Dirty Dishes	Dirty Dishes Archive

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Thanks to the reader who sent a clip from The Times (London) detailing how some Jewish activists campaigned in Germany to have Nazi-era statues "quickly dismantled and scrapped" before the World Cup soccer matches brought thousands of international tourists through the gates of some stadia with very ugly pasts.

Books burned, art defaced, or statues destroyed always make Dawn nervous. Surely, sensible anti-Nazi activists and citizens don't want to follow the same art "reform" policies of the Mao's Red Guard or the Taliban. (Or, for that matter, the Nazis....) George Washington owned slaves; is his portrait by Stuart Gilbert to be removed from the National Gallery and burned? Theodore Roosevelt had hundreds of thousands of Filipinos slaughtered; is he to be chiseled off Mount Rushmore? No; preserving art does not endorse the politics of its makers nor subjects.

Art preservation is one thing; nomenclature, another. "Adolf Hitler Platz" obviously needed re-naming. As does, in Dawn's opinion, Washington's "Ronald Reagan International Airport." Honoring the man who busted the Air Traffic Controllers' union and launched the on-going war on America's poor is inappropriate and distasteful.