200 Japanese aliens throughout the United States. Over the next several weeks, President Roosevelt received contradictory advice about further action.

FDR's military advisers recommended the exclusion of persons of foreign descent, including American citizens, from sensitive areas of the country as a safeguard against espionage and sabotage. The Justice Department initially resisted any relocation order, questioning both its military necessity and its constitutionality.

But the shock of Pearl Harbor and subsequent news of Japanese atrocities in the Philippines intensified long standing racial tensions on America's West Coast. In the face of political, military and public pressure, Roosevelt accepted the relocation proposal. His Attorney General acquiesced only after the War Department relieved the Justice Department of any responsibility for implementation.

On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 granting the War Department broad powers to create military exclusion areas. Although the order did not identify any particular group, in practice it was used almost exclusively to intern Americans of Japanese descent. By 1943, more than 120,000 Japanese Americans living along the West Coast had been forced from their homes and moved to camps in remote inland areas of the United States.

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Curriculum Guide - Japanese American Internment - FDR Presidential Library & Museum

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In the uncertain weeks after the Japanese surprise at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 many Americans-particularly those on the Pacific coast- feared enemy attack and saw danger in every corner. These fears, combined with racial prejudice, led to a great injustice.

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Erasing history?: The debate over Confederate monuments

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The statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee sits at the center of the park formerly dedicated to him, the site of recent violent demonstrations, in Charlottesville. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

Comment Gift Article
As an anthropologist who has studied the meaning of monuments and sacred spaces in other cultures, the recent controversy and violence surrounding Confederate monuments has been ethically challenging. I love my country, and part of my professional responsibility is to foster tolerance. I have also worked with our military to help thwart the Islamic State, an organization that instituted slavery in our time. As such, I detest the legacy of division, bigotry and slavery these monuments represent. But I think they should remain.

In the 1980s, I worked as an archaeologist at ancient Mayan ruins in Central America and saw how monuments to their rulers were defaced during the tumultuous fall of their civilization. The Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten similarly defaced and destroyed statues of earlier Egyptian gods in his religious reform 3,300 years ago, and Spanish conquistadors destroyed Aztec and Inca monuments and statuary in their war on idolatry in the New World.

And there are plenty of examples of the desecration of monuments in the 21st century. The Taliban blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001; we aided Iraqis in toppling the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square in 2003; and nothing can compare to the scale of destruction of monuments at the hands of the Islamic State.

Simply removing monuments and moving them so they are out of sight is likewise not new, either. The Inca Empire of South America removed icons of conquered peoples' gods and effectively held them hostage in a temple in the Incan capital of Cuzco. In our time, the post-Soviet Russian government removed many statues of Lenin and others, which now reside in Muzeon Arts Park in Moscow.

People effectively act as though destruction of a monument exorcises its power and removal banishes the power from their midst. But these pieces of metal and stone only have the meaning we assign to them, and that meaning can take any form we like. They can be revered or reviled; honored or ridiculed; or co-opted for a new purpose.

I understand the affront that Confederate monuments are to those whose ancestors were held as slaves or died preserving our country, and to those who suffer and oppose racism today. However, destroying monuments takes a page out of the playbook of mobs across the centuries, lowering one's self to that moral plane.

Further, removing Confederate statues amounts to whitewashing our history, turning our heads away from the inconvenient truths of our past. We should let them stand and use them to remind ourselves of what we are and are not, the cost our forebears paid for our freedom and to educate our children.

And the facts are plain: The South seceded from the United States over the issue of slavery. Many Americans believed in the superiority of Europeans over Africans at that time. Slave owners used that belief to justify the owning and abuse of millions of human beings. In the late 1800s, the era of Jim Crow disenfranchisement of blacks was ushered in and continued until the 1950s. This period witnessed the greatest spike (especially from 1900 to 1930) in monument building honoring the Confederacy. A smaller spike occurred from 1954 to 1968, in reaction to the civil rights movement.

The Civil War was the single most devastating war our nation ever fought. Nearly as many Americans died in that war than all of our other wars combined. Americans never paid so dearly for their country and what it was to be. With regard to fighting against racist ideology, World War II claimed 400,000 American lives. These two wars may account for 80 percent of the blood spilled for our country.

Civil War monuments bear a constant testimony to all of this history, none of which should be forgotten. The monuments should remain, and we should constantly remind ourselves of what they represent.

When racists revere these monuments, those of us who oppose racism should double our efforts to use these monuments as tools for education. Auschwitz and Dachau stand as mute testimonials to a past that Europeans would never want to forget or repeat. Why not our Confederate monuments?

Destroying or removing monuments is the easy way out of our obligation to understand our past and improve our future. Monuments to our nation's racism can be as much a tool to counter it as they can be a tool to foment it. The choice and obligation is ours.

The Post's View: It's time for a full and fair reckoning with Confederate statues
Read more on this topic:
Tony Horwitz: Is the Confederacy finally about to die for good?

Bree Newsome: Go ahead, topple the monuments to the Confederacy. All of them.

E.J. Dionne Jr.: There's a right way to judge America's past
Dana Milbank: Obama offers the perfect response to the Confederate flag wavers

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Opinion | I detest our Confederate monuments. But they should remain.

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Comment Gift Article As an anthropologist who has studied the meaning of monuments and sacred spaces in other cultures, the recent controversy and violence surrounding Confederate monuments has been ethically challenging. I love my country, and part of my professional responsibility is to foster tolerance.

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Proposal to remove monument

Durham, N.C.

Confederate soldier monument toppled by protesters

Protesters pulled down a statue of a Confederate soldier in front of the Durham County Courthouse in Durham, N.C., on Aug. 14. The statue, which had stood since 1924, was protected by a special law. On Aug. 19, Duke University removed a Robert E. Lee statue from Duke Chapel.

