Regarding statues as history:

[Ilsa]

Link to tweet

Think of how absurd and repugnant it would be to erect a memorial to Bin Laden in the middle of Ground Zero to "preserve history"

[Glorfindel]

1. History, usually, is written by the victors

In the case of the Confederate statues, the losers erected them to glorify a fairy-tale past that really never was, and to (a) defy the damn Yankees and (b) intimidate the African-American population by reminding them of their previous condition of servitude. Surely the time has finally come to remove them to museums or sell them to private collectors. By now, the Civil War should be as distant and forgotten as, say, the French and Indian Wars of the previous century.