Comparison falls short

Without irony, the governor of Maine, Paul LaPage, likens the removal of Confederate monuments to taking down monuments to the 9/11 victims. The Union soldiers of the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment must be rolling over in their graves.

For those of you who don’t know, the 20th Maine played a decisive role at Gettysburg, saving the Union’s extreme left flank by repelling the Confederates at Little Round Top, and yet LaPage says, “How can future generations learn if we’re going to erase history?”

Most of the contentious Confederate monuments were erected between 1890 and 1920 at the height of the Ku Klux Klan’s lynching of their fellow Americans, to honor treasonous insurrectionists and humiliate and frighten those who gained their freedom only a generation or two before.

Then there are those who showed up in Charlottesville, Va., to protest the removal of a statue to a defender of slavery and traitor to the United States, among them neo-Nazis, who espouse an ideology that nearly a half-million of America’s “Greatest Generation” died to defeat.

This story was originally published August 23, 2017 at 10:43 PM with the headline "Comparison falls short."