Tampa, Fla.

Confederate statue considered for removal

A Confederate monument in Tampa will only be removed if enough private money is raised, Hillsborough County Commissioners decided on Aug. 16. On Thursday, Tampa's three major sports teams said they would help pay for the monument's removal.

Washington, D.C.

Proposal to remove Confederate statues from U.S. Capitol building, park

Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey tweeted late Aug. 16 that he plans on introducing a bill to remove Confederate statues from the U.S. Capitol building. On Aug. 17, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, called for the removal of the statues, describing them as "reprehensible." There are at least 12 Confederate statues in the National Statuary Hall Collection of the Capitol building. D.C. officials have called on the National Park Service to remove a statute of Albert Pike, a Confederate general, from a park.

More removed monuments

Ellicott City, Md. "

Confederate memorial removed

Late Monday night, Howard County officials removed a Confederate memorial that had stood outside of a courthouse in Ellicott City, Md. "The more appropriate place for the memorial is in a museum," said Alan H. Kittleman, the county executive, in a post on Facebook.

San Diego "

Plaque honoring Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, removed

The plaque at Horton Plaza Park was removed on Aug. 16. "Monuments to bigotry have no place in San Diego or anywhere!" City Councilor Christopher Ward wrote on Twitter.

St. Petersburg, Fla. "

Plaque honoring Stonewall Jackson removed

A marker honoring the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Highway was taken away on Aug. 15 by city officials who said they did not want it to become a "flashpoint in this national debate."

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Confederate Monuments Are Coming Down Across the United States. Here's a List.

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Proposal to remove monument Confederate soldier monument toppled by protesters Protesters pulled down a statue of a Confederate soldier in front of the Durham County Courthouse in Durham, N.C., on Aug. 14. The statue, which had stood since 1924, was protected by a special law. On Aug.

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ape Town was the first. In March 2015, a student named Chumani Maxwele brought a bucket filled with shit to the University of Cape Town, where there stood a statue of Cecil Rhodes, the British diamond magnate, colonial politician and avowed white supremacist. "There is no collective history here - where are our heroes and ancestors?" Maxwele announced. He splashed the contents of the bucket over the monument.

The incident attracted national attention and within days had grown into a full-scale protest. Students covered the Rhodes statue with graffiti and plastic bags, and promised to demonstrate until it was removed. The statue had drawn criticism before, but none of such sustained anger, even though there was no mistaking what the Rhodes monument represented. Erected in 1934, it occupied the very centre of the campus, the bronze Rhodes gazing out over the city as though contemplating creation: his and, perhaps, God's.

Rhodes believed black Africans were a "subject race" and that white rule was the natural order. The setting and the figure's obvious stylistic debt to Rodin's The Thinker symbolised the "civilisational" ambitions Rhodes harboured for the colony he governed, ambitions made plain by the inscription from Kipling along the plinth: "I dream my dream / By rock and heath and pine / Of empire to the northward / Ay, one land / From Lion's head to line."

But there was an air of fragility, of the elegaic, at work too: the figure that looks out from its seat in photos from before the protests is bare-headed, middle-aged, mortal. It is Cecil Rhodes near the end of his life. (He died in 1902.) He contemplates his life's work, and with it, the future that will come to pass without him. The monument didn't satisfy itself with celebrating Rhodes; it lamented that he did not live long enough to enjoy the white-ruled South Africa he helped to create.

When the statue was installed in the pre-apartheid era, white rule couldn't be taken for granted - not yet. The suffering of its black residents needed to be naturalised first, and to that end the monument cast Rhodes's life's work as a noble struggle, with his supposed civilisational achievements implicitly justifying his policies and the pain they caused. If black Africans were admitted into this anxious reality, it was so their suffering could be diminished and finally negated. They were the obstacle Rhodes surmounted. In place of their suffering we got, obscenely, his suffering.

The statue finally came down a few weeks after the Rhodes Must Fall protests began. It had stood for more than 80 years, including through two decades of majority black rule under the African National Congress (ANC), the party of Nelson Mandela. The protests and the removal of the statue took the South African establishment by surprise, including those, such as the then president, Jacob Zuma, and the archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane, who a generation earlier had helped end apartheid.

The blindness of the everyday

There was a time not long ago (though it feels like forever) when a kind of blindness was possible as you moved through your city - any city. You could step out of your front door and cross street after street without giving much thought to the former colonies and forgotten diplomats they memorialised; go to school or work in a building named for a famous statesman without doing a moral accounting of his achievements; eat your lunch beneath the statue of another long-ago luminary renowned for his charity without wondering about the provenance of his wealth; stop on your way home to take in a view of the city at night without imagining what, or who, was there before. To never wonder, never imagine: this was possible if your skin was a certain colour.

This is the blindness of the everyday. We grow used to the spaces we inhabit. We stop seeing them. And we grow used to the ideas around us until we can't see them either. Not long ago it was possible to believe the past was irrelevant - that history had no purchase on the postcolonial, post-cold war, post-everything present. With the horrors of the 20th century behind us, the free market would deliver us into a future where democracy and prosperity were available to all. (Again, this was easier to believe if your skin was a certain colour, if you belonged to a certain class, if you had a certain set of experiences.)

Little by little, that narrative began to fray. The growth and exuberance of the 1990s set the tone for a decade of reckless military adventurism, financial deregulation and economic globalisation, which in turn gave us the disastrous wars in Iraq and Syria, a market crash, multiple refugee crises and massive, rising inequality. At some point along the way, around the time of Brexit and Donald Trump, the ideas we took for granted lost their explanatory power. All around us the historical forces that have always shaped our lives have become visible. The urban monuments we barely noticed have become the centre of protest movements around the world.

