Every monument that has ever gone up will at some point come down. That is what history looks like. During the first world war, Americans insisted on national self-determination in Europe, and at its end the statues of the old emperors came down. After the next world war, American GIs watched in Europe as city squares named after Adolf Hitler were renamed. (The German term for “rapid deployment teams”, by the way, was “taskforces”, or Einsatzgruppen.) Americans cheered when the Lenin monuments came down after the revolutions of 1989. Americans themselves brought down a statue of Saddam Hussein. Should all of this now be restored?
Free people aware of their history can debate and dispute what should go up and what must come down. History is not a fictive permanence where an autocrat tells us that we are right and the others are wrong because we have mystical objects in the sacred locations. History cannot be captured by the dead weight of metal or cement and transformed into an object of worship, the meaning of which is defined by a leader’s whim. That is the politics of eternity, used to make us unfree.
History, by contrast, is about recording and understanding change. It takes for granted that the past structures the present, but also that people can understand those limitations and find ways to transcend them. That is freedom. Democracy requires history, because free people must always be judging our leaders, and ourselves, for our past mistakes. The history of those years between and around the world wars, if we attend to it, tells us things that we need to know.
The black American GIs who returned from the first world war were beaten and humiliated. African Americans were purged from American cities. America after the first world war suffered from a pandemic. We failed, then as now, to establish national public health. Then, as now, a sense of white entitlement got in the way of a system in which everyone would have access to care. We chose “racial hygiene” over public health, and have ever since. Adolf Hitler admired the Jim Crow laws of the interwar years and emulated them. We sent a segregated army to fight the second world war. The men who returned very often found that they could not vote nor enter public places. Then, as now, the separation of African Americans from their basic rights makes us all less free.