"Black Lives Matter" pressure groups in Boston were victorious in removing a statue of the man who ended slavery in America.  The vote by members of the Boston Arts Commission, having fielded growing complaints from Guess Who, was unanimous.  "Although the monument was created to celebrate the freeing of slaves in America," the Boston Globe explains, "and the funds for the original memorial were raised by freed slaves, its design disturbed many who objected to the optics."  Well, let's consider the optics.  According to the gist of the complaints as received by the BAC and reported by the Globe, the objectionable optics were of a "black man kneeling before Lincoln."

One doesn't have to wonder why the BAC members didn't respond the way they should have:

"Yes, devoid of context, devoid of knowledge, and devoid of history, we can understand that's what it looks like.  But that's not what it is.  Lincoln having one hand on the U.S. Constitution exemplifies his struggle to amend it.  The position of his other hand could have many meanings, but a show of dominance or an attempt to arouse submission from the slave couldn't possibly be one of them.  The so-called 'kneeling black man,' on the other hand, isn't kneeling at all, let alone kneeling before Lincoln.  On the contrary, the man is not even facing Lincoln.  His gaze is on the horizon, on the future, as he rises to his feet to stand beside his liberator on equal footing.  A cursory examination clearly shows the man is poised mid-rise: his left knuckles pressed against the ground, his right knee arched upward, placing weight onto the ball of the right foot, his right hand bent at the wrist, clutching broken shackles.  We understand that the optics may appear objectionable if one doesn't examine the design more closely or know the history behind its commissioning (for it turns out this 'black man' has a name).  But a simple lesson in that history will put such contentions swiftly to bed.  For this statue is no more an image of a black man kneeling before a U.S. President than Leonardo da Vinci's 'The Last Supper' is a painting of Christ dealing with a rowdy Italian cookery class.  We wish you all the best in your endeavors but the statue stays.  Sincerely, BAC"

Unfortunately, that's not the way it went.  The people at BAC know their history.  But they also know something else.  They know that this isn't about preserving history so much as rewriting it.  To the normal person who wasn't brainwashed by the modern university, a group calling itself "Black Lives Matter" having the Lincoln Emancipation Memorial removed doesn't make any sense whatsoever.  But I assure you that it does when you stop pretending this is about protecting black lives rather than securing black votes.

Lincoln, being the founder of the Republican Party, is an ideal target for historical annexation, given the entire point of this movement.  The point, to be clear, and as BLM's co-founder made clear herself in a 2015 speech, is the spread of Marxism (the ideological framework for socialism and communism).  Bordering on two centuries ago, Marx and Engels were deconstructing their world long before deconstructionism was cool, let alone mainstream.  As with any good deconstruction, the facts are what you make them, and history is just as much a matter of what you choose to remember as what you choose to forget.

Therefore, when the time comes for actively censoring the past and revising the history, it's important to make sure one removes all memory of your political opposition's achievements.  Thus can you effectively make way for the new version of history in which your opposition have always been on the side of evil.  Fail to do that, and you won't be able to have your Two Minutes Hate — be it as Orwell imagined in a crowded theater against a two-dimensional screen or as we know it today, at the behest of crowds in streets against three-dimensional people, buildings, and monuments.

Or, failing to revise the man who freed the slaves into the man whose image keeps them enslaved in the modern age, you can just revise what side the man who freed the slaves was on.