Should Statues be torn down?
I wanted to write a short article on the question of tearing down statues. I do not think it is a very important question compared to others. But it is an amazingly easy question to answer. And people get it so incredibly wrong that I may as well say something. 1)Historical monuments are to remember something important that happened. 2)You will find that most important figures of history have also done bad things. 3)Usually those bad things were normal in their day. For example, Thomas Jefferson did own slaves. But that in no way made him stand out from the crowd. That was normal back then. In fact all of planet earth outside of Western Europe was perfectly OK with slavery at the time. Jefferson stood out from the crowd because of his important work in founding America, the world's first modern democracy. He also had a hand in the founding of the world's second modern democracy, the French Revolution. It makes no sense to t...