Same as with the COVIDIOT shamdemic, the statue-toppling is NOT about what they say it is.
The Monument-Destroying Mobs Don’t Hate The Confederacy, They Hate America
Well, actually, wrong. They DO hate the Confederacy too, rest assured. But do they hate it more for all the usual reasons, or more because it’s part of American history?
To suppose this has anything to do with the Confederacy or the Civil War is to misunderstand completely the nature of what is happening right now in America. The people who are pulling down monuments, defacing statues, and demanding U.S. military bases be renamed do not have a limiting principle. They don’t distinguish between those who fought for freedom against the British Empire and those who fought for union against the slave states of the South. To them, the Union itself was a crime against humanity long before the South seceded. What kind of moral monster would ever fight to preserve it?
This is the 1619 Project come to life. If the American Revolution was fought to protect and preserve slavery then the entire history of American colonization and westward expansion is a litany of crimes that no one should celebrate. The Founding Fathers are no less guilty than Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis — not just because they owned slaves but because they founded the United States, a nation conceived not in liberty but in white supremacy.
In other words, as is always and forever the case with the Left, their position and attitude is based entirely on balls-out lies.
You will nevertheless hear, and likely have already heard, arguments for a limiting principle, a way to justify pulling down Confederate monuments while allowing monuments to Christopher Columbus or Thomas Jefferson to stand.
The comedian Andrew Schulz tries to make this argument in a recent YouTube video. Confederates were traitors and slavers, he says. Their monuments were built to glorify a treasonous and failed effort to secede from the Union.
Another bone I must pick. Many if not most of those monuments were built for a two-fold purpose: not to honor The Lost Cause itself—it’s entirely ridiculous to argue that they were—but 1) to honor what were fundamentally honorable men, accomplished and in some cases legendary soldiers about whom it might more fairly be said had varied motives for enlisting themselves in a less-than-honorable cause; and 2) to soothe the passions of the recently-conquered South, and help ease its transition back into full membership in the larger nation that vanquished and then severely abused them after the war.
There’s a reason, for example, the anarchists and Antifa rioters in Seattle’s “autonomous zone” set up barricades and hung a sign saying, “Now Leaving The United States.”
These people don’t want to improve America. Like the monuments they despise, they want to tear it down.
Bingo. In the end, this is a real war we’re in now. We can only hope the Great American Awokening to that sad fact didn’t come too late to have any hope of fighting back, and of prevailing. Because the one and only alternative scenario is too awful for any liberty-minded person to contemplate.
Update! Common ground, with some extremely unlovely bedfellows.
Destruction of art is a common theme. In the late 18th century, the Jacobins took hammers to the kingly statues that adorned Notre Dame; today, the original heads, buried by sympathizers with posterity, are in a museum. The pharaohs encouraged the defacement of monuments to their predecessors (which is why many Egyptian artifacts are literally defaced).
Moving ahead a few years, the Taliban, 20 years ago, blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, which had stood for more than 1,000 years. ISIS destroyed Syrian edifices and artworks that had outlasted millennia. Al Qaeda attacked our architecture and what it stood for (inaccurately, since the World Trade Center was a symbol of central planning, not capital).
You would think our pluralistic society would be more sophisticated. Nope: In the past decade, Yale has removed stained-glass windows depicting slavery, after an employee smashed one. Better to forget slavery?
Movies? You can’t watch “Gone With the Wind.” Nobody should watch this movie and think, “Gee, those were the days.” But a properly educated audience can understand that the movie shows the stark horror of failure, because the cause was wrong, and doomed.
We probably ought not watch “It’s a Wonderful Life,” as it glosses over black servitude, and so we should just miss its lessons about capitalism. J.K. Rowling has “incorrect” thoughts about the trans movement — so kids shouldn’t read “Harry Potter.”
“Black servitude,” is it? My increasingly-pissed off white ass, it was. Annie, the live-in maid character in IAWL, was a salaried employee, doing honest and honorable work for people that were clearly enchanted with her and treated her as fully one of the family. Anybody who perceives anything whatsoever demeaning or degrading about that once-common arrangement ought to extract their head out of their ass toot sweet, if it takes a fucking heavy construction crane to do it. And she was hardly “glossed over,” as can be readily discerned from even a most cursory viewing of the film.
- Entries
What they hate is everything and anything not controlled by them.
IAWL is now on the verboten list?
Unbelievable.
I remember seeing the Tom and Jerry cartoon where a similar character was up on a chair and yelling at Tom in a colloquial accent to catch that mouse eek. That character was a Black person.
Later versions made the character a white woman with a colloquial Irish brogue.
If for some reason the former was offensive to Black Americans then why shouldn’t the Irish “servant” be an offense to me since I have a certain amount of Irish ancestry.
The plain fact and truth is that neither was offensive. It was historically accurate.
These people are nuts AND have an Agenda to destroy America.
There’s nothing wrong with honoring The Lost Cause, Mike.
As a Yank I was taught that Slavery was just one of the Issues that led to the Secession Movement and War. Tariff policy and other Trade issues were another important issue.The whole issue of whether a State could Secede was ALSO an important issue. The Declaration of independence obviously supported the idea of severing ties when the government ceased to support the Rights of the people. Ending Slavery was NOT one of the enumerated reasons Jefferson gave for severing ties to England and would hardly be a proper reason for it either. So there was an ambiguity in the South’s position but not a totally wrong viewpoint. It was gray in its implications.
There had been a way the South could have won concessions by phasing out Slavery. They actually took the first step when they stopped the importation of new Slaves.
There was clearly a path by which the South could phase out Slavery in return for caps on Tariffs or Increased Tariffs as the case may be. It’s what Trump is working through now (and getting pushback from Dems, heh, the irony). In other words there was a way to find a solution to the Issues.
AS to it being a Lost Cause. Well, it probably was for several reasons. The Industrialized North had the economic clout to win a prolonged War. The Issue of Slavery gave the North the resolve they needed to continue the fight even though the South had gotten the better of the fighting in the early Years. Finally, the issue of Slavery kept foreign powers like Britain and France, who were anxious to break the Tariffs and sell THEIR goods in America, from joining the War on the South’s behalf.
So once Lincoln held the resolve of the North to continue the War after two years, it was inevitable that the North would win.
Still, History should be remembered. Generals and troops who fought to keep what they considered Invasion from a Foreign Power should be understood, reconciliation so that we could heal should be respected (even now it is a scarring moment to see them torn down, and I’m a Yank), respect for a foe who was worthy on the battlefield should be given, and the Monuments should be viewed as a Tribute to how people in America gave their lives in a Struggle that ultimately led to the Freeing of the Slaves in America. It is as much, or more, a Monument to the Victory of Abolitionists as it is a tribute to those who fought, perhaps for misguided reasons, but still valiantly, and yet were defeated.
Every Southern Monument is a reminder that the South ultimately did not prevail.