Statues are history
We are now entering a very dangerous part of our history - the destruction of monuments. Throughout history this has happened to almost every civilisation that has soon come to a dismal end.
Monuments, statues are history and good or bad they represent the passage of time through which our country journeyed.
To destroy any of them is to tear up the book.
Yes, there were days of infamy, people the world would have been better off without - but they existed, they carved their names indelibly on our past, nothing can ever remove the fact that they existed and to deny their existence is to remove actual fact.
This is dangerous and every civilisation that had done this has suffered from it.
We can only learn from the mistakes we make and having made them to remove the
memory is folly.
Hide them if you must but they must remain to remind us.
If we, for example, denied Adolf Hitler's existence then it would only be a matter of time before the next holocaust.
Jim Adams
Rotorua
Attach plaques
I'm alarmed at the rampant destruction of irreplaceable statues and monuments, not only in America, but other western countries that has happened in the wake of the terrible killing of George Floyd.
Perhaps justice would be better served if these monuments had plaques attached that further listed the misdeeds of these people. In that manner, history is more truthfully served and we all have the possibility to form educated opinions about these men (they are almost always men, I note).
I doubt historians or thinking scholars would agree with the wholesale removal of all these mementos as, in their time, these men were recognised for their benevolence, civic duty or efforts of gallantry and while times have changed, absolute truth does not.
A people that ignore, destroy or manipulate their history are a people doomed to repeat those same mistakes, and America has had 160 years since the Civil War to remedy their racial and social inequality and while they've progressed from the horse to space travel, and the abacus to Apple, the population remains prone to the same emotions that caused Cain to murder Abel.
Without the lessons of accurate history, people lose their way and perhaps we can see the results of this truth when we look at the plight of almost all colonised minorities.
Māori, Pacifika, Aboriginal peoples of all kinds display a common thread of oppression in their histories and it just maybe that there's not been honesty from either side.
John Williams
Ngongotahā
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