In all fairness, I suppose it would be acceptable for me to mention that General Sherman was a monster and proved it in his almost 300-mile scorched-earth march from Atlanta to Savannah. Sherman wrote to Grant in 1865, “We are not fighting against an enemy army, but against an enemy people. Both young and old, rich and poor must feel the iron hand of war in the same way as the organized armies. In this respect, my march through Georgia was a wonderful success.”

He stole every animal possible and killed those he could not take. He stole all the grain he could carry and burned every barn to the ground. And it was war against a people, not an army!

General Sheridan describing his part of the war in the Shenandoah admitted, “I have burned 2,000 barns filled with wheat and corn, all the mills in the whole country, destroyed all the factories of cloth, killed or driven off every animal—even the poultry—that could contribute to human sustenance. Nothing should be left in the Shenandoah but eyes to lament the war.” Very principled men, those Yankees.

So, if we are going to hold southern soldiers responsible according to modern standards then we will do the same for northern soldiers. Won’t we? Hypocrites!

Rather than learn from the good and bad decisions in our past, the non-thinkers rewrite history and express hate for southern culture. They demand that statues of highly principled men be removed from the public square and portraits of them and of major battles be relegated to obscure storage rooms.

Slavery and legal segregation were blights on our nation, but that is behind us. The segregationists today are radical Blacks and non-thinking, self-hating Whites. However, some critics assert that segregation was the major and almost exclusive blight of southerners. There are many southern values such as love of country, way of life, commitment, courage, leisurely lifestyle, gentle weather, etc., that make the South distinctive and are often reflected in our history, monuments, music, and general culture. Today, official segregation is a moot issue.

Only a small percent of southerners owned slaves, and the first slaveholder was a Black! His name was Anthony Johnson who owned black and white slaves! So, there is plenty of blame to go around starting with black chiefs who kidnapped and sold their own people to Arab slavers long before New World colonies were involved. I have noticed that many of the black agitators refuse to discuss these embarrassing facets of this issue, being willing only to demand their position be heard and accepted. I have no guilt over slavery, but I am embarrassed by it.

It is the business of each city and state to decide about monument removal or not—not outside black or white activists. Moreover, there must be consistency in vilifying objectionable leaders of extremist causes. If statues of slavers and Klan supporters are to be removed from public view, then former Democrat Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia (former Klansman) must be treated the same way. Any Byrd monument or plaque or reference in D.C. or elsewhere must be removed.

That would also be true of Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black (former Klansman and Democrat). Same with anti-American and black extremists W. E. B. DuBois, Malcolm X, etc. But that won’t happen. And agreeing to remove a few monuments will only encourage the fanatics. Progress will be possible only if there is honest reciprocity.

Desegregation came about in the U.S. school system in 1954 with the Brown v School Board of Topeka, decision. And while it is good that schools were desegregated, the decision was not a wise one. If the court had simply ruled that any student could choose which school he wanted to attend, that would have solved the problem without bloodshed, violence, expense, turmoil, etc., in both north and south. Unknown to many, the worst of the bloody riots surrounding school desegregation happened in the North.

Northern racial hatred was evident before, during, and following Lincoln’s War of Northern Aggression. In Democracy in America, Alexis Tocqueville wrote in 1864 that “the prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the States that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those States where servitude has never been known.” He was right on target.

Few are willing to admit that the North had “whites only” restrictions in restaurants and hotels, and almost every northern city had its share of racial killings, cross burnings, and white-black riots. Thomas J. Sugrue, a professor of history and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, revealed in Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North that major black entertainers “had a hard time finding rooms and faced Jim Crow in restaurants when they toured the North.”

Following WW II, Blacks streamed to northern cities, but they did not move to New York City but to Harlem, not to Chicago but the Southside of Chicago. Malcolm X stood before a Harlem audience in 1964 and declared, “America is Mississippi. There’s no such thing as a Mason-Dixon line—it’s America. There’s no such thing as the South—it’s America. . . . And the mistake that you and I make is letting these Northern crackers shift the weight to the Southern crackers.” I shockingly find myself agreeing with a black racist extremist!

Black activist James Baldwin reflected on Blacks immigrating to northern cities: “They do not escape Jim Crow: they merely encounter another, not-less-deadly variety.” He was saying that the North was as bad as the South! Martin Luther King, Jr. said that even in Alabama and Mississippi, he had not encountered mobs as hostile to black civil rights as those in Chicago.

All the major northern cities had huge ghettos of Blacks, and Martin Luther King, Jr. did not lead a march through the Chicago suburb of Cicero, because of so much hostility about integration. In 2011, the liberal Salon website revealed that the ten most segregated cities in the U.S. were Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, New York, and Milwaukee. Notice the common denominator! And even the U.S. military was segregated during WW II! So, let’s be even-handed in the criticism of black/white relationships in both North and South.

In this rush to make right all the past wrongs of famous men and in light of the resent awareness of the mistreatment of women maybe we should visit the lifestyle of Martin Luther King and his numerous mistresses and his mistreatment of them.

Oh, well, maybe not. After all, consistency can be carried too far.

(Dr. Don Boys is a former member of the Indiana House of Representatives who ran a large Christian school in Indianapolis and wrote columns for USA Today for 8 years. Boys authored 18 books, the most recent Muslim Invasion: The Fuse is Burning! eBook is available here with the printed edition (and other titles) at www.cstnews.com. Follow him on Facebook at Don Boys, Ph.D., and visit his blog. Send a request to DBoysphd@aol.com for a free subscription to his articles, and click here to support his work with a donation.)

That attack on truth has been considered fiction but distorting history is a fact that is accelerating daily.

Ashamed of the past and fearful of the future, desperate, duplicitous, and disgusting politicians have destroyed the historical record to make them look less unscrupulous and to confuse, corrupt, and control each generation. A rewrite of history is in the making as I write.

