Growing up in the Deep South, I was steeped in the old trope that holds Robert E. Lee, the leader of the Confederate Army as a man of principle who only reluctantly took up arms against the United States. I was well into adulthood before I decided to research Lee’s history for myself. Briefly, the man himself was a slaveowner and held brutal views about their treatment. There is no question about his ideology and why he was a Confederate general. The man was no saint.

And he should not be revered in stone.

Nonetheless, there are U.S. citizens, including their President, who regard the dismantling of Confederate statues as misguided. Trump calls it “foolish.” The typical argument intended for public consumption is that removal of Confederate monuments erases history.

Make no mistake, the argument based on forgetting the past is a logical fallacy. It’s the fallacy of the slippery slope. Or stated less generously, the fallacy of the absurd extrapolation. The fallacy assumes that monuments are the sole vector of history or at least a critical link in the chain that connects the past to its memory in the present. The U.S. Civil War is thoroughly documented in many forms. Removing statuary has no bearing on recalling history.

Of course, the real reasons that some object to removing Confederate statues can either be more sinister or simply ignorant. There are some who look at Confederate monuments as symbols of an earlier proper world order where black people served the needs of the white man. Others just haven’t thought it out thoroughly for themselves. They have a mushy feelings about Southern heritage, politeness, family, and good food. And the formless glow of all these emotions bathes Confederate statuary in a light that should never be intended.

We need a new approach to this problem, an approach based on first principles.