As the Cape Town protests spread across South Africa, students at Oxford University in England launched their own version of Rhodes Must Fall: they marched on a statue of Rhodes at Oriel College, demanding it be torn down and that the university curriculum be changed to reflect the diversity of thought beyond the western canon.

In Berlin, social justice groups launched a campaign to rename the African Quarter because of its connection with Germany's genocidal colonial reign in the early 20th century. The protests have challenged Germany's self-image as a bastion of tolerance, coming as they have while the country struggles to integrate hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East.

Across the US, Confederate monuments have become the target of protests, most spectacularly in Charlottesville, where anti-racism activists clashed with white supremacists last August over a statue of Confederate army commander Robert E Lee. One woman who was peacefully protesting died and many people were injured. Trump defended the torch-wielding far-right extremists as "very fine people".

The fury of the counterprotests in Charlottesville and in other cities show how high the stakes in the so-called statue wars are, and how difficult removing the symbols of slavery and colonialism will be. But the protests continue to gain momentum. In the past month, protesters toppled the "Silent Sam" Confederate statue at the University of North Carolina and defaced another monument in Virginia. The city of San Francisco quietly removed a 19th-century statue that celebrated the founding of California - and the humiliation of Native American peoples. Austin, Texas, is supposedly mulling a name change because of its namesake's association with slavery.

In Canada, the country's founding prime minister, Sir John A MacDonald, has become the focus of opposition for his role in the cultural genocide of indigenous peoples. The city of Victoria recently announced it would remove his likeness from outside city hall, and MacDonald statues in Montreal and Regina were defaced as pressure mounted to recast his legacy.

From New York to Bristol to Sydney to Bulawayo, no monument is apparently safe.

'Fake news before there was fake news'

In a recent essay for the Guardian on the Oxford protests, the novelist Amit Chaudhuri wonders: "When is it possible to ignore or laugh at statues or symbols, and when does it become hard to do so?" Chaudhuri remembers visiting Oriel College as a student in the early 1990s and finding "its old-fogey students with monarchist enthusiasms, its conservatism ... uncharming but weirdly funny". During the visit he caught a glimpse of Enoch Powell, the former MP whose race-baiting "Rivers of Blood" speech a generation earlier was "synonymous with a dark moment in British history", and barely flinched. Chaudhuri didn't even notice the Rhodes statue that would become so controversial. Looking back, he marvels at how irrelevant any reminders of the colonial era felt, and how he shrugged them off so easily.

Our relationship to a statue, or a building, or a sign is always changing. Often the change is so gradual, happening over decades and generations, that the monument - the version of reality it embodies - simply recedes into the background. Of its time: this is the explanation we reach for as we shrug and walk past, if we've bothered to look at all. We make the assumption that the past is past, that those ideas and values no longer have the power to threaten or harm, or never did.

The reality is more complicated. For one thing, this is what monumentsdo: they normalise the past, for better or worse. They make injustices easier to defend and, more insidiously, harder to see. For another, it's the people most likely to defend those injustices who ultimately decide what is or isn't threatening, not the people who have been most affected. Only the dominance of the settler majorities in the US, Canada and Australia, for example, can explain their indifference to the statues of Theodore Roosevelt, John A MacDonald, and Captain James Cook that for many indigenous peoples have long represented genocide.

But as the past resonates in unexpected ways as social and economic conditions change, so a monument's power ebbs and flows. Its semiotics are always volatile. What the Oxford Rhodes represents to students of colour and their allies right now might be closer to what it represented to their counterparts in the 1960s, when the lived experience of colonialism was fresh, than either would be to Chaudhuri's cohort in the early 1990s, when - as Chaudhuri points out - multiculturalism was ascendant in Britain and their place in an equal, just society felt increasingly secure.

The hated Rhodes statue in Cape Town was relatively uncontroversial in the 1990s. It stood for more than two decades after apartheid, as did (and do) many other white supremacist monuments across South Africa. With Mandela's election and the transition to black majority rule, victory seemed total: the future was too bright for the past to matter very much.

The country embarked on a forward-looking restorative justice process whereby the perpetrators of apartheid were forgiven so South Africans could move on with the job of building a free and equal society. School curriculums were updated to play down the more painful aspects of the country's past and many black parents chose not to burden their children, the "Born Frees", with the history they had lived through and which had been so psychologically devastating. There was power in forgiveness, and in that moment of great optimism it was suddenly possible to regard the figure of Rhodes and feel pity or disgust rather than fear or anger. The statue now contemplated a city whose future, in spite of his life's work, belonged to all South Africans. Contemporary South Africa was a living, breathing repudiation of Rhodes's legacy. What need was there to remove the statue?

For black Americans, the symbols of the Confederacy have always had the power to menace. The many hundreds of monuments built in the century following emancipation speak to the brutal, persistent fact of white supremacy; that nearly all of them have remained standing through the civil rights era and the decades that followed, up to the present day, speaks to the fact that, however enlightened white Americans might think they are, their understanding of racism differs wildly from black Americans' experience of it.

If you believe that America is more or less equal, and whatever discrimination black people face is a problem with individual racists and not the symptom of a racist system, then you might struggle to appreciate the persistent, malevolent power of a stone likeness of Robert E Lee or Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Even if you dislike Confederate iconography, you might still struggle to grasp how fully the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow continue to circumscribe black lives, how they limit opportunity. If black people have failed to thrive in the post-civil rights era, you might convince yourself they just need to strive harder.

This way of thinking has deep, unbroken historical roots in the "Lost Cause" movement that emerged in the southern states after the civil war - what the historian and public monument expert Madge Dresser calls "fake news before there was fake news". Led by groups such as the United Confederate Veterans and United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Lost Cause movement sought to recast the defeat of the Confederate army as something tragic and even noble.

