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This week's topic: "Should Confederate symbols and statues be taken down?" Let us know by email or in the comments below.

What's in a statue? Or a flag?

Charlottesville was both an inciting moment and the product of centuries of history. The Unite the Right rally began in the Virginia city because of a single threat - the removal of a Confederate statue - and since then, Confederate symbols have been under siege. In North Carolina, a Confederate statue was toppled in front of the old Durham County Courthouse. The University of Texas at Austin decided to take down four Confederate statues overnight. Some of these removals were officially sanctioned, while others were at the hands of vigilantes.

Some 150 years after the Civil War, the United States of America remains divided over whether these landmarks are offensive reminders of slavery or document a key chapter in our shared history.
What do you think? Should Confederate symbols and statues be taken down? Let us know by emailing or answering in the comments below.

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Should Confederate Symbols and Statues Be Taken Down? | OZY

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This week's topic: "Should Confederate symbols and statues be taken down?" Let us know by email or in the comments below. What's in a statue? Or a flag? Charlottesville was both an inciting moment and the product of centuries of history.

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As president of a cultural heritage organization, I feel obligated to weigh in on the current controversy over Confederate monuments. The semi-hysterical push to remove them is, I strongly believe, a mistake, a dangerous precedent, and an exercise in ignorance. Mobs pull statues down. ISIS destroys monuments. Fanatics rewrite history to edit out the bits they don't like. Our country should not be walking down that road.

To the advocates of historic cleansing, this is about racism. Remove its reminders from public spaces, and you are helping to remove it from society. That is a bold assumption-in fact it's many assumptions: that what a monument says to you is what it says to everyone. That negative periods of history should be erased. That the losing side in a conflict also loses, for all time, the right to honor or mourn its dead. That driving an opposing sentiment underground will make it go away.

My nonprofit helps people in conflict zones protect their endangered heritage sites or rebuild them if they were damaged by war or terrorism. For example, we are working to restore the last remaining Judaeo-Christian pilgrimage site in the vicinity of Mosul, the only one that was missed by ISIS in its rampage. From my vantage point, the idea that the way to deal with history is to destroy any relics that remind you of something you don't like, is highly alarming. It's bad enough when some insane bunch of fanatics has this idea. When it happens in a supposedly rational, knowledge-based society, it sets a terrible precedent. And by the way it doesn't even accomplish its aim-quite often, a destroyed monument thereby gains in power and resonance. There are much better ways to process the past.

The first problem with projects of cultural cleansing is that they must always, inevitably, be subjective. The people behind the destruction of a statue or an edifice or a monument of course believe themselves to be justified. They see Object X as offensive to their beliefs and values. Others may argue for its survival by pointing out that it does no harm, or that it is art, or that they are sentimentally attached to it, or that they want it to remain for any number of other reasons. But even if everyone agrees that Object X should go, later generations may find that decision appalling, a loss to culture, to art, to science, to knowledge and to the historic integrity of the urban landscape.

To the Taliban, the ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan were impious remnants of a pre-Islamic age, idols that deserved to be blown up. Now these irreplaceable, priceless and beautiful statues are gone, lost to the world. ISIS dynamited Palmyra ("a heathen site") and many other beautiful and valuable places in Syria and Iraq, including the tombs of the Biblical prophets Jonah and Daniel and countless other historic treasures. And they can make a case for so doing-not a case you and I might agree with, but a case nonetheless. They disapprove of monuments altogether-a sort of radical "thou shalt make no graven images" argument, and they especially disapprove of monuments honoring anything that is not Islamic, or not Islamic in line with their own particular vision, which is why they also destroy historic mosques and Muslim shrines. They feel virtuous and justified in targeting something they despise and turning it to rubble. The rest of us ought to beware of that feeling.

The second problem with this method is that it doesn't work. Object X will just become one more martyr. Fifteen years after their obliteration, the Bamiyan Buddhas are arguably the most vivid Buddha figures in the minds of millions of people. There are other colossal Buddha statues in the world-but how many can the average nonarchaeologists, non-Buddhist name? The Buddha of Hyderabad anyone? Of Kamakura? Similarly, can we seriously expect that removing Robert E. Lee from perches in parks will contribute to the elimination of racism in America? Taking a statue away is not a social reform action, it is a pseudo-action to make people feel they are accomplishing something when in fact they are not.

Another thing to consider, and perhaps be healthily humbled by, is the temporal nature of our societies, their accomplishments, their battles. Tour the archaeological ruins of any formerly great civilization, and you will invariably encounter inscriptions that have been chiseled away, faces that have been obliterated, heads that have been struck off the rumps of their statues. Someone overthrows or assassinates a predecessor and orders his or her name and image removed. Often, the relevant dynasties have been lost to historic memory, and no one has any clue what their bitterly monumental conflicts were about, who won, who lost, who got slaughtered, what they believed in. What could have remained is their story, and any lessons later humans might draw from it. Erase your story and you erase yourself.

And on the subject of stories: a monument does not impose a story. A monument is just a piece of stone or metal. The "get Robert E. Lee out of here" contingent assumes that anyone who stands before his statue will be thinking, "how noble it was to own a plantation and have slaves, I wish the South had won." A reasonable viewer, however, is more likely to think: "How sad that so many thousands of young men had to die for this lost cause. Too bad that Robert E. Lee, by all accounts a brilliant man, made the wrong call. We should all learn to subject our loyalties to very careful moral scrutiny." Instead of removing the object, it's much better to try and shape what lesson it conveys.

