As novelist William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Battles over remembrance, interpretation, “cancellation” and censorship of history take center stage in the 2021 documentary “Civil War (Or, Who Do We Think We Are),” streaming today on Peacock. The film was begun in 2016 and meets with individuals north and south of the Mason-Dixon line to discuss the different ways the history of the Civil War has been taught and interpreted, commemorated and celebrated.
As we see in “Civil War,” battles over the past aren’t about history at all. They’re about political power and who gets to be powerful enough to define “what really happened.”