In this version of history, the south went to war not to preserve the institution of slavery but to protect states' rights to self-determination against a federal government determined to impose its secular, cosmopolitan values on southerners' way of life. What was being defended was tradition, in other words, rather than economic self-interest. Central to this aggressive campaign of historical revisionism were pageants, plays, novels and monuments that portrayed the old south as a proud, Christian culture where men were chivalrous, women virtuous, and black people their spiritual and intellectual wards, in need of correction and uplift.

Hundreds of statues went up across the US between the 1890s and 1950s. Lee, the commander of the losing side, was a favourite avatar of this sentimental and dishonest vision. The Lee mythologised in the Charlottesville monument was brave, honourable and enlightened - if not opposed to slavery, then sensitive to its excesses.

Compare him with the man who emerges from the actual historical record, though, and the revisionism at the heart of the Lost Cause narrative becomes pretty clear: as Dresser noted in a TEDx talk, it was "under [Lee's] watch that the Confederate army kidnapped free blacks and slaves who had fled north, and forcibly returned them to slavery". The Lost Cause version of history is at such odds with established fact that when you peel away all the pomp and ceremony, you're left with kettle logic: the Confederacy didn't fight to preserve slavery, but even if it did, there were good slave owners, and anyway, those who were enslaved benefit ed from it. Like colonialism, it was a "civilising" mission.

The Lost Cause narrative shaped white Americans' understanding of slavery and racism. For southern segregationists at the turn of the 20th century, it was a way to reassert their identity within the union and recover a measure of dignity. For northern abolitionists, it was a bargain to be struck for the sake of national unity: let them have their statues and their Confederate flags if it brought them back into the fold. But it did something else too.

Comforting but destructive

These symbols of the Confederacy were allowed to mean very different things to different groups of white people, even as the symbols reaffirmed for both the cherished idea of America as a land of freedom and opportunity. The monumentalisation of figures like Lee allowed segregationists and abolitionists alike to invest themselves in the comforting and ultimately destructive idea that slavery (and, by extension, racism) was a "people" problem - bad slave owners, as the segregationists saw it; all slave owners, as the abolitionists did - and therefore not an "America" problem, not something woven into the fabric of the entire project of American capitalism from the very beginning. As the historian Ibram X Kendi, the author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, has pointed out:

When you make it about ignorance, you're not making it about power and policy and structures and systems, that the problem centrally is not America's institutions, is not the American story, is not American capitalism, that the problem is ignorant individuals. So it allows people to deny how fundamental racism has historically been to America.

By shifting the problem of racism on to the individual, white Americans of all political persuasions absolved themselves of their complicity in, and responsibility for dismantling, systemic racism.

This way of seeing things gained a new kind of legitimacy in the 1980s as American politics fell under the spell of the neoliberal economist Friedrich Hayek, who conceived of society itself as a market, and people as individual economic actors rather than, first and foremost, "bearers of grace, or of inalienable rights and duties".Capitalism could even be the driver of racial progress: the free market would solve the "people problem" of racism because self-interest would lead everyone, eventually, to enlightenment - obviating the need for critical policy solutions. As the writer Pankaj Mishra has noted:

The cruellest trick used by both Republicans and Democrats was the myth that America had resolved the contradiction at the heart of its democracy. For the conviction that African-Americans were walking and running and would soon start flying, enabled by equal opportunity, paved the way for an insidious ideological force: colour-blind universalism.

During the cold war, any serious discussion about the deeper, structural causes of racial inequality was impossible because it required some degree of apostasy - entwined as the problem was with the very roots of American capitalism - and because inequality at home paled next to the threat of Soviet domination. The cold war limited the spectrum of political possibility, not just in the US but around the world. It hijacked the process of decolonisation happening in many of the newly independent nations of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. There was to be no renegotiation of their relationships with the west on something like equal terms. Those relationships were reset instead along cold war faultlines.

In the scramble for ideological supremacy, the Americans and the Soviets traded money and arms for allegiance, intervening in elections and propping up sympathetic strongmen where necessary. The dynamic of patron state and client state obscured the dysfunction these fledgling nations inherited from the colonial regimes that preceded them, perpetuating and even exacerbating their inequality and brutality.

The fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s represented more than just a victory of capitalism over communism: it reaffirmed the Enlightenment narrative of progress, so badly tested by the horrors of the 20th century. Western-style liberal democracy was the destination, and free trade and globalisation were the twin engines that would take the world there. Neoliberalism's time had come.

The problem was that neoliberalism preserved classical liberalism's blind spots: its pretense to universalism (of the exceedingly white, male landowner variety) and over-idealisation of the market. Never mind the deep inequality that existed between and within nations: a deregulated global market would be the tide that lifted all boats. Applied as a broad, one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges facing impoverished and traumatised post-Soviet and postcolonial nations (as well as increasingly multicultural countries in the west, with complicated histories of their own), neoliberalism couldn't help but be disastrous for many people.

For a while, though, things looked pretty good. The economies of the west grew rapidly and countries such as China, India and Brazil began to emerge as economic powers in their own right. In many countries the upper and middle classes flourished. Even if your own situation was tenuous, a kind of aspirational fellow-travelling was still possible. From your vantage point on the lower rungs of wealthier countries or the middle rungs of poorer ones, you might watch other people growing richer and think, One day that will be me. The promise of neoliberalism was the promise that the burden of history was being lifted from your shoulders.

And this was true in a sense: the victory of the west over the Soviet Union lifted the threat of global cataclysm that had existed for most of the previous 75 years. But the psychological weight of the cold war and now the euphoria and triumphalism of the neoliberal moment obscured the other forces of history that had been (and still were) bearing down on you all along. All of which paved the way for the hubris of the 21st century's first decade.

