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Comment by hef19898 | Hacker News Reader

hef19898

If the statutes of british monarchs were raised during their reign, or shortly after, those statues now represent history. A bad bit of history, but history none the less. If they were erected way later, they celebrate this bad pit of history and can be torn down.

History does not have to be celebrated, it definitely has to be remembered so.

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If walls can become memories, statues and monuments can be torn down without losing their place in history.

What?

Berlin Wall.

I guess the Berlin Wall is a memory... Not quite because parts of it remain.

And not leaving parts it up was not appreciated by everyone.

Well, Nazi monuments erected during Nazi Germany are pretty taboo but we still have other ways of remembering the history. I'm personally not sold that we have to preserve giant monuments to loathed people for the sake of remembering history.

Well, there are still Hitler's (and others') letter boxes in the Reichstag, along with all other letterboxes for every dully elected MP up to the latest election, and future ones.

WW2 and holocaust memorials can be found all over the place, ranging from impressive, and depressing, sites like Dachau Concentration Camp to a some ruins and a explanation at sites of former KZ satelite locations somewhere in the woods. Not everything the Nazis built was torn down. And I highly doubt there are Churchil or Auchinlek statues in former Bengal, and if there are, sure, get rid of those.

You guys still have a lot of flak towers around, although to be fair those were built to be indestructible.

I quite like the "stick a display next to the monument explaining the history and pulling no punches while doing so" approach, optionally (and in some cases I suspect highly preferably) having relocated the thing to a museum first so people only have to see it at all if they're intentionally looking at stuff related to that era of history.

However as somebody who's generic white british and grew up in an area that was unusually white even compared to the median bit of britain I tend to default to expecting that most of the time my perspective isn't going to add much to a debate in progress and leave it be instead.

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