A monument, like the one to General Lee, is a material acknowledgement of a person’s virtue and contribution to the common good. Once history books are written and the voices of victims of dark episodes such as slavery have been heard, it is pertinent to reconsider the moral standing of figures who might have once been considered heroes and are depicted in statues. [...]
According to the Gregorian dictum, written 1400 years ago by Pope Gregory the Great: images should not be destroyed because they are the books of the illiterate. We learn the mistakes of our past from the images that we make, in the present, of that troublesome past. [...]
Some statues need to be removed because of their embodiment of venomous ideologies, such as Nazism. For this reason, many symbols of Nazism such as the big swastika in the Zepellinfeld in Nuremberg were completely destroyed after the second world war in Germany. After all, images can work as didactic devices.
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