Look it is the return of the WORST TAKE about defending keeping confederate monuments. I know you are not all credulous basics, so you know why this take is stupid and racist, but let's remind those who don't know yet that THIS IS NOT HOW HISTORY WORKS.

So first of all, learning from history has nothing to do with keeping racist monuments up. We know, for example, that Nazis are bad without keeping every monument to Horst Wessel up. In fact, usually, we intentionally remove monuments glorifying genoicidal killers.

History, actually, is about reviewing historical documents. I can learn as much about a society being racist AF from a piece of paper that says "there was a big old racist confederate statue in this place from the year XX until XX." That's all I need to know about the racism.

And believe me, this is my literal job. I talk about the meaning of medieval structures and the messages that they portrayed to people all the time, about buildings that have not existed for hundreds of years. It doesn't have to be there any more for me to learn from it!

What statues and monuments do is aggrandise people, by design. Continuing to keep them in place sends an explicit signal that they are worth celebrating. That is the *entire point* of statues. To keep them up is, therefore, a tacit agreement with what they did.

We learn nothing by keeping monuments in place and we send an explicit signal to the groups that they killed, tortured, and oppressed that the pain of their ancestors is less important than an imagined Great White Man's legacy.

You want to learn some history? READ A HISTORY BOOK. It has nothing to do with looking at statues of racists. This is not what censorship is.
Also read a book other than 1984 just ONCE, I beg you.

Anyway I have written extensively on this terrible take in the past, but suffice to say it is still bad and if you agree with it you should sort your life out. https://going-medieval.com/2017/08/17/history-is-a-discipline-not-a-virtue/