“Who controls the past controls the
future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
That line from George Orwell’s
“Nineteen Eighty-Four” might serve as a sort of motto for the woke apparatchiks
who run our lives today.
Perhaps it's because they have, as
one wag put it, mistaken Orwell’s stern admonition about the dangers of
totalitarianism for a how-to manual.
In any event, the present’s attack on
the past by those holding the reins of power continues apace.
And the goal, just as in Orwell’s
novel, is to revamp the future by redefining the past.
John Calhoun was an apologist for
slavery, so the college named for him at Yale must be renamed.
Never mind that he was valedictorian
at Yale, a member of the House of Representatives, a senator, Secretary of War,
Secretary of State, and vice president.
Never mind, too, that he was one of
the most powerful minds and greatest orators of his day.
He had beliefs that the beautiful,
pampered people of today find objectionable.
So he had to go.
It was the same with the great mining
magnate Cecil Rhodes.
He made a stupendous fortune in
what's now South Africa, endowed Oriel College, Oxford, with part of his
fortune, and established the Rhodes scholarship program.
He too was insufficiently
enlightened, so a campaign to besmirch his memory and remove all traces of his
presence from Oriel College has been underway for years.
From 1924 to 2021, a large equestrian
statue of Robert E. Lee stood in a place of honor in Charlottesville,
Virginia.
In the wake of the Black Lives Matter
riots, the statue was removed. Last fall, in a sort of pyromaniacal ritual, it
was cut apart with a blow torch and then melted down.
Last month, President Joe Biden had
the 109-year-old Reconciliation Monument removed from Arlington National
Cemetery.
Just a few days ago, the Biden
administration announced that it was removing a statue of William Penn, the
founder of Pennsylvania, from a park that had been his home.
That spot will undergo a “rehabilitation” and, in place of Penn, the
administration will place a statute of an American Indian in order, to provide a
more “inclusive ... interpretation of the Native American history of
Philadelphia.”
The attack on the past is proceeding
apace.
Its goal is to efface the
contributions of white Europeans, especially white male Europeans, to the
formation of Western civilization.
Over the past several years, we have
seen a rising tide of assaults on statues and other works of art representing
our nation’s history by those who are eager to squeeze that complex story into a
box defined by the evolving rules of political correctness.
A vocal minority, claiming victim
status, demands the destruction, removal, or concealment of some object of which
they disapprove.
Usually, the official response is
instant capitulation.
It's worth noting that the monument
controversy signifies something much larger than the attacks on the Old
South.
Indeed, the attack involves not just
artworks or commemorative objects.
Rather, it encompasses the resources
of the past writ large.
It's an attack on the past for
failing to live up to our contemporary notions of virtue.
In the background is the conviction
that we, blessed members of the most enlightened cohort ever to grace the earth
with its presence, occupy a moral plane superior to all who came before
us.
Consequently, the defacement of
murals of Christopher Columbus—and statues of later historical figures such as
Teddy Roosevelt—is perfectly virtuous and above criticism since human beings in
the past were by definition so much less enlightened than we.
The psychopathology behind these
occurrences is a subject unto itself.
What has happened in our culture and
educational institutions that so many students jump from their feelings of being
offended—and how delicate they are, how quick to take offense!—to self-righteous
demands to repudiate the thing that offends them?
The more expensive education becomes,
the more it seems to lead, not to broader understanding, but to narrower
horizons.
The iconoclasm that accompanies this
existential narrowing takes different forms.
The disgusting attacks on the past
and other religious cultures carried out by the Taliban, for example, are quite
different from the toppling of statues of Saddam Hussein by liberated Iraqis
after the Gulf War.
Different again was the action of
America’s own Sons of Liberty in 1776, who toppled a statue of the hated George
III and melted down its lead to make 40,000 musket balls.
It's easy to sympathize with that
pragmatic response to what the Declaration of Independence called “a long train
of abuses and usurpations.”
It's worth noting, however, that
George Washington censured even this action for “having much the appearance of a
riot and a want of discipline.”
While such attacks on the past depend
upon a reservoir of iconoclastic feeling, they represent not the blunt
expression of power or destructiveness but rather the rancorous, self-despising
triumph of political correctness.
The exhibition of wounded virtue, of
what we now call “virtue-signaling,” is key.
Of course, impermissible attitudes
and images are never in short supply once the itch to stamp out history gets
going.
At Charlottesville it was a statue of
Robert E. Lee.
But why stop there?
Why not erase the entire history of
the Confederacy?
There are apparently some 1,500
monuments and memorials to the Confederacy in public spaces across the United
States.
According to one study, a majority of
them were “commissioned by white women, in hope of preserving a positive vision
of antebellum life.”
A noble aspiration, inasmuch as the
country had recently fought a civil war that devastated the South and left more
than 700,000 Americans dead.
These memorials were part of an
effort to knit the broken country back together.
As at Arlington, our leaders have set
about obliterating them in earnest.
What they want isn't reconciliation
but capitulation.
Thomas Jefferson and George
Washington and James Madison have all been queued up for “rehabilitation” if not
ostracism.
After all, they all owned slaves, as
did 41 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence.
As I say, many of our politically
correct culture warriors seem to regard “Nineteen Eighty-Four” as a how-to
manual.
Orwell saw clearly where it
ends.
“Every record has been destroyed or
falsified,” Orwell wrote, “every book has been rewritten, every picture has been
repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has
been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.
History has stopped.”
We stand by and watch it happen sitting on our asses as we watch the obliteration of our culture and Legacy by People who did nothing to build up this country! And don't tell me that black slaves built America. That's bullshit if it weren't the blacks it would have been donkeys and horses and the Irish and who ever else until the Industrial Revolution took hold.