And President Donald Trump was right to ask where this will end. Our Founding Fathers were flawed personalities on many levels, and one could make the case that none of them deserve to be put on pedestals. An estimated 70 precent of the signatories to the Declaration of Independence owned slaves. And let's spend a moment perusing the following quotation:

I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races- I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

Any guesses on who the speaker was? Robert E. Lee perhaps? Stonewall Jackson? No, these are the words of Abraham Lincoln. The sad hard truth is that although he presided over the abolition of slavery, Lincoln was and throughout his lifetime remained a racist. Shall he now be purged from our memory and deprived of our esteem, or shall we accept-as Professor Tanya Marsh argues in an exceptionally engrossing article-that history is " messy." And not just ours.

Which is why we need to ask ourselves: what's the bottom line here? That after a societal conflict, the losing side should have its symbols erased? That instead of looking forward and considering how to do things better, we should focus on looking backward to retroactively judge and eviscerate the past, in a Cultural Revolution of Politically Correct Righteousness?

It's true, of course, that there are historic personages who should not be honored or venerated. But I don't agree that keeping a monument means venerating the person or era it depicts; it can just as well stand witness to the folly of some despot's hubris or some tragic mass delusion. If North Korea ever becomes a normal state, I for one sincerely hope that they keep the bizarrely grandiose monuments of the peculiar dynasty that kept them in thrall for so long-as a historic curiosity, an object lesson, and a warning. Statues can have many meanings. In Vienna, just off the Ring-the broad circular boulevard that was built in place of the old fortification wall when the city had begun to sprawl beyond its medieval boundaries-stands an expansive fountain. At its head looms a twenty-meter high column topped by the statue of a Russian soldier holding a shield with the insignia of the Soviet Union in one hand and a Soviet flag in the other. At the base are two quotations from the dictator Stalin. The statue was erected by the Soviet army in 1945, using German POW's as forced labor. Designed in the trenches before the troops had even entered Vienna, the plan for the monument was modeled out of bread, since the architects had no other materials to work with.

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Destroying Confederate Monuments Hurts Us All-and Accomplishes Nothing

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As president of a cultural heritage organization, I feel obligated to weigh in on the current controversy over Confederate monuments. The semi-hysterical push to remove them is, I strongly believe, a mistake, a dangerous precedent, and an exercise in ignorance. Mobs pull statues down. ISIS destroys monuments.

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What Should Happen to Confederate Statues? A City Auctions One for $1.4 Million (Published 2019)

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The debate over whether to remove Confederate monuments divided the country. The question of what to do with them next is just as complicated.

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A Virginia judge has ruled that the Confederate statues in Charlottesville are protected by state law because they are war monuments - and will not be taken down while the case is ongoing.

The statues were at the center of shocking violence in the summer of 2017 as neo-Nazis and other white nationalists, marching in support of them staying put in a park in the college town, clashed with anti-rightwing demonstrators in an outbreak that left many injured and one young demonstrator dead.

The ruling on Wednesday by Judge Richard Moore came after a lawsuit was filed against city council members by the Monument Fund, an organization based in Charlottesville that campaigns to preserve such statues, which could yet go to trial.

The suit was filed back in March 2017, alleging that the city council violated state laws when they voted to remove the statues of Confederate generals Robert Lee, and later, the Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson monument from Charlottesville.

Moore cited how the statues depict the men in military uniforms and on horses associated with them during the civil war. Virginia law makes it illegal for local municipalities to remove war monuments without permission from the state.

Moore acknowledged the controversy that has surrounded Confederate statues around the nation in recent years, and said his ruling is limited to the question of whether the Lee and Jackson statues fall under the definition of war memorials in Virginia law.

"While some people obviously see Lee and Jackson as symbols of white supremacy, others see them as brilliant military tacticians or complex leaders in a difficult time ... and do not think of white supremacy at all and certainly do not believe in, accept or believe in such. In either event, the statues to them under the undisputed facts of this case still are monuments and memorials to them, as veterans of the civil war," Moore wrote in his ruling.

Before the case goes to trial, Moore must first rule on other pending issues, including the council's motion for immunity from the lawsuit.

Bob Fenwick, a former city councilor who is named in the lawsuit, believes that the council still has a good case for removing the statues, claiming that "It was a lawful act that we did" and that he was "very comfortable" with his vote to remove the statues. "It's based on a flawed law, so the law doesn't make much difference; it was a public process, it was a lawful process, so that's our case," he said.

In an effort to fight against the council's original vote to remove the statues, hundreds of far right members gathered in Charlottesville in August 2017, to protest in what was called a Unite the Right rally. The protest turned deadly when self-avowed white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr drove his car into a crowd of counter-protestors killing a woman, Heather Heyer, and injuring nearly three dozen other people. Fields was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison last year.

Other Confederate monuments across the country have been the subject of fierce debate and sometimes clashes. Many have been taken down following the violence in Charlottesville.
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Virginia judge rules confederate statues are war monuments and can't be removed

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A Virginia judge has ruled that the Confederate statues in Charlottesville are protected by state law because they are war monuments - and will not be taken down while the case is ongoing.