There’s a deeply disturbing trend to remove Civil War monuments and to rename parks, schools, and streets whose subjects are no longer in favor. Librarians and scholars, on the other hand, celebrate banned books, publications so controversial in their time that people weren’t allowed to read them.
Texts like Mein Kampf and Lolita populate book shelves. Do we approve of Nazism or pedophilia? Of course not. Yet those titles remain. We are in fact considered enlightened if we permit their distribution.
What if monuments were books? Would we be removing them from bookshelves and prohibiting people from reading them? With statuary, we are banning people from reading their stone wrought pages and erasing our history. It is an affront to everything scholarly and the freedom of speech and ideas we so earnestly espouse.
From 1984:
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” George Orwell
Post inspired by The Common Sense Conservative (external link)
