Canceling History

The following is my response to a daily newspaper reporting on yet another protest demanding the removal of a historical statue. The statue in question this time is of Robert Moses an iconic municipal planner of the twentieth century who created the Jones Beach State Park and many other parks, roads and bridges that are important in New York State. The demand is not only remove the statue that stands in front of a town hall but to also removed his name from all buildings and other municipal properties. The claim of racism is very thinly constructed around the fact that his designs dislocated communities of color.

Your coverage of the many protests demanding removal of historical statues under the guise of being offended by some issue or other related to that personage has reached a level of absurdity. Although the protests point to some specific issue, in some cases well over one hundred years ago, they no longer seem to have a matching level of fervor. The cancel culture is taking hold at a fever pitch and main stream citizens are afraid to oppose the wholesale erasing of history lest they be labeled racist. For those who have read George Orwell’s iconic book, “1984” you will recognize that we are about to live under the Ministry of Truth where history was scoured from all references that ever existed and revised over and over as the winds of shifting agendas changed.

The logic of this cancel culture can be explained in one analogy. Christians can claim the Sanhedrin, made up of Jewish clerics and the Jewish citizens of Jerusalem were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. As a large segment of the population Christians demand the removal of all Jewish symbols, monuments, or remembrances of their life journeys including all mention of the holocaust.

No one would think that is deserved, appropriate, level headed or close to warranted.

If that is not enough to convince you, I bring you a second more recent equivalent to your attention, the destruction of antiquities by ISIS terrorists when they were building their caliphate. In a short span, and not even close to demonstrating how widespread this was, the militants blew up three tombs in the ancient city of Palmyra, and reduced the Greco-Roman Temple of Bel to rubble. These artifacts were an affront to their ideology, but priceless and irreplaceable to the world.

No one would agree with this mindless attempt to erase history.

History is what history is. The Vietnam war is history that not everyone supported, yet thousands of our warriors died. Should we take down the Vietnam Memorial to appease the anti-war faction of the sixties? Should we bulldoze Auschwitz because it is an offense to the Jewish.

American history was not always glorious, but neither is anyone's life. You cannot go backwards for a redo. And you cannot undo what was by merely hiding it away in a closet somewhere. Most importantly if you don't know history you are destined to repeat it.