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Lighting a Match to History
There will always be those who are bigoted and racist. There will always be those who believe that race is always a problem, holding them back. Both are wrong. As a nation we have done more than any other to erase race, origin, sex, age, religion and sexual preference in how we deal with others in the conduct of our daily lives. We aren’t perfect. Our freedoms allow our citizens the liberty to be ugly. But we are the most open, generous and forgiving country that has ever been; a place where everyone is offered an opportunity to rise beyond his natal station.
There is a call from the Left and the media that all symbols of the losing cause in the Civil War, after more than a century and a half, be purged from the public eye and destroyed. They inspire racists and bigots, we are told. However, ritual removal of all confederate memorials will do absolutely nothing to remove the purple scar of slavery from America’s history. It provides no absolution, no confession, no relief for anyone. Six generations of Americans have been born since the end of that horrible war and not one of them bears any responsibility for that institution in America, an institution as old as mankind and still strong in the world.
And the removal of Confederate memorials will do nothing to create opportunities, jobs or advancement for anyone unless you specialize in demolition, work in a scrapyard or just happen to be the sculptor commissioned for the replacement art.
So what is the point of all this commotion? Is it triumphalism coming from the Left, exercising their perceived superior moral authority? Is it a sudden realization that the South finally must be brought to heal? Is it the conqueror’s imperative to purge the conquered of all vestiges of culture, to remove all rallying sources of pride and solace? Is it an opportunistic display of Leftist revanchism and revisionism meant to rally its most ardent and violent followers? Or is it just a series of provocative acts meant to root out the usual racist groups and paint any opposition of this censorship as racists and bigots?
It is all those things. And none of it is good.
Published in General
So what is the point of all this commotion?
Truuuuuuuuummmmmppppppppppppp!!!
It is witch-burning mass hysteria being orchestrated by those who have an interest in taking down our government.
Agreed. Case in point the most recent historical cleansing undertaken by the University of Texas at Austin. Apparently, to provide a fig leaf of careful thought and consideration to a foregone conclusion, back in June of 2015, UT had convened a task force on what to do about these statues. And in August 2015 the task force issued its report recommending that they be removed.
But nothing happened.
Until last night when it suddenly became a moral imperative.
One line in the task force’s report instructive…. “History is not innocent; it is the living foundation of the present.”
They wish nothing less than to change the present by rewriting the past. Such is the mission of a great public university today.
Slavery? What slavery?
(If you eliminate history, you eliminate history.)
Our country is the least culpable among the nations that participated in African slavery, in terms of duration, intensity and sheer numbers. We had to fight a bloody war to eradicate the institution, which the colonial overlords had forced on us. Despite the enthusiastic support for the South of (officially neutral) Britain and France, we did abolish it. More people died on the Union side and more white people died than black people, in the fight to end it. While it existed, it held us back as a nation. Okay? That oughta be the end of any discussion on the subject.
But it never will be. Because there are forces, ideologues, that hate our country more than they hate any of the countless murderous despotic regimes whichblighted the planet for centuries before 1776.
See, now, nothing Thomas Jeferson wrote, or did, matters any more. Nothing at all, except the fact that he had slaves.
The weak lay hands on what the strong have done
And all things at one common level lie.
–Yeats
Not to quote myself, but in a recent post I noted that “The current controversy is not about statues or slavery; it is about revolution and power.” I’d add to that that it is also about virtue-signaling. The Left can’t fight the Civil War; it can’t end Jim Crow; but it can be “on the right side of History” by achieving the removal of all traces of slavery or Confederate iconography – a task the participants in the Civil War and the segregation wars of the ’50s and ’60s apparently didn’t consider important enough to undertake.
It is 98% these two, since November 8th.
I wonder why it is that the South continues to identify with the Confederacy and its heroes, when it existed only up until the end of the Civil War (because of the difference in slavery laws, one could argue that the Confederacy existed implicitly prior to being declared). I can think of some things the South can be proud of that don’t derive from having resisted Northern Aggression, even though I’m not from the South. Some of those things come across from Ricochet members who’ve lived there or are from there. Some I can tell you from my own experience.
This might be only a partial answer, but it might represent some progress from blaming all whites for slavery. Many Northern whites fought on the side of Northern Aggression and lost their lives to do what was right. It certainly has seemed for too long that they have been lumped in with all whites as automatically being labeled as racist towards blacks. This doesn’t necessarily explain why now the commotion, but it might explain why certain artifacts are being attacked as being insensitive to current attitudes in race relations. If I were a black person in the South, I don’t think I would be comfortable being around a white person who could speak in glowing terms about the heroics of the historical figures being represented in many of those statues. For me, it would say that old attitudes in some cases never die. Admittedly this is a straw person argument. I doubt there are many if any whites in the South who would be that insensitive. But actions sometimes speak louder than words.
If the statues go, those demanding it will be appeased for maybe a minute or two. Then there will be more demands. They will not be satisfied until they start a French Revolution. Any appeasement should result in the replacement of whatever politician or administrator agreed to it.