Monuments are artistic things that we, the living, put up to honor our past. A big tombstone suggests that the dead guy was important. Medium-sized tombstones mean a person was loved. Tiny tombstones suggest a pauper passed on. How important was someone? Look at the size and expense of his monument.

As a result, the Confederate monument brouhaha isn’t about honoring the dead, destroying history or fighting a war that ended over 150 years ago. It’s about how we choose to remember history.

Monuments are for the living – not the dead. They reflect what’s in people’s hearts when built.

The sheer number of Confederate monuments raises a few questions:

1. Why doesn’t the Union army have as many? The North won. Slavery ended. A lot of soldiers living above the Mason-Dixon line died too. There are monuments honoring the North, of course, but if our view of history is balanced, shouldn’t the monument-to-monument count be roughly the same?

2. Why don’t we memorialize WW I, WW II, the Korean War or the Vietnam War with as many monuments? (Yeah, yeah, there are other wars – them too.) If we choose how we honor history, why do we over-emphasize a failed attempt to keep slavery alive?

3. Why aren’t there more memorials decrying slavery? Comparing U.S. slavery to the Jewish Holocaust is an apples-oranges comparison, but both are massive human rights abuses on a breathtaking scale. Jews killed in WWII: Up to 6 million. Africans forced into slavery in the U.S.: 12.5 million. Africans who died on the way: 1.8 million.

Jewish museums honor the dead with a strong “never forget” theme, so that a human tragedy akin to the holocaust will never happen again. But most of our tributes to the old South suggest that a sad injustice occurred to heroes, and the “South shall rise again.”

The actual holocaust portion of the Civil War – human bondage and murder – is usually an unchiseled detail. If Southern monuments include black Americans, they look like doting fans to rock-star plantation owners. Outside a few slave bungalows in “See a Real Plantation!” tourist attractions, there are few existing today with a “never forget” theme.

The numbers are stunning: More Africans died crossing the Atlantic than American soldiers died in all U.S. wars (1.8 vs. 1.26 million). And three times more black people died in some nameless boat bobbing in the Atlantic than all white people who died in the Civil War (620,000). Where are their statues?

4. Why do we need monuments to remember history, anyway? Or the flipside to that question: Why is tearing down monuments somehow going to make us forget? We have books. We have historical documents. We have museums. We have movies. We have websites. History will be destroyed only if we no longer care – yet even then, data will live on.

There’s honor in fighting for your Southern homeland even if you disagree with the reasons, and the anti-Confederate-monument people should remember that. More than a few Americans headed to Vietnam disagreeing with the reason for being there. Honor every soldier’s commitment, their love for family and home.

Winston Churchill said “History is written by the victors,” but he’s wrong in the context of the Civil War. Ask, “Why is this history the one we choose to honor and remember?”

Then ask this: “If we’re focusing on this version, what are we, by default, ignoring?”

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