Topic: WorldNetDaily
Ted Baehr begins his Aug. 23 WorldNetDaily column by Ted Baehr begins by bizarrely claiming that the Dachau concentration camp had been "cleaned up, sanitized and almost turned into a park. There was none of the terrible remnants of the genocide that occurred. They had scrubbed and whitewashed the history of Dachau."
Actually, no -- the folks running the Dachau memorial site make sure you know it was a concentration camp.
Baehr then even more bizarrely presents his flawed Dachau claim as an analogy for the debate over removal of Confederate monuments:
Certainly, those who are sanitizing and removing Confederate monuments are also wiping away the memory of the brutality and horrors of slavery. Yes, these monuments might be offensive, but there are lots of things that are offensive. Dachau was offensive. However, anyone who thinks clearly will know that knowing history is important to keep us from repeating the same mistakes and indulging in the same evils over and over again. If you remove all the Confederate monuments and statues in the United States, people will no longer be able to talk about the history of the Confederacy during the Civil War, including the part slavery played in how that war began and how it developed during the four years in which it occurred, or all the many people who died during the war and why.
Hoo boy. First, Baehr doesn't seem to realize that his Dachau-Confederacy analogy makes the Confederacy look even worse than he probably intended.
Second, and more importantly, Baehr doesn't understand that those Confederate monuments were not built to serve as a reminder of "the brutality and horrors of slavery" -- they were built to celebrate the Confederacy and to further the idea of white supremacy and black subjugation. The people who erected many of these monuments wanted to repeat the mistake of the Confederacy.
As for Baehr's claim that "if you remove all the Confederate monuments and statues in the United States, people will no longer be able to talk about the history of the Confederacy during the Civil War," he will be pleased to learn about the existence of things called books and TV shows where the Civil War is discussed in depth. Removal of Confederate statues doesn't affect the existence of other media.
If the Confederacy really was as evil as Baehr says it is, shouldn't he be in favor of removing statues that were erected for the express purpose of celebrating that evil?
Looks like we have a frontrunner for next year's LoBaido Award for dumbest ConWeb commentary.
