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With emotions still raw from the removal of New Orleans' Confederate monuments, it can be helpful to look at how other countries have dealt with the changing symbols of history.

David Hammer, WWL 12:40 PM. CDT May 21, 2017

NEW ORLEANS -- With emotions still raw from the removal of New Orleans' Confederate monuments, it can be helpful to look at how other countries have dealt with the changing symbols of history.

From the joyous fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, to U.S Marines toppling a massive Saddam Hussein statue when they took Bagdhad in 2003, historic symbols of oppression often come down when regimes change. But in the American South, its been a much longer, more painful process.

It took 152 years after the Confederacy lost the Civil War, more than 100 years after Jim Crow-era leaders erected statues honoring heroes of the so-called Lost Cause and more than 50 years after the fall of Jim Crow for New Orleans to take down three Confederate monuments of President Jefferson Davis and Gens. Robert E. Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard and a fourth dedicated to an uprising of white supremacists at the Battle of Liberty Place.

The closest comparison may be in Ukraine, where it took 25 years after Ukrainian independence to take down more than 1,300 statues of Vladimir Lenin, the Soviet leader who conquered Ukraine in 1921.

Investigative journalist Oleg Khomenok said thats because when Ukraine re-asserted its independence with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, it remained under Communist control.

Actually, the first Ukrainian president was the chief of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, and there was no way to get rid of this legacy, Khomenok said.

It took decades for Ukraine to truly emerge from under Russias thumb. The Orange Revolution of late 2004 helped undo a rigged presidential election and get a pro-Western government. But the pro-Russian candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, took back control in 2010.

Khomenok knows first-hand about toppling regimes. He led a television news investigation into Yanukovychs corruption and was among a group of journalists who chased the disgraced president out of his opulent Mezhyhirya palace in 2014.

Another pro-Western government took over and finally passed a law to remove the Communist monuments and change more than 52,000 street and town names.

Since then, Russia has seized the Crimean peninsula and made military incursions into eastern Ukraine. But Khomenok says resistance to the law removing Communist symbols and names has not been seriously challenged.

One argument that was made against the law sounds a lot like those made recently against removing the Confederate monuments in New Orleans.

The Communist Party leaders were talking this shouldnt be done because this is the history and is part of our past, Khomenok said.

But that didnt fly.

Actually, the Communist Party of Ukraine was also banned as a part of this law, Khomenok said. The website Raining-Lenins.Silk.co tracks whats called the Lenin-Fall movement in Ukraine. It keeps photos and maps of all the Lenin statues around the world, including four in the U.S. -- in a park in Seattle, atop a building in New Yorks East Village and at casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City.

Earlier this year, Khomenok came to New Orleans to meet with reporters and got to see the Confederate monuments in person. When he heard about the debate, he found the motivation to take down symbols of American slavery reminiscent of the passions that drove the Lenin-Fall movement.

They were mad that these people who were guilty (of) a million peoples deaths would be standing on the squares in the cities, to be looking (like) glorious heroes of the country, he said.

2017 WWL-TV

Originally posted here:
Ukraine also faced monument removal challenges - WWL