Bugle editorial ...
What is gained by rewriting history?

In recent months, symbols of Southern history and culture have come under intense fire. For example …

• Following complaints, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley signed a bill to remove the Confederate flag from the capitol grounds.

• The New Orleans City Council voted to remove four Confederate monuments (Lee, Beauregard and Davis) from prominent places in the city.

• Mississippi voters soon will decide whether to replace the state flag (Confederate Battle Flag) with a new flag that would feature 20 white stars on a blue square.

• In Minnesota, activists demanded that a lake named after John C. Calhoun, a senator and vice president from South Carolina who was a proponent of slavery, be renamed.

• A Kentucky state official said a statue of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy and a native Kentuckian, should be removed from the Capitol rotunda in Frankfort. The statue is near a larger one of another Kentuckian, Abraham Lincoln, a proximity that made him uncomfortable, the official said.

• The Atlanta branch of the NAACP is calling for the immediate removal of all Confederate symbols from Georgia’s Stone Mountain Park, state-owned property that also houses a Civil War museum, hiking trails and other attractions.

“We need not honor these individuals and moments from the past that do not meet our standards of decency, equality and nondiscrimination,” one individual remarked.

Yet as proposals emerged to remove Confederate imagery in state after state, members of Confederate veterans’ organizations voiced concern about the flood of demands and said they felt misunderstood. The Confederate statues, the battle flag, even the naming of locations were a matter of remembering family members who had fought in the Civil War, they said.

“People are calling for removing monuments and names of places in the name of racial sensitivity?” one Southerner commented. “Where does this end?”

If and when all the statues and any reminders of a time some do not want to remember are removed, what will be left? You can tear down all reminders, but that won’t undo the past.

Was the Civil War waged because the North wanted to end slavery? Slavery was and is wrong. But was the North so noble that it was willing to fight to end a social wrong? Or could that have been a cover to make an economic gain?

War is about greed. It happens because someone wants something that someone else has. Let’s not rewrite history in the name of political correctness.

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history,” George Orwell wrote.

Words to remember.