Fast-forward to 2018. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria have displaced nearly 20 million people, part of the largest refugee crisis in modern history. The top 1% of people now own half of global wealth, while the bottom 70% account for less than 3%. The past few years have seen the Great Recession, the steady breakdown of international norms, the rise of illiberal democracy and re-entrenchment of authoritarian regimes, and the emergence of rightwing populism in the west, leading to the self-inflicted wounds of Brexit and the Trump presidency. Meanwhile the world faces a new existential crisis: climate change. The impact of decades of unchecked growth is now undeniable, with rising temperatures and quickening cycles of natural disasters that threaten new calamities every day.

Suddenly life feels overdetermined, shaped by forces larger than any individual, community or nation. Larger than the now. In the anxious present, it has become very hard indeed for anyone to ignore or laugh at statues or symbols of the past.

In an article published not long after the Cape Town protests broke out, young activists describe the experiences that led them to Rhodes Must Fall. Chumani Maxwele, the student who started the protests, recalls looking around his neighbourhood and struggling to understand why, nearly two decades after the end of white rule, everyone was still so poor. A student from an upper-middle-class background remembers seeing the mostly white faces and white professors in his classes and wondering why he was the exception. A third student remembers having to discover for herself the works of black thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko because they weren't taught at school.

Each was troubled by the feeling that the world around them didn't make sense, and little by little they began to connect the inequality of the present to the past that Rhodes represented. The South African government's well-meaning attempt at a clean break with history played a significant role in the alienation of the post-apartheid generation. As the upper-middle-class student says in the story: "Our experience of racism is worse. It's subliminal. The form of racism that makes you ignorant about your subjugation."

Those policies alone don't explain the sudden fury of the protests, though. Even as the ANC had tackled the problem of race with a comprehensive programme of reconciliation, it did not dismantle apartheid's economic legacy to alleviate the poverty of the many. Instead the government pursued a long-term strategy of austerity and privatisation, which entrenched the highly stratified society in slightly different form: a tiny group of white and now black South Africans at the top, a small black bourgeoisie in the middle, and a massive black underclass. No surprise, then, that for the students who came of age in the post-apartheid era, the Rhodes statue would be flush with menace once again.

The cognitive dissonance the students describe is not unique to Cape Town or South Africa. As the lens through which people view the world comes to feel insufficient, they go looking for deeper explanations and discover the buried continuities between the injustices of the past and the present. For the Oxford protesters, it's the privatisation of British society and, as Chaudhuri notes, "gradual extinction ... of the ideals of multiculturalism" over the past several decades. For Americans, it is extreme inequality, which has made reconciling the idea of America with the grim prospects they face nearly impossible. And so on.

But many other people have arrived at the opposite conclusion: the situation is bad today because we have strayed too far from the way things used to be. The nostalgia of Brexit and Make America Great Again is exactly an appeal to the consoling idea (for some white people) that the moral failures of the past are, in fact, the triumphs we once thought they were.

Statues, buildings and street signs have become flashpoints because they embody the tension between these two worldviews.

Reconciliation

So what should we do with troublesome monuments? Based on the media coverage that the Cape Town and other protests have attracted, you'd be forgiven for thinking that controversial monuments are falling all the time, all over the world. In fact, most - including the statue at the centre of the tragic Charlottesville protests, and the vast majority in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa - remain untouched.

There are those who would remove the most offensive signs and statues (the so-called antagonistic approach), those who would modify them to reflect contemporary sensibilities (agonism), and those who would leave them alone (conservatism).

Conservatism is clearly the easiest option, and the least tenable one because if the past is not past, and some monuments never totally lose their power to threaten certain groups of people, then they can't be left to stand unaltered. We have a responsibility to take those threats seriously whether we see them at first glance or not. They are not idle threats: these monuments have not lost their power to normalise the dominance of one group of people over another. At best they seem embarrassing or irrelevant; at worst they help to nourish an aggrieved sense of superiority among what is clearly a growing number of people. The white supremacist rally in Charlottesville is only one of the more obvious examples of their everyday toxic effect.

On the other hand, what is actually lost when a statue of Rhodes or Lee falls? Virtually all western cities are monuments to colonialism. Either they were superimposed on earlier indigenous settlements (New York), founded to support the trade in slaves and natural resources (Cape Town), or substantially built with capital extracted from the colonies (pretty much any major European city). Removing a few of the most egregious statues will not, as some people fear, erase the histories of these places, nor diminish the cultural heritage their residents are, for better and worse, heir to.

Dresser makes the case that something else is lost: an opportunity. "As a historian, I love the idea that you have all these different statues from different eras that represent changing value systems - a palimpsest that enriches the urban landscape," she tells me. "But then I'm not a black student in Oxford feeling that the white imagination is excluding me from belonging, which is important. So do we eviscerate this historical building? If we get rid of problematic statues, we foreclose the discussions we can have about those statues, which is important to the evolution of our shared identity. But if we keep them, what are we saying to these students?"

Oxford University has tried to stake out the middle ground, announcing that the Rhodes statue at Oriel College will stay, with modifications that "draw attention to this history [and] do justice to the complexity of the debate". Proposals include building a second version of the statue that could be defaced with graffiti. This idea of agonism is appealing: it seems both creative and reasonable. Cities such as Asunción, Hamburg and Odessa have all invited artists to rework and recontextualise statues with troubling legacies, with interesting and even powerful results. In Asunción, a hated statue of the former dictator Alfredo Stroessner was crushed and the pieces reassembled into a much-praised monument to those who resisted his regime.

Amin Husain, one of the organisers of recent protests at the American Museum of Natural History in New York that saw a statue of Theodore Roosevelt splattered with red paint, argues that agonism doesn't go far enough. The problem with keeping but modifying statues, he says, "is that it's still the dominant group that sets the terms of the debate. Shouldn't affected communities have a say? If you want to learn from it, but you don't want to perpetuate that mythology that is doing harm every day, you can put it in a museum or a statue garden."

