The Washington Post worries about white-washing history (!)

[struggle4progress]

With astonishingly unfortunate irony, the Washington Post Editorial Board on Sunday opposed relocating the confederate monument from the Rockville courthouse lawn -- on the grounds that efforts to remove the monument distort history ... by whitewashing it

The monument dates from 1913 -- an era when white supremacist ideology was conquering the nation -- and Washington in particular

Plessy v Ferguson, upholding the constitutionality of Jim Crow laws, had been decided less than two decades earlier in 1896

Thomas Dixon's trilogy glorifying the KKK had been published in the previous decade; it first became a stage hit and later the film Birth of a Nation, which played at the White House, as the President segregated federal service and drove out black federal employees

The most history-distorting significant white-wash, of course, has been two-fold: it has involved the re-conceptualization of the Civil War as a principled battle for states' rights and of the bush-wacker terrorism in the Reconstruction years as a heroic struggle to wrest government away from corrupt outsiders; but it has done so in the service of a much more literal white-wash which regulated the skin-color of political power, denying a large fragment of America their rights -- and placing confederate statues beside courthouses to ensure everyone understood the cold reality of this disenfranchisement

[Igel]

1. 18 months ago there were over 1200 monuments to Lenin in Ukraine.

This, in addition to all the Lenin streets, roads, alleys, boulevards, prospects, lanes, and other Lenin-related street names.

And Lenin libraries, institutes, universitys, parks. Lenin-related and Revolution-related town names, village names, precinct names.

The Maidan movement disposed of some of the statues. It's part of the "fascism" in the west that gets much of the publicity in the east: The Leninopad, the "Lenin fall" (which sounds like "listopad," leaf-fall, the Ukrainian word for, IIRC, November.) It was assumed to express personal hatred and contempt for the ethnic Russians in Ukraine.

Officially I have no say in this. I'm not Ukrainian, I just knew a few Ukrainian emigres. It's not my history. That makes it easier. Because for the Russian-speakers the monuments are viewed as their "legacy."

Of course, their "legacy" is the USSR, which mean linguistic and political repression of the Ukrainians that refused to kowtow and assimilate to Russianish. It meant the wholesale nationalization and slaughter of the holders of small estates when they refused to yield their land, and even worse when they refused to yield their food (including seed stock) to feed the urban proletariat that was the power base of the Leninist-Marxist oligarchy. It meant censorship, death camps, and the mess that was WWII, largely fought on Ukrainian soil with dead Ukrainian civilians all over the place and the crushing of national aspirations to be free of both Germany, Hungary, and Russia.

So I get the desire to dispose of the Lenin statues. But for the Russian-speakers it means something entirely different.

And for those outside the cultural struggle, Lenin was an important part of their history. To destroy those statues is as silly, IMHO, as the destruction of some of the Ukrainian monuments to Ukrainian heroes from the 14th-18th centuries in Crimea. They may not need 1200 of them, but they should keep some simply as a testament to what came before, whatever the symbolism.