Incinerating Robert E. Lee Statue in a ‘Memory Hole’ Signals a Darker Agenda: Constitutional Scholar

‘Ripping down statues of great people because they fought on the wrong side is a mark of bigotry,’ constitutional scholar Robert Natelson said.

A statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee is removed after a yearslong legal battle over the contentious monument in Charlottesville, Va., on July 10, 2021. Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

As social justice leaders and media celebrate the melting and remolding of the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, into a new public artwork, one history scholar warns of the dangers of erasing the past.

In an interview with The Epoch Times, Robert Natelson, a former constitutional law professor and senior fellow in constitutional jurisprudence at the Independence Institute in Denver, compared the removal of the statue to the Ministry of Truth’s incineration of historical documents in the memory hole in George Orwell’s “1984.”