When a mob tears down a statue, they are tearing down art. The artistic aspect of a sculpture is more important than its historic significance, and grows more so over time. All of this wrecking is a great shame. Furthermore, moving the statues to “safe spaces” for political reasons plays right into the hands of the destroyers.

The sculptor of the greatest of the so-called “Confederate” monuments, the Confederate Memorial in Arlington Cemetery, was a Sephardic Jewish gay fellow by the name of Moses Jacob Ezekial. He had been a not-particularly-effective Confederate officer before taking Robert E. Lee’s sage advice to give art a try after the war. He’s the sculptor of many other monuments.