Reflections on some public discussions ongoing in San Francisco in the Summer of 2019.
Most
societies commit shameful acts, including enslavement and colonization. Some
societies, sometimes glorify their shameful acts, capturing them in paintings
as victorious activities of their hallowed leaders, maybe showing perpetrators
and victims together. As new generation replace the old ones, such objects of
remembrance can serve useful purpose: they remind us of the sins and the pains of
our forebear and could help us to avoid new age cruelties.
Some who
identify with the victims may find these objects very offensive, others who
identify as descendants of the perpetrators may find them very upsetting.
Neither group wants regular exposure to such memorabilia.
This problem
gets especially complicated when perpetrators and heroes may be the same people,
or pride and shame appear together in valued documents and/or artifacts. For
instance, the Declaration of Independence refers to Native Americans in a
derogatory manner. It contains: “the merciless Indian savages, whose known
rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and
conditions”. The Declaration of
Independence is probably the most honored historic document in the USA; nevertheless,
such language is totally unacceptable in the 21st century. Furthermore, most of
the signatories of the Declaration of Independence were slave owners, including
Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin, both heroic figures by most accounts. Recently
there was much discussion about a large mural in a San Francisco high school
that depicts George Washington together with some Native Americans and slaves;
both the Native Americans and the slaves are represented in a manner that today
most people find objectionable and offensive.
How do we
avoid offending and upsetting the current generation with the images of the
sins of the past, but retaining their useful purpose (and their possible
artistic value)? The answer is simple: retain the objects under appropriately
guarded and described conditions and show them publicly for appropriate
educational and artistic purposes.
There are
some successful examples where shames of the past were successfully saved and
are being used to remind us of the past that has not always been happy or to be
proud of. In Budapest, Hungary in 1956 there was a popular uprising that started
with an angry mob dismantling a large statue of the much-despised Soviet
dictator Stalin. That uprising failed and all over the city of Budapest many
statues of communist heroes disliked by the population remained and many more
were still erected between 1956 and the collapse of the evil empire in 1990.
These much-hated symbols of an unhappy and painful past were collected into an outdoor
exhibit, named Memento Park, located on the outskirt of Budapest and are now
available to be visited as historic reminders of the sad, painful and hateful
past most are happy to see gone. Likewise, there is a Holocaust memorial
outside the Legion of Honor museum in San Francisco and this memorial includes
a display listing all the Nazi camps where Jews were interned and murdered over
the shameful period that lasted more than a decade, from 1933 to 1945. On a
typical day one may see people from all over the world standing in front of
this display and reading slowly the names of one horror place after the other;
the readers are clearly not rejoicing, nor celebrating, but deeply reflecting.
History
cannot be rewritten. The shames of the past cannot be erased, nor totally
hidden. They must be preserved as reminders of a part of history that is never
to be repeated.
