"You can't rewrite history."

The title of this is an occasional argument from people who grew up being told that certain things happened and are told that those things didn't happen, or didn't happen in the way they were told, or didn't happen for the reasons they were told.  This occasionally comes with the removal of statues.

I regard the word "history" as being two things: there's "History" - being that which occurred - and "history" - that which was written to tell the story of what occurred.  In any university, the History Department is in the arts rather than the sciences, but history does share something with science - it relies on evidence to make its case.  And, like science, the thing that is better than the existing evidence is better evidence.

An excellent example of the rewriting of history is the revelation of the breaking of German codes during the Second World War.  Because that war became the Cold War, the information that the western Allies had been reading German coded radio signals wasn't revealed to the public until the 1970s.  After that revelation, a lot of history needed to be rewritten.

You have to rewrite history, every time more evidence arrives to make your written history a better reflection of History.  And sometimes, with better knowledge, the statues have to come down so that you aren't honouring a bad person.  Removing statues doesn't remove History or memory of History.  Germany no longer has statues of of a certain corporal with a toothbrush mustache.  But they haven't forgotten him.