Even if agonism can work as a dialogue between cities and affected communities, it is limited in what it can do. It remains centred on the sins of the coloniser, in relation to which the colonised are thus always secondary. We can modify statues to recognise historical truths, and to perform a kind of apology, but that's as far as agonism goes. Given the now impossible-to-ignore continuity between the misdeeds of the past and the conditions people face in the present, this feels insufficient.

No single solution - leave up, tear down, modify - is equal to the problem, because each is zero-sum when applied case by case. A thoroughgoing approach that considers each case in relation to the larger urban landscape might be needed to tackle such complexity. Modify some monuments to reflect those histories, whether by adding interpretive signs or re-engineering them. Tear down others to make space for new ones that represent affected communities on their own terms, not just in relation to their victimisation. Representation is critical.

Vancouver, where I live, offers an unlikely example of what that approach might look like. Today the city is known for its easygoing charm and expensive real estate. 150 years ago, and for millennia before that, the area was the hunting and fishing grounds of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Their settlements dotted the shores of the Burrard inlet and Fraser and Capilano rivers. The arrival of Europeans and founding of Vancouver precipitated their almost total erasure over the next 150 years.

In 2014, Vancouver declared itself a "city of reconciliation", formally recognising its occupation of the unceded territories and embarking with local First Nations governments on a longterm plan to decolonise and indigenise the city. To begin with, some streets, parks, schools and landmarks will be renamed, including Siwash Rock, a well-known sea stack near Stanley Park whose name (derived from the French word for "savage") is seen as an offensive slur against indigenous people.

The new names will be specific to the group whose territory the landmark or sign is on - for example, Sir William Macdonald elementary school, which sits on Musqueam territory, recently became Xpey' elementary school, meaning "cedar" in the local hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ (Halkomelem) language. The University of British Columbia, which also sits on Musqueam territory, has replaced all of the street signs on campus with bilingual street English-hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ ones. The sites of historical villages will be reinscribed with signs and interpretive displays, and other artistic interventions. "The point is to make sure Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh are reflected and visible everywhere in Vancouver," Ginger Gosnell-Myers, the city's aboriginal relations manager, tells me.

Renaming and monumentalisation are only the most obvious aspect of the process. "Colonial structures permeate every part of the city, from the place names to the architecture and the use of space, even the way city departments are organised," Gosnell-Myers says. "So for reconciliation to actually work, the plan needed to be comprehensive, too." Inspired by a similar exercise in New Zealand, the partners have together created a set of indigenous design principles that will inform the design of all future public space in Vancouver - including sightlines and building materials, the ways structures relate to the natural environment, and how they are used. There will be greater emphasis on communal, intergenerational public spaces, for example, because in the local indigenous cultures, all buildings are meant to be used by all people.

Everyone agrees that reconciliation can't just be about the past; it must be forward-looking. "When we say we want to indigenise the city, the first thing somebody's going to say is that we need to put a longhouse [a traditional dwelling] here," Gosnell-Myers says. "But what does a city with contemporary indigenous culture look like? A mixture of the wood and the glass and the metal from a design standpoint?"

The challenge is that Vancouver does not have any Musqueam, Squamish or Tsleil-Waututh architects or urban designers, because local indigenous people have for so long been shut out of opportunities for education and professional advancement. "We could have done the easy thing and hired indigenous architects from other parts of Canada," she said, "but it's not true to who we are as a city of reconciliation." Part of the process is training local indigenous designers and planners who can translate and synthesise their cultures into contemporary urban forms. In the meantime, the city has begun the work of hiring indigenous professionals across all departments, from engineering to finance, so that every civic decision takes indigenous perspectives into account.

Obviously, not every city would benefit from the same solutions as Vancouver. Even the success of the City of Reconciliation project is not assured. For one thing, Vancouver must solve its longstanding affordability crisis - the result of decades of policies geared toward globalising the local real estate market - which affects indigenous and other vulnerable groups disproportionately. If indigenous people can't afford to live in the city, then "reinscribing" their presence will amount to a branding exercise. Such a risk raises the much bigger question of whether decolonisation is even possible within capitalism as it is currently constituted.

But in spirit at least, the project shows how cities might begin to rethink their relationship to the past. Public space is one of the few truly populist mediums we still have, especially as people retreat in their private lives to the echo chambers of social media. If, as Dresser argues, the right tends to be "more effective at mobilising public opinion because they focus less on abstract, universal values and more on the particulars of place, historic and family traditions ... on people's emotions and their need for belonging," then here is a way to engage people with the facts of historical injustice while also appealing to their sense of belonging.

For minority groups, this means seeing themselves represented in ways that recognise their historical marginalisation but also go well beyond that, making their contemporary perspectives and experiences a central part of civic culture. For everyone else, this means relating to these perspectives and experiences as we move through the city every day, in ways that include but aren't limited to that painful history. It is in spaces where everyone belongs that justice and equality begins.

A new consensus on reality?

We live in uncertain times. As neoliberalism stutters and falters, political space is opening up. For the xenophobia and illiberalism of Trump and his imitators, yes, but also for the emancipatory politics of Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Idle No More, Rhodes Must Fall and monument protests around the world. They are as bold as any in recent memory. Even if they don't amount to a single movement, we are seeing a shift in thinking in the west; a repudiation not just of the neoliberal status quo but of the deeper historical structures that support it.

It's an open question whether, in this era of fake news and hyperpartisan politics, we can even hope for something like a new consensus on reality: a set of facts, a way of seeing the world to replace the neoliberal narrative we are leaving behind. That won't stop people from trying to establish one, in good faith and bad, and without resistance it is the powerful who will set the terms. Which is what gives the protests in Cape Town, Charlottesville, Berlin, Oxford and beyond such urgency.

