Don’t lynch history

Despite whatever today’s nightriders demand

IT COULD have been a scene out of the post-bellum South—only with the images reversed, as on a photographic plate. This time the masked marauders, once again acting under color of law, were adjusting the noose around a monument to New Orleans’ and the whole South’s past. Piece by piece they took it apart in the dead of night—as if torturing their victim before carting away the remains to an as yet undecided or at least undisclosed location.

It was all done under cover of darkness. As if the perpetrators of this crime against history knew very well what they were doing and were intent on hiding the evidence. One after the other, these monuments are to pay the ultimate penalty. One after the other, three more memorials dedicated to the memory of yesterday’s heroes but today’s villains—Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Louisiana’s own Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard—are to be effaced from history.

“We will no longer allow the Confederacy to literally be put on a pedestal,” pronounced New Orleans’ current mayor, Mitch Landrieu in the style of Canute ordering the waves to stop their ceaseless motion. As for his first monumental victim, the statue was put up “to honor the killing of police officers by white supremacists,” he said. “Of the four that we will move, this statue is perhaps the most blatant affront to the values that make America and New Orleans strong today.” Or just forgetful, anyway. The mayor explains that he had to act in such haste and secrecy in response to “threats and intimidation” leveled at the contractor who responded to the original bid to remove them. In short, if ‘twere done, let it be done quickly.

A handful of protesters did show up objecting to the statue’s demolition, but the protesters were dispersed by local police about an hour and a half after midnight, after which the cops barricaded all the surrounding streets and positioned snipers on rooftops. By 3 a.m., workers were drilling into the memorial and by dawn’s early light, the obelisk was gone, its severed parts dispersed much like Oliver Cromwell’s after the Lord High Protector had fallen out of favor with the mob that was the English government at the time. His head would be displayed on a pike. Though he leaves behind a wealth of good advice for today’s temporal rulers such as: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.” But those who would declare history at an end and they its masters, like Mayor Landrieu, are much too sure of themselves to take such wise counsel seriously.

To quote an outnumbered group that styles calls itself, most appropriately, the Monumental Task Committee: “This secretive removal [of the monument] under the cloak of darkness, outside of the public bid, masked contractors, and using unidentified money [reeks] of atrocious government. People across Louisiana should be concerned over what will disappear next.” And not just people across the state border but across the country, for we are all one with one history. And, Lord willing, it is far from ending.

With all the respect due to Mayor Landrieu and his closed view of history, which is very little, allow us to remind him that there is no right side of history but only a phase in the cocksure present that will prove as evanescent as all the other phases of historiography that have preceded it. Clio, muse of history, has seen it all before, and she can be forgiven a wry smile at his egotism. For all history is revisionist, and all those who write and read it are as perishable as their fleeting works. Some of those works will endure as long as Herodotus’ while others are already being forgotten.

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