As a citizen and proud Philadelphian, I am angered and appalled at the recent directive by the Trump administration and the U.S. Department of the Interior to remove signage regarding Washington’s ownership of slaves at the President’s Executive Mansion on Independence Mall.

In Ancient Egypt, pharaohs erased their predecessors’ names from monuments in an effort to say they didn’t exist. During the Reign of Terror, at the height of the French Revolution, the Jacobins destroyed the statues of saints by lobbing off their heads, and closed churches, including Notre Dame, renaming them “Temples of Reason.”

In the past century, the Nazis held book burnings and suppressed any art that didn’t fit into their ideology. Lenin and Stalin banned artists and authors who they deemed “bourgeoise” in an attempt to create the “New Soviet man.” Chairman Mao, during China’s Cultural Revolution, executed tens of thousands of Confucian scholars and replaced them with his little Red Book. In recent decades, in an effort to destroy the pre-Islamic past, the Taliban destroyed the giant Buddha statues and Buddhist monasteries carved into the Bamiyan Cliffs, in Afghanistan, dating back to the 3rd to 5th centuries.

The recent attempt to whitewash our own history should sound alarm bells to all of us. To wipe away our past because it might offend some is no different than what other repressive regimes have done throughout history. At the very birthplace of our freedom, it is a disgrace to act as though slavery, the darkest chapter of our history, didn’t exist. Does the current administration hope that the country develops collective amnesia? I trust not!

Michael J. Collins

Mr. Collins is a retired history teacher