Justin Ward
Aug 23, 2017 · 2 min read

Please keep Orwell’s name out of your mouth.

If anyone is rewriting history, it is you. Historical revisionism is right in the headline, where you lay claim to represent the legacy of Orwell.

To the day he died, Orwell was a democratic socialist and a fierce opponent of totalitarianism of all kinds—be it Stalinist or fascist. He would no doubt today be opposing Trump, whose efforts to intimidate and silence his enemies in the press and the public are truly Orwellian.

Orwell risked his life fighting in Catalonia against the fascists alongside the militias of the CNT/FAI, who are the forebears of today’s antifascist movement.

In all honesty, whose side do you think he would march on today? The side seeking to tear down monuments to those who fought to preserve slavery or the side marching against this, i.e. the side carrying Nazi flags and chanting “Jews will not replace us?”

All of the statues—with the exception of Durham—were removed through normal democratic channels, yet you falsely equate this with the destruction of historical relics by the Taliban or ISIS.

For one, statues and monuments are not historical relics, and have little historical value in terms of what they can teach us about the past. Most are barely a century old.

Furthermore, the monuments themselves are the embodiment of historical revisionism. Monuments aren’t about the past. They are about choosing the ideas from the past that we, in the present, believe are universal and deserve to be enshrined in granite and bronze—to immortalize forever as a component of our national ethos.

A monument to the Confederacy or to Confederate generals is saying that there is something worthwhile about them and their cause was worth celebrating. They are propaganda pieces in the effort to perpetuate the “Lost Cause” narrative of gallant and chivalrous Southerners fighting against the carpet-bagging Yankee oppressors.

They rewrite history by emphasizing the many noble characteristics of the “War Against Northern Aggression” while relegating its central issue to the margins.

And your article itself rewrites history by misrepresenting why the statues exist in the first place. They are not to honor the dead. They were tools to assert white supremacy, and the inscriptions of some even explicitly say so.

The height of Confederate statue building was the 1910s, which not-at-all coincidentally was one of the bloodiest periods of white-on-black racial violence in American history, culminating in the Red Summer of 1919 and a few years later, the complete destruction of Black Wall Street in Greenwood Tulsa.

The most Orwellian thing about your article is your Doublespeak. You take obvious hate and call it “history,” and we have your number.

We know what these statues are about. The motley assortment of reactionaries who marched in Charlottesville mingling Confederate flags with banners reading 1488 and emblems of Vanguard America—they know what these statues are really about.

You’re fooling no one. So just stop it.

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Justin Ward

Written by

Radical journalist. Write about extremism, politics, class, labor, history and media. Bylines at SPLC, The Baffler & ArcDigi.Twitter: @justwardoctrine

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