It has happened and has been accelerating since the beginning of time.

Ancient kings glorified their successes in battle, often neglecting major disasters, all to preserve their position in history. They profusely bragged about their elaborate building programs but refused to reveal their waring tendencies that destroyed their cities. Sennacherib was the son of Sargon and ruler of the Assyrian Empire in Eighth Century B.C. Assyrian inscriptions reveal that Sennacherib made astoundingly vainglorious boasts about his accomplishments of shutting up Hezekiah in his Jerusalem capital “as a bird in a cage.” Everyone now realizes that Sennacherib took 46 Jewish cities but failed to conquer Jerusalem (after the angel of the Lord killed 185,000 of his troops in one night) and Sennacherib left in defeat for his Nineveh palace only to be eventually killed by his son.

If anyone offended a tyrannical king, that individual was not only killed but often any mention of him was removed from all public records.

I revealed in my book, The God Haters, an example of politicians manipulating history when Caesar tried to obliterate the memory of Pilate because he had offended Caesar. Pilate therefore did not exist since Caesar said so and officials and historians willingly obeyed by removing Pilate’s name from all records.

For many years, Bible critics declared that the Bible is unreliable because Pilate could not be found in any historical record. Then archeologists, digging in the rubble of Caesarea by the Sea, found a five-inch-thick stone that referred to Pilate and had been used in the famous theater ruins where I have preached a few times. The stone had been used because it was exactly the size needed and was used with the forbidden information about Pilate underneath! It is on display in Caesarea today.

Mark Antony had a similar experience with his memory being formally expunged from Rome’s official records after his affair with Cleopatra. “His name was obliterated from the…state registers of official events. His statues were removed. It was to be as if he had never existed. The Senate …voted that no member of the Antonius clan should be named Marcus….His birthday was made …an unlucky day, on which public business could not be conducted.”

Roman Emperor Caracalla murdered his brother and co-emperor Geta and had statues of Geta removed and his image chiseled off coins. Geta’s image was removed from all paintings, his statues were destroyed, his name was struck from all records, and it became a capital offence to speak or write Geta’s name. An estimated 20,000 people were massacred as a result.

Soviet despot Joseph Stalin sent Leon Trotsky into exile and airbrushed him out of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, then to finish the matter, had him assassinated in Mexico. For decades, when a Soviet official fell out of favor with the sitting tyrant, the offender was painted out of the official photos of the most recent May Day Parade in Moscow.

Politicians never change, and modern politicians continue in the same way: they exaggerate their successes, excuse their shortcomings, and excise their sins. Similarly today, politicians and their zealot followers seek to rewrite history and remove any photos or statues that might not meet their modern views of morality.

Some U.S. textbooks don’t deal with major American founders, and liberal censors insist that Huckleberry Finn be removed from libraries because it is politically incorrect.

Notre Dame is a Catholic university and the president cowardly responded to student complaints about paintings of Christopher Columbus so they are being concealed. Columbus was a dedicated Catholic, now repudiated by a Catholic university.

Usually, at the first demand of self-appointed protestors, whimpering university presidents cower under their desk as they immediately capitulate to the foaming-at-the-mouth fanatics.

Officials at University of Pennsylvania have quickly surrendered without a fight to the fanatics by removing a portrait of William Shakespeare and replacing it with a black lesbian writer. New York Governor Cuomo removed the statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson from a public place. Calhoun College has been changed to Grace Hopper College since Calhoun was pro slavery, you know. Also, stained glass windows depicting slavery were removed from college buildings. New Orleans removed its famous 20-foot statue of Robert E. Lee, the last of four to be removed.

Baltimore removed their offensive statues overnight including one of Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney author of the majority opinion in the Dred Scott case that decided former slaves could not become U.S. citizens. So, now in rewriting history they are going after dead judges for their judicial decisions.

Mob protesters in Durham removed a statue of women of the Confederacy and one to fallen soldiers of the South. We can’t even honor women’s part in the war or the average soldier who died for his country. Some, historical statue haters, desperate for support, charge that those Confederate soldiers fought and died to preserve slavery. What balderdash! No southern boy was so stupid to leave home with crops and animals in the field to fight and die for the right of less than 5% of southerners to own slaves.

It is going to get confusing (and expensive) when the fanatics start removing and changing all streets, buildings, etc. with the names of slave-holders George Washington or Thomas Jefferson and almost all the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Even Mount Rushmore is in the sights of the history haters since two of the four faces were racists—Washington and Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt, an imperialist. Only Lincoln is safe and if his statements on Blacks were well known, he would be in danger. Roosevelt is considered an imperialist and is often ridiculed rather than respected for his part in the Spanish American War. Roosevelt’s statue in front of the museum on Central Park West is a tribute to his status as the nation’s greatest environmentalist. His statue is also in front of the Museum of Natural History. Will the zealots determine to destroy Rushmore?

Statues, paintings, etc., of very difficult and embarrassing times in our nation’s past are still a part of our past and their presence could be a reminder that we don’t want to make the same mistakes again. And that goes for mistakes made in the North as well as the South. Would these dedicated progressives demand the destruction of the Roman Colosseum where thousands were brutally slaughtered? How about the Pyramids since they were built by slaves?

Such nonsense is an attack upon the past which won’t change the reality and will only confuse the present. We should learn from history not defile, distort, or destroy it.

Dr. Don Boys is a former member of the Indiana House of Representatives, who ran a large Christian school in Indianapolis and wrote columns for USA Today for eight years. Boys’ book, Muslim Invasion: The Fuse is Burning! is available here. Follow Dr. Boys on Facebook at Don Boys, Ph.D. and TheGodHaters, Twitter, and visit his blog.