In Britain and the US, statues of historical figures associated with colonialism or slavery are being pulled down or slated for removal.
This is to appease the Black Lives Matters activists and their supporters, both black and white, who have seized upon the appalling death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody to claim that Western society is fundamentally racist.
The destruction of these statues and similar artifacts, which are part of the cultural memory of civilization, inescapably calls to mind another act of cultural extermination — the Nazi regime’s burning of books in the 1930s. They threw into the fire books by Jewish, socialist, liberal, or any other authors they deemed to be inimical to Nazi ideology. They did this to erase a Western culture they wanted to destroy and replace by their own horrific ideas.
