History is not merely written by winners. It’s dictated by them. That’s true at Wimbledon. And it’s especially true in war.

The controversy over a Confederate battle flag flying over the South Carolina State House that has erupted anew in the wake of the Charleston mass murders is yet another example of our failure to understand this. The South lost the Civil War. And the losers do not get to display the trophies of war. If they did, the Nazi flag would be flying over Germany today. How long do you think the former Allies would tolerate that?

Some defenders say the Confederate battle flags are symbols of Southern resilience – more like Southern defiance. The Confederacy was not resilient. It was crushed into submission. Look at the photographs of that era. There was barely a twig left standing in Atlanta. (When Margaret Mitchell wrote the phrase “gone with the wind,” this is what she meant.) The living skeletons in the prison camps evoke Auschwitz. (As a Northerner, I take no pride in the devastation of the Civil War South. Nor am I naïve about the North’s complicity in slavery. There were more slaves in New York City than there were in Charleston. Slaves built New York. For more on this, see the website that accompanied the astonishing 2005 New-York Historical Society exhibit “Slavery in New York.”

It’s true, as one of my cousins noted at Father’s Day brunch, that the countries of the former Soviet Union fly their flags. But the U.S.S.R. was a shotgun marriage. That’s why it fell apart. We, on the other hand, were one nation under the Stars and Stripes from the beginning. North and South we threw in our lot together, pledging “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor” not only to the idea of freedom but to one another. Slavery was the cancer that threatened that Union. Slavery had to be rooted out.

But slavery was sneaky. It metastasized into racism, which is what the Confederate flag has really come to symbolize. It has to go, as South Carolina’s leaders have been forced to recognize.

It is time to understand that we live with the past not in it.

It is time to understand, in the words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that “We must learn to live together as brothers,

“Or perish together as fools.”