“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” George Orwell, 1984 카지노사이트
These words were written by George Orwell to describe the dystopian fictional society of 1984. It is a place where the endorsed ideology matters above all else. History, heroes, rights, and wrongs are illegitimate in the face of the Party’s ideology.
It continues to strike me as uncanny how, in a society so fearful of authoritarian rules, we are slipping further and further down the path that Orwell described in his novel with the best of intentions.
American history is being erased today. Sometimes this is done with good intentions. American history is full of its own shames and disgraces. But I do not agree we should deny these things occurred by erasing them from our record and memory. We should remember our culture’s mistakes. Don’t tear down the monuments. Keep them up but tell the truth about what they mean and the true stories that occurred which we might have forgotten, or perhaps were never told.
Recently the American Civil Liberties Union asked Virginia’s governor to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee from Monument Avenue in Richmond. Several years ago, I was in Richmond and noted that statue. I considered what it would be like to be a black man and raise my children in its shadow. What would I tell them about it? What does it say about us as a society? I believe that would be problematic, to say the least.
At the same time, Robert E. Lee is a central piece to the history of Richmond and Virginia and the Confederacy that was headquartered there. We do not have to be proud of that history but do we disservice our children by erasing history and pretending it never happened?
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Last summer the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that 110 Confederate statues and monuments had so far been taken down across the southern states. More are coming.
It is not only Civil War history that is being erased. In 2015, protests at Princeton University resulted in changing the name of many buildings and locations on the campus including those which carried the name of former President Woodrow Wilson who had served as a President of Princeton University. Wilson was racist in many of his perspectives (he was the first southerner elected to the US Presidency after the Civil War). The protesters at Princeton in 2015 believed the campus should reflect greater diversity by erasing America’s 28th President’s lingering presence from the campus.
In 2018 the American Library Association voted to remove the name of Laura Ingalls Wilder from a major children’s literature award (the author of the Little House on the Prairie books was the first recipient of the award in 1954). 바카라사이트 The move by the ALA was based upon recent controversies and outrages regarding how native Americans are referred to in the author’s books about life on the old west prairie.
Earlier in 2018, an idea was floated to rename the capital city of Texas as the founding father of Texas for whom Austin is named after was a proponent of slavery.
Don’t Erase History – Remember It Better
We don’t need to tear down monuments or erase history. We need to be better taught, know, and remember our history.
- Listen to the podcast episode Monumental Issues when you become a Patron to JB Shreve and the End of History by clicking here.
Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative produced a landmark research project that details the history and locations of lynching in the American south during the Jim Crow era. Through their research 4,075 racial terror lynchings of African Americans that took place between 1877 and 1950 were identified. 온라인카지