Quote:
Originally Posted by Livia
Plenty of statues of Stalin dotted around, and Mao Zedong and plenty of other questionable men. Removing them would be like trying to rewrite history.
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The removal of statues is not unprecedented. Indeed, removing iconography has always been central to the process of a nation’s reckoning with its problematic past. After the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in 2011, Egyptians waded through every street removing imagery of their finally-toppled dictator. Libyan rebels similarly tore down the statue of Muammar Gaddafi in his Bab al-Azizya compound in Tripoli.
Statues of Josef Stalin are still – as recently as 2011 – being removed from all over Russia and Eastern Europe.
Of course, it would be absurd to claim that these moments deleted these figures from historical memory – rather, they represented a collective will to atone for their widely condemned actions, with the hope that by removing artefacts that idolise unethical ideologies, we can begin to learn from history’s mistakes.'
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education...is-crimes.html