Confederate Monuments Were Built to Change History, Not Preserve It
Eric Levitz
... America’s myriad tributes to the Confederacy do no more to promote accurate historical memory than the president’s tribute to the brave imaginary soldiers who died on the shores of his golf course.
Like Trump’s plaque, Confederate monuments were born of a desire to rewrite the past for present convenience ... If we saw German politicians arguing that there was no tension between upholding the values of their liberal democracy and preserving monuments to Adolf Hitler’s military prowess we would recognize that these officials were trying to distort their nation’s history, not learn from it.
That so many Americans cannot recognize the tension between their president’s endorsements of freedom and equality under the law and his defense of monuments to men who committed treason in defense of chattel slavery is a reflection of our nation’s resilient racism. But it is also a product of the fraudulent history that all those statues of Robert E. Lee were erected to propagate ...
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/08/confederate-monuments-were-built-to-change-history.html
