Posted by Mao Tse Dung’s regime killed about 70 million people including those starved to death. It enslaved about 20 million people over a period of 27 years.
Today, approximately 3,000 Mao statues exist worldwide, most of them in China, but there are also Mao monuments in Nepal, Peru, and Albania as well as in London, Los Angeles, San Diego, Montreal, Vancouver, and Sidney, Australia. A summary can be found in Cheng Wenjun’s book on Mao Statues. (图解毛泽东雕塑 ISBN-10: 7503324163 and ISBN-13: 978-7503324161, published by the People’s Liberation Army and Art Publishing House, 2013).
The Mongols under Genghis Khan and his successors killed approximately 40 million people – nearly 10% of the world population at the time – and enslaved an estimated 5-8 million people over a period of 250 years.
Today, there are many Genghis Khan monuments in Mongolia. Almost every provincial capital has one. There are several in Kazakhstan, China, and Russia and one even in London’s Hyde Park, erected in 2012.
Lenin’s regime killed about 10-12 million people and enslaved hundreds of thousands.
Today, there are an estimated 10-12,000 Lenin memorials world wide, about 80% of them in the Russian Federation. There is a Lenin memorial in Seattle, showing Lenin in a dynamic revolutionary pose. There are two Lenin memorials in Germany, one in Gelsenkirchen and one in Berlin. Another one is in Cavriago, Italy. Another Lenin bust is located in Gullspång, Sweden and one is at the South Pole in an abandoned Soviet research station.
Stalin’s regime killed approximately 20 million people and enslaved about 32 million more.
Today, there are still approximately 140 Stalin memorials worldwide. 110 of them are in Russia. 95 were newly erected under Putin since 2000. There is a Stalin memorial in Bedford, Virginia. One is in Vienna, Austria, and one in Berlin, Germany.
During its almost 1000 years of existence, the Roman empire killed approx. 40 million and enslaved an estimated 20 million people around the Mediterranean and in Northwestern Europe.
Today, there are still thousands of Roman monuments all over Europe that memorialize and celebrate Roman dominion and rule over more than 70 ethnic groups or nations. Roman rule is still very present in Germany today.
Yet, nobody in Germany has ever publicly demanded that Roman triumph arcs or the remains of Roman military installations should be removed because they are perceived as glorifying the enslavement of German tribes.
The Germans attacked France three times in modern history: 1871, 1914, and 1939. In these three wars, the Germans killed approximately 2.2 million French soldiers and civilians.
Roughly 1 million German soldiers are today buried in France in seven cemeteries. The French maintain these cemeteries while the Germans carry most of the maintenance costs. There has never been a public voice in France demanding that these cemeteries, some of which also hold graves of SS officers, should be closed, because they are perceived as glorifying military aggression.
About 6 million Europeans died in the Napoleonic wars. Today, millions of European tourists visit Napoleon’s Memorial Tomb in the Dôme des Invalides in Paris every year and the bridges across the river Seine are still named after Napoleon’s victories.
Today, all over Latin America, there are still thousands of memorials for the Spanish and Portuguese conquerors. Some have been removed, but some have been re-erected.
In short, there are many memorials worldwide for people whose actions were arguably as bad as or worse than the enslavement of Black people from Africa in America.
Also, although the Confederate States cited the preservation of slavery as the main motive for their secession, slavery was only one aspect of the Civil War, not its sole motive. At least not for the Union. In a letter to Horace Greeley, Abraham Lincoln wrote on August 22, 1862:
“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.” (Super Grok 4, punctuation and orthography as in the original.)
There are several similar statements from Lincoln. Should we tear down all Lincoln statues?
For millennia, slavery has been a worldwide phenomenon and black people were not always the slaves but often the slave holders, slave raiders, and slave traders. In Africa, the premier slave holding and slave trading states were the kingdoms of Songhai and Mali. Mansa Musa, the ruler of Timbuktu, had over 20,000 personal slaves in his entourage during his hadj to Mecca, many of them Europeans, who had been caught by Muslim pirates in the Mediterranean. Islamic slave traders controlled the trans-Saharan slave trade for hundreds of years before the first African was shipped to America as a slave. The West African chiefs conducted most of the slave raids and sold their own fellow countrymen to the European slave traders. And the trans-Saharan slave trade still exists today.
In Prussia, German chattel slavery (Leibeigenschaft) was only abolished on March 31, 1850 – just 13 years before the Emancipation Proclamation. That was Germans enslaving Germans.
Through the millennia, people fought, killed, and died for what they believed in. Occasionally they were right. But later generations, the victors and the historians, judging by their own values, often found them to be wrong. Values change. What will coming generations think about the values we have today?
The Romans had a saying: “De mortuis nihil nisi bene.” In modern speak: “Honor the dead regardless of how they lived, what they believed in, or what they fought or died for.” Most people and nations seem to accept this moral principle today. I plead that we should also apply it to the fallen Confederate soldiers, most of whom fought for Southern Independence, not for the preservation of slavery regardless of Mr. Cornerstone’s famous speech in 1861. They died for what they believed in, and we should honor their deaths even if we do not share their values.
This is not a political issue. It is simply a matter of common decency.
Thank you.
Florian Deltgen, PhD, PD
Professor of Anthropology, ret.
Kiswahili: Hakuna ila mambo mazuri kuhusu wafu.
English: Nothing but good things about the dead.