— by Polydamas
The left’s methodical campaign to topple monuments and to scour the public square of all disapproved historical figures recently claimed yet another victory. Lori Aratani recounts the details in her October 28, 2017 Washington Post article titled “Historic Alexandria Church Decides to Remove Plaques Honoring Washington, Lee”, which is quoted below (http://wapo.st/2iK2qG4). The Alexandria, Virginia Christ Church Episcopal congregation was founded in 1773 and counted among its members and benefactors President George Washington and Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
Rev. Noelle York-Simmons, the church’s rector, justified the decision to remove both George Washington’s and Robert E. Lee’s plaques because they “create a distraction in our worship space and may create an obstacle to our identity as a welcoming church and an impediment to our growth and to full community with our neighbors”. Apparently, the issue had been percolating among church leaders for some years, but prompted action after Heather Heyer was killed on August 12, 2017 during a violent clash between white nationalists and Antifa in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Brendan O’Neill brilliantly analyzed the movement to scour history in his August 19, 2017 article in The Australian titled “The Orwellian War on History” (http://bit.ly/2x2O0Ug), which is respectfully reproduced below. According to him, it is part of a “Year Zero mentality” in which people are “hellbent on wiping out history”, “and starting society all over again, cleansed of the likenesses of dead people of whom they disapprove”. He likens their actions to “wide-eyed fury of Islamic State agitators as they stamp on what they view as idolatrous historic carvings in the ancient cities of Palmyra and Nimrud”. The statue topplers view “certain groups as fragile, as needing to have public life sanitised on their behalf in the way a new mum might baby-proof her home”. Yet, in reality, their actions are no different than George Orwell’s 1984 fictional Ministry of Truth “eras[ing] old newspaper reports about events that now embarrass the party” in the same way that the old Soviet Politburo ordered the doctoring of old photographs to excise from them the likenesses of Communist Party apparatchiks who had fallen out of favor with the ruling elite.
Dr. Walter Williams, the renowned libertarian economics professor and commentator, who just happens to be African-American, ascribes an even more insidious motive. His trenchant October 25, 2017 article in The Stream, titled “What the Left Hopes to Achieve by Attacking the Founders”, (http://bit.ly/2zSSpKD), which is respectfully reproduced below, makes the case that “If the leftists can convince the nation that America’s founders were good-for-nothing, slave-owning racists, then their ideas can be more easily trashed”. He incisively concludes that “If they can delegitimize the Founders themselves, it goes a long way toward their agenda of delegitimizing the founding principles of our nation”.
Dr. Williams is entirely correct. Delegitimizing the Founding Fathers and the founding principles of our nation have been among the goals of leftists for a century. Chapter 12 of W. Cleon Skousen’s superb book The Naked Communist warned Americans about it as far back as 1958, described the Communist timetable of conquest, and outlined 45 leftist goals that include:
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a world-wide basis.
30. Discredit the American founding fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the “common man.”
Leftists are not content with merely removing statues of Confederate leaders such as president Jefferson Davis, General Robert E. Lee, and others. They — especially academic leftists — plan to try in absentia long-dead southern political and military leaders, based upon legal and moral precepts that did not exist in the 19th century. They want to repudiate the actual historical terms of the Confederacy’s 19th century surrender to the Union. They see the South as newly conquered enemy territory and demand to impose a new Reconstruction that completely obliterates southern history and ideals.
Once the South’s historical leaders are convicted of crimes against humanity, the left plans to utilize the same precedent against the Founding Fathers. Founding Fathers from southern states, e.g., Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and others, will also be convicted of crimes against humanity for personally owning slaves or for representing southern states where slavery was legal. Founding Fathers from northern states will not be immune from leftist calumny because they bargained with and agreed with their southern peers on the Three-Fifths Compromise embodied in the Constitution, which counted every southern slave as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation.
We at The Cassandra Times believe that what leftists today seek to accomplish is to take a page from the post World War II Nuremberg trials in which Nazi officials were tried for crimes against humanity. They want to try the Founding Fathers as war criminals. Not coincidentally, leftists are also insistent upon depicting President Donald Trump, his cabinet, and administration as Nazis and white supremacists because they also long to charge them with crimes against humanity. This is because their objective is a process akin to the denazification of Germany and Austria after World War II.
Beginning in 1945, the United States and its allies engaged in a process of denazification, “Entnazifizierung” in German, in which they systematically destroyed every vestige of Nazism in Germany and Austria’s government, politics, culture, media, and economy. A somewhat similar process was employed to dismantle Japan’s militaristic culture under Emperor Hirohito. Likewise and with even greater zeal, leftists plan to uproot any remnants of the Founding Fathers and their political philosophy from America’s government, politics, culture, media, and economy, and to install in their place the 21st century version of Marxism.
The aphorism that “history is written by the victors,” is attributed to Sir Winston Churchill and to Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History. Not only does the conqueror prevail on the battlefield due to to superior military strategy and tactics, the conqueror’s army of historians proceeds to extol the conquest as blessed by the gods, divinely decreed or historically preordained. Simultaneously, the vanquished foe’s philosophy, ideology, religion, history, and any viewpoint that diverges from its conqueror are effaced from the history books.
The left’s control of academia and popular culture threatens to consign the Founding Fathers and their legacy of individual liberty to the dust bins of history. If conservatives and libertarians do not vigorously defend America’s Founding Fathers, their history, and ideals of individual liberty, this nation and their legacies will be razed to the ground and sown with salt just as Rome obliterated Carthage.
Historic Alexandria Church Decides to Remove Plaques Honoring Washington, Lee
Lori Aratani
Washington Post
October 28, 2017
Leaders of a historic Episcopal church in Alexandria have decided to remove a pair of plaques from its sanctuary that memorialize two of their most prominent parishioners: George Washington and Robert E. Lee.
In a letter sent Thursday to members of the Christ Church congregation, church leaders explained that the decision came after much deliberation.
“This was not a discussion we entered into lightly, but rather a sincere attempt to have a family conversation about our worship space, our larger history and our future,” they wrote.
The fate of the two plaques, which have hung on either side of the altar at the historic church since 1870, had been talked about for years, according to the Rev. Noelle York-Simmons, the church’s rector. But the matter took on added urgency following events in Charlottesville.
