This purging of all things Confederate has precedent. Before the end of the cold war Russian text books were constantly being revised to eliminate references to people who had been purged or fallen out of favor. Russians used to joke that “in the Soviet Union the future is certain; it is the past that changes.”
That’s a good quote; thanks. Red China was bad as well; one of the causes of resentment for Taiwan was that Chiang Kai-Shek took many museum pieces with him while they were trying to erase China’s imperial past.
I first heard that joke from a visiting Russian chemist just before the break-up of the Soviet Union, around 1988.