This is really interesting to me for it concerns the destruction of evidence of a nation’s ugly past, a cleansing of history, if you will. I have thought about the destruction of reminders of our racist past in the taking down of confederate monuments, the idea being that the statues necessarily celebrate the ugliness that was the slavery. I have wondered, if we were now decent enough as a people to understand how wrong was what was once celebrated was, the statues would stand as historical evidence of how wrong good numbers of people in this nation could be and for how long wrongs could be celebrated as right, such thought leading to our doing what is necessary in terms of our thinking and our actions to become a people very much different from those we have decided deserve scorn and not celebration. By wiping off the residue of past bad behavior to make ourselves look better than we were, to give our ancestors a pass for inhumane behavior, well, what is produced is a most insidious form of false advertising.
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Cultural Cleansing
