Grant Russell makes valid points in his letter (“Leave memorials alone,” Sept. 11), but I take exception to the notion that the removal of Confederate memorials from places of public veneration is any attempt to “rewrite history” and “remove facts.” He wrote: “Fact: Each side fought for what they believed to be right. One side lost, the other won. That didn’t diminish the need for each side’s hero.”
Traitors to a nation should not be afforded the status of “heroes.” One does not find monuments honoring the leadership of Vichy France in World War II. By Russell’s metric, those collaborators who sold out the French Republic were only “doing what they believed to be right.” Thinking you’re right and being right are different things.
Memorials to the Confederacy did not come into vogue until a generation after the war, when the mythology of the “Lost Cause” of the South had gained purchase. These memorials to traitors were created for the express purpose of making sure the emancipated African-American population stayed in its position of subservience.
Russell is correct; these memorials are “history.” They are false history, and belong in museums and places where the deception they represent that was foisted upon generations can be properly explained.
