Text 2: Gersh Kuntzman from the NY Daily News

Ever wonder why there are no statues of Adolf Hitler in Berlin?

It's a question that President Trump should consider when declaring that monuments to Confederate leaders are part of our nation's great "history and culture." Hitler was part of German history and culture, too. But to this day, Germany rejects him as a traitor to his people.

Every American should feel the same way about the leaders of the Confederacy as Germans feel towards Hitler. The Confederacy was an act of treason against the United States of America, its Constitution and one of its greatest Presidents. But alas, there are still close to 700 Confederate monuments strewn across the South. And President Trump — who, ironically, often says he's the best President since Lincoln — wants to maintain them.

But the President is drawing the wrong history lesson from these statues and memorials. Monuments are never about history itself. They merely represent what the people putting up the monument think about history at the moment that the monument is being installed. That's why there were once so many statues of Lenin in the Soviet Union, yet so few now. Every generation gets to write history the way it wants. And every next generation gets to rewrite it.

So it's no surprise that most of these monuments to our so-called national culture were installed in two major periods of Southern racist backlash: the era of Jim Crow segregation in the 1910s and 1920s and the Civil Rights era in the 1950s and 1960s (historian Kenneth Kruse's chart makes this point very clearly).

These monuments were put up by a succeeding generation to recast the earlier event, in this case that Confederate secession was not a traitorous act against the United States of America, but a noble effort to defend the honor of the South — with whites playing the starring roles.

Perhaps President Trump should recall the lesson of Benedict Arnold. Just like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis and everyone who swore allegiance to the Confederacy, Arnold was a traitor to his country. He won many great battles early in the Revolutionary War, but because he betrayed his nation, there are no monument to him anywhere in this country. In fact, a monument to the Revolution in Saratoga has places for statues in each of its four corners, but only three statues are there: Horatio Gates, General Philip Schuyler and Colonel Daniel Morgan. The place where Arnold's statue should be, given his heroism at Saratoga, is empty.

Nearby is a statue of a boot. Arnold famously injured his foot in the battle, yet fought on bravely. The plaque on the boot monument reads, "In memory of the most brilliant soldier of the Continental army, who was desperately wounded on this spot, winning for his countrymen the decisive battle of the American Revolution, and for himself the rank of Major General."

Arnold's name is not on the monument — a statement by the later generation that his traitorous acts left him unworthy of respect (tellingly, there's a monument to Arnold in England, the nation he aided in deceit).

The Jim Crow and anti-Civil Rights Southerners who put up monuments to their heroes saw treason differently than the Americans who put up the Saratoga monument. The Southern goal was two-fold: a) to intimidate blacks and b) to ensure that their leaders would be celebrated as part of our culture. Now the President is serving both agendas with his horrific tweeting on Thursday.

These statues are not part of our culture. They are part of a racist effort to turn a segregationist, traitorous movement into a part of our culture.

That effort must fail — and would fail if the President would find the moral integrity to just get out of the way and let today's generation recast history for itself.