“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
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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. |
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