First, ​They Came for Robert E. Lee

I mean, let’s be fair, didn’t the old general choose the Confederacy because his loyalty was to Virginia before America? There’s a lot to be said for regionalisation but I don’t want to go there this time. And didn’t he go on to say that he would free all the slaves if he could prevent war? Maybe that’s splitting hairs. Lee and the South did a very bad thing so we must remove all bad things from the past disturb or offend us, right?

Even politicians are getting in on the act. Sensing which direction the river is flowing, Gov. Andrew Cuomo tweeted: "New York stands against racism. There are many great Americans worthy of a spot in this great hall. These two Confederates are not among them." So why stop there? Not to be left behind, Cuomo went on to demand to remove Christopher Columbus' statue.

Nor are Confederate icons being targeted. While we’re at it, what about Mount Rushmore? What about Thomas Jefferson, he kept slaves, didn’t he? And it’s going global! Nelson’s statue in Trafalgar square must come down — the same Horatio Nelson whose navy hunted down slave ships bound for America — Cecil Rhodes, that colonialist — even Mandela and Gandhi are not safe — as for Winston Churchill…hang on a big fat minute, didn’t he stand up to the Nazis when no one else would? Wasn’t he accused of getting a bee in his bonnet over Herr Hitler; other politicians, royalty, and media folk thought he was a pretty decent chap? Wasn’t he getting Germany sorted out and the trains to run on time? So he imprisoned some people who were troublemakers and wants to rearrange some borders, what the hell! No reason to go to war. And there was that newspaper headline trumpeting Oswald Moseley: “Hurrah for the Blackshirts.” Nothing like going with the flow, that’s politics for you.

Of course removing statues is nothing new. Those of Lenin’s and Stalin’s came down like ninepins all over Eastern Europe following the collapse of communism. And the Soviets themselves had a tendency to change what has happened if inconvenient; airbrushing disgraced officials from photographs. As George Orwell once wrote in 1984: “Control the present, you control the past, then you can control the future." Is it any coincidence that these statue destroyers often wear communist insignia? Not just communists, can we forget those scenes of ISIS destroying ancient monuments in Palmyra. Be careful what you wish for, Governor!

Others urge caution: To quote Yale University historian David Blight, an expert on slavery: “I am very wary of a rush to judgment about what we hate and what we love and what we despise and what we’re offended by.” Or in Mao Zedong’s words, when reigning in the excesses of the Red Guard: “Let the past serve the present.” And China has a rich past — and an awful lot of it, building cities when we were building things out of mud and wattle.

Nor are the Germans about to forget their murky past, however painful it might be. If anything they are too guilty about it — believe me, I know, because I know a lot of Germans. It’s like beating up and then letting him do whatever he wants. I speak from experience. Even Jews are telling them: "It’s time to move on." Guilt is all well and good but serves to teach us, not rule us. Like Mississippi mud pie, another offering from Good Ol’ Dixie, you can have too much of anything. I’ll confess I would miss that more than Robert E Lee.

And Jews don’t want Auschwitz obliterated because it offends them — quite the opposite. They want it preserved as a reminder of what humankind can do to their fellow humans. What’s happened has happened. Let’s learn so we don’t forget.

I have to admit, when I saw footage of that statue being ripped down in Durham, North Carolina, being spat upon, kicked and danced over by people who were neither slavers nor enslaved, all I saw was hysteria and hate — and history also teaches us that nothing good ever came from either.