Free Republic

Under fire from ignorant iconoclasts, the Emancipation Memorial shows a former slave 'exerting his own strength with strained muscles in breaking the chain which had bound him.' Black Lives Matter Protesters have threatened to tear down the Emancipation Memorial in Washington. District of Columbia Delegate to Congress Eleanor Holmes Norton also called for the “problematic” statue’s removal from Lincoln Park, alleging the statue fails to note how enslaved African Americans pushed for their emancipation. Norton said former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass “expressed his displeasure” at its unveiling.In truth, Frederick Douglass predicted members of his race looking back at its...

Rarified conservative arguments that we should remove Confederate monuments is tantamount to accepting the left’s vision of America as irredeemably racist. Last week, as statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson—among many others—were pulled down by angry mobs, conservative writers Rich Lowry and Philip Klein were penning throat-clearing columns explaining how it’s wrong to pull down monuments to the Founders but okay to remove Confederate statues, because you see, Confederates were traitors who fought for slavery.Which, of course they were. But at this point it would be hard to imagine an argument more detached from reality. Lowry and Klein—and all...

History is a lie. Or, rather, a complex galaxy of truths, half-truths, exaggerations, and downplayings that together form a narrative. We don’t write histories because we want to record what really happened; we write them in order to provide ourselves with a meaningful story. We write history because we, as humans, have a fundamental need for meaning in life. We yearn to make order out of chaos, we feel we have to derive positive significance from the hardship and the trials of the everyday. In this sense, history, far from being an accurate record of reality, is an escape from...