Much as that quote may sound like something you are likely to hear sometime this weekend on the evening news regarding the current rash of vandalizing Confederate Statues in various locales around the country, it is not. Rather, it is from a novel I am currently reading entitled "A Gentleman in Moscow" and which covers the life of a former member of the Czarist aristocracy and his experiences living under the society created by the Bolsheviks from the time of the Revolution and modified as time moved onward. Indeed, the quote, above, is uttered by a friend of the main character, who started as a strong supporter of the "new order", but after some infraction, spent a decade in the Gulag only to be released and made to live somewhere called Yavas, forbidden to ever return to Moscow.
When I read the line, it gave me pause and not in a good way, because it seemed very similar to what some of our citizens want to do to statues of soldiers who struggled in an, admittedly, defeated cause and the moves to expunge the names of selected Presidents from schools and other public buildings because they were slave holders. Now, I hear on CNN this morning that some people in Georgia want to dynamite Stone Mountain because it has a carving of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson on its face.
We can't keep trying to erase history. You don't have to like what happened but it did and it's past time to learn its lessons rather than refusing to recognize its existence. Or else---indeed, where will it end?