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Facts matter, and the protests are, at bottom, about facts - the historical truth of colonialism, slavery and patriarchy, and the contemporary truth of the people they still marginalise. Without facts and without protest, the best we can hope for is that these systems and their legacies will continue to exert their insidious effect. At worst, they will be fully rehabilitated and weaponised. We are seeing this already in the resurgence of rightwing populism all over the world.

Until it happened, no one would have imagined that the spontaneous protest of a South African student would inspire long-overdue discussions about structural racism, not just in South Africa but in Britain and Canada and Germany, too. Nor that cities like Berlin, Toronto, Baltimore and New Orleans would begin quietly removing racist monuments of their own accord, or that Auckland and Vancouver would commit wholeheartedly to indigenisation. All these things were impossible to imagine until they happened, just as the injustices of the past are impossible to see until you see them everywhere. Minds and eyes are opening - come what may.
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Statue wars: what should we do with troublesome monuments?

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The global protest movement to tear down urban memorials that reinforce racism is rewriting the very story of our cities. Should any monument be safe?

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The idea that once they are taken down, these statues "belong in a museum" doesn't take into account that museums may not want them. Should they?

By Janeen Bryant, Benjamin Filene, Louis Nelson, Jennifer Scott, and Suzanne Seriff

smithsonianmag.com

This article was

originally published on the blog for the Center for the Future of Museums

In the wake of the Charlottesville riots last summer, newspaper headlines throughout the nation were calling for the removal of Confederate war monuments from the American public sphere-and their "safe housing" in museums. " What to do with Confederate monuments? Put them in museums as examples of ugly history, not civic pride," read a Los Angeles Times headline days after the riots. " Confederate Monuments Belong in Museums, Not Public Squares" stated a Weekly Standard headline from last August. " We Need to Move, Not Destroy, Confederate Monuments," was the heading for a thoughtful article by New York Times critic Holland Cotter.

In the subsequent months, dozens of Confederate monuments across the nation have, in fact, been "removed" or toppled, and many have made their way to the "cold storage" of museum collections spaces.

But for many of us who actually work in and interpret museums, the issue of our institutions' rightful role in this debate does not seem to be either straightforward or obvious. Are museums, in fact, the appropriate place for storing these gigantic homages-not even to the Civil War itself-but to the Jim Crow movements that fueled their commissioning and erection on state capitol grounds, university commons, city parks and other places of power in the early decades of the 20th century?

We would argue that the "put them in a museum" response to Confederate memorials reflects a misunderstanding of what museums are for-and an effort to sidestep conversations that we really need to have.

Yes, museums do collect things-savory and unsavory-and, yes, they often put things away and preserve them for a very long time. But 21st century museums are striving hard to expand their reach, shift their focus and repair their popular perception as public warehouses primarily in the cold storage business for art and artifacts. More and more, we aim to surface issues, not hide them-to be places where communities come together to discuss and wrestle with contemporary questions.

There are those who respond that museums should just put Confederate monuments "in context," and by doing so, fulfill the mission of many contemporary museums to serve as sites of civic engagement nimbly poised to investigate, convene and discuss the most contested issues of the day.

Yet putting monuments in context is anything but a simple, declarative act: power dynamics come into play. First, museums are physical spaces that convey authority. Statues remain powerful-and physically imposing-visual forms that will keep speaking even when they are in new settings. They can and certainly will shape social experiences in ways that curators may not be able to anticipate.

A simple label is not enough.

In displaying statues, museums will need to be prepared to contextualize them visually and dramatically, to represent the layers of their history-from the story of their creation to the story of them being taken down and collected.

This is exactly the approach taken by the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin when they agreed to house the 8-½-foot-tall, 2,000-pound statue of Jefferson Davis, former president of the Confederacy, that was removed from the campus grounds in 2015.

The controversial decision to transfer the statue to the history center, rather than store or destroy it, represented one possible solution to the Confederate statue debate. "I think this is the answer," wrote Don Carleton, the center's executive director, in a article that is pointedly titled "When a bronze Confederate needed to retire, the University of Texas found a home." "They are pieces of art; destroying that is like burning books. They need to be preserved and they belong in museums."

He added, "We will not be putting him in our building as some sort of shrine to Jefferson Davis, but as an educational experience and point of discussion." Using old letters, diary entries, and original sketches, the permanent exhibit, titled "From Commemoration to Education," tells the story of how the statue came to be and why it was later moved from the campus' south. The presence of the statue in an educational exhibit, as opposed to a place of honor, underlines that Davis, as well as his ideas and actions, are no longer commemorated by the university, said exhibit curator Ben Wright.

Yet the question still remains whether, by accepting monuments into permanent collections, museums are not continuing to bestow the same value and authority upon them that they "enjoyed" as 'stand-alone' monuments - or even worse, further aggrandizing them. Even if museums contextualize them in more complicated ways, their very monumentality might spark an even fiercer form of physical intimidation when squeezed into the small space of a standard museum building.

More than 25 years ago, the Maryland Historical Society shocked the museum world by inviting artist Fred Wilson to "mine" its collections for the revolutionary "Mining the Museum" project. In that exhibit, Wilson juxtaposed slavery-era documents, objects and texts traditionally consigned to storage along with the comfortable objects of privileged white history. The most dramatic example involved the placement of slave shackles next to a polished collection of silver repoussé vessels of the white Maryland upper class.

