The grandchildren of Nazis don’t drive cars with swastika bumper stickers or fly it in their yards. Yet in the US all the Confederate symbols still abound. Why? Because America never honestly faced our past with our version of Denazification. It’s time. It wasn’t enough to merely denazify. Germany, and Germans, had to be confronted with their horrors. It is time to strip the “legacy” of slavery to its essential horror. Repeat and repeat until we engage every American with our terrible history. Only when even the idea of some pickup truck proudly brandishing a Confederate flag will seem as unthinkably ludicrous as a bumper-sticker proclaiming child rape- will we know America has turned to truth, honor and hope. What any culture finds unthinkable defines it.
