So I'm reading this news story about ISIS blowing up ancient shrines while thinking about this new campaign to outlaw the Confederate flag.

Malcolm Muggeridge said of his friend George Orwell that: "He loved the past, hated the present and dreaded the future." Totalist revolutionaries have the opposite mindset. They seek to attain a radiant future of perfect justice and equality by annihilating the past.

In the actual world we actually inhabit the future will be, as the past was, a mix of good and bad. You will never get Cultural Revolutionaries to believe that, though. It would remove their entire reason for living.