Could the lessons learned from "Mining the Museum" exhibit inform a museum's approach to displaying Confederate statues with their not-so-subtle messages of white supremacy? Perhaps, but the broader question still remains: No matter how sensitively we contextualize the artifacts themselves, does their larger-than-life presence mitigate or even parody any interpretive value they might otherwise have in the dwarfing gaze of an enclosed exhibition space?

Our co-author Louis P. Nelson, a University of Virginia professor of architectural history, suggested in a 2017 interview that perhaps one solution is not to try to transfer gigantic statues to museum buildings, but rather to create museums around the statues themselves:

"Such statues cannot stand alone in the middle of a square with azaleas. I have argued that we need to transform these open spaces into open-air museums, where we can learn about the simultaneous histories of lynching, Confederate monuments and Jim Crow policies. These are powerful objects so they will need powerful recontextualization...They need to become catalysts for conversations as objects in a museum might."

Yet even this approach raises critical questions about the nature of these conversations, the particular "stakeholders" who are brought to-or absent from-the table, and the role of "professionals" in the process. Do we really trust that curators and museum personnel have the right stuff to make this happen? Who will be the arbiters and decision-makers in the meaning-making process? And how is this process limited-or framed-by the starting assumption that the monuments must be preserved in the public sphere in the first place?

Another co-author, museum educator Janeen Bryant, born and raised in South Carolina, echoes this apprehension about museum professionals' training-and ability-to both facilitate, and effectively translate, historically marginalized community voices about the embodied outrage and pain of such monuments on the landscape. An informal social media poll she conducted corroborated these concerns about whether museums really have the preparation and capacity to house and display these monuments to our racist national past.

"As a native southerner," she says, "I often consider the monuments (and Confederate flags) as a social marker of claimed territory for white people/whiteness-a visual cue of which town/courthouse/pit-stop is safe and not safe."

For years, the deadening silence from mainstream museums was a frustrating reminder that most staff were unwilling or unable to confront racist monuments, racist artifacts or racism in any form. Fortunately now, museums are beginning to recognize the important role they can and should play in facilitating community engagement and response. Our challenge as professionals is a willingness to create intellectually active spaces wherever we gather-in workshops, in conferences, and in staff break rooms-to grapple with the overt assumptions surrounding monuments.

Ibram Kendi, noted historian and anti-racism educator reflected on his childhood in Manassas, Virginia, home to a Civil War battlefield, during a recent speech at the Smithsonian's symposium on " Mascots, Myths, Monuments and Memory." "In thinking through my comments for today," he said, "I tried to really understand, first and foremost, how it felt for me, how it feels for so many of us to live day in and day out surrounded by so many Confederate monuments.

How does it feel for those people that have to literally watch people cheer for mascots that are a desecration of their people?...

And more importantly, what do these feelings say about our memories and our histories, let alone the memories of the defenders of these monuments and mascots?

How can we use these feelings and memories as a motivation to never stop digging into American history to uncover the graves of racial violence?

And how can we study these graves, the dead, to give us a better sense of the living-the life of racial violence in the United States today?"

As we museum professionals formulate our own approach to the thorny issues of where and whether and how to re-contextualize these toppled monuments to our Jim Crow past, we must recognize our own histories of complicity in the centering of white, male, hetero-normative heritages and the celebration of icons of white supremacy in our centuries of collection and display.

It is no secret that a willful erasure of people of color (and the long histories of racist assaults) exists in museums and the public landscape in this country. This has prompted generations of activism whereby communities of color have tirelessly contested these narratives and fought for their rightful place in history.

The successful Take 'Em Down Movement in New Orleans that led to the dismantling of four Confederate monuments, for example, was the direct result of community activism led by black organizers such as Michael Moore. However, most coverage attributed the removals to the open-mindedness and forward thinking of New Orleans' then-Mayor Mitch Landrieu, lauding his speech and unprecedented action, rather than acknowledging the movement and the black leadership that truly and thoughtfully catalyzed these changes.

A broader conversation about museums and monuments must include not only a recognition of the landscapes of oppression that the Confederate statues mark, but also an understanding of the self-determined landscapes of resistance that marginalized communities have created, of necessity, to mark their own histories, in opposition to, but also in spite of these erasures.

Museo Urbano in El Paso, Museum of Chinese in America in New York, Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn, Pauli Murray Center in Durham, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in Chicago, and the now-open, National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration in Montgomery are only a handful of examples of "bottom-up" museums that are de-centering white supremacist narratives, centering marginalized histories and social justice, modeling innovative approaches to inclusion and redefining the very idea of what constitutes memorials and monuments.

Mainstream museums have much to learn from the foresight and sophistication of these and other culturally, ethnically and racially specific museums, many of which began to emerge as long as 50 years ago. Museums need to critically examine their own histories before they earn the right to properly contextualize racist memorials.
Read more from the Center for the Future of Museums blog .
As Holland Cotter so correctly noted in his column from last year, in order for museums to name the message of these oversized propaganda monuments for what they are, they "will have to relinquish their pretense of ideological neutrality. They will have to become truth-telling institutions."

The five of us who have jointly authored this blog-museum directors, curators, scholars, educators and architects-will be moderating a roundtable on this topic with the wider museum community this week at the American Alliance of Museum's annual conference in Phoenix. Perhaps an apt point of departure to spark our conversation might be the prophetic words of artist Nayland Blake, who recently stated, "Museums need to decide whether or not they are active participants in the life of their city or if they are just some kind of trophy house."

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Are Museums the Right Home for Confederate Monuments?

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By Janeen Bryant, Benjamin Filene, Louis Nelson, Jennifer Scott, and Suzanne Seriff smithsonianmag.com This article was originally published on the blog for the Center for the Future of Museums In the wake of the Charlottesville riots last summer, newspaper headlines throughout the nation were calling for the removal of Confederate war monuments from the American public sphere-and their "safe housing" in museums. " What to do with Confederate monuments?

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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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