Destroying history will not make you feel good about the present. Studying and learning from it might.

Victor Davis Hanson writes in American Greatness,

The subtext of most current name changing and icon toppling is that particular victimized groups blame their current plight on the past. They assume that by destroying long-dead supposed enemies, they will be liberated — or at least feel better in the present.

Yet knocking down images of Columbus will not change the fact that millions of indigenous people in Central America and Mexico are currently abandoning their ancestral homelands and emigrating northward to quite different landscapes that reflect European and American traditions and political, economic and cultural values.

…Stanford University has changed the name of two buildings and a mall that had been named for Father Junipero Serra, the heroic 18th century Spanish founder of the California missions. Serra was reputed to be unkind to the indigenous people whom he sought to convert to Christianity.

Stanford students and faculty could have found a much easier target in their war against the dead: the eponymous founder of their university, Leland Stanford himself. Stanford was a 19th century railroad robber baron who brutally imported and exploited Asian labor and was explicit in his low regard for non-white peoples.

Yet it is one thing to virtue-signal by renaming a building and quite another for progressive students to rebrand their university—and thereby lose the prestigious Stanford trademark that is seen as their gateway to career advancement.

…ignorance both accompanies and explains the arrogance of historical erasure, past and present.

Recently, vandals in North Carolina set fire to a statue of General Lee. But they got the wrong Lee. Their target was not a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, but a statue of World War II Maj. Gen. William C. Lee, who campaigned for the creation of a U.S. Army airborne division and helped plan the invasion of Normandy.

The past is not a melodrama but more often a tragedy. Destroying history will not make you feel good about the present. Studying and learning from it might.

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