What to do with symbols of shame?

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.