There was news this past week in America when that old problem of racism managed to escape from its containment cell in Mel Gibson’s house and make it all the way across the country to Virginia with a flashpoint of violence in Charlottesville which is a small university town up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, ironically in one of the few parts of Virginia where there wasn’t even any fighting during the actual US Civil War.

It was always liable to turn violent and then President Trump decided to troll everybody by saying that everyone was to equally to blame and implied that when the KKK make questionable scientific claims, there’s a moral equivalence with the Lying Mainstream Media. The rise of social bubbles and selective internet news doesn’t help either but that’s an age old problem, after all in 1863 it was Abraham Lincoln himself who said “don’t trust quotes you read on the internet”

Sure, protests always attract a violent element, just look at the unspeakable violence you get when mime artists go on parade. And at the same time, most people know the US is a deeply divided country on many subjects, that diversity of opinion works in its favour most of the time. But we also assumed that nowadays the more extreme elements of the white supremacy movement listened to their own advice and “kept themselves to themselves”.

Back in the 1860s the civil war was an actual legitimate war with guns and everything to settle the issue once and for all, and then of course about a century later the US realised they should maybe pass some laws to really clear up the apparent misunderstandings over who’d won. Sometimes we don’t like what’s in the history books, just ask David Cameron about the thing with the pig. But sometimes you should really focus on the bad stuff so you can teach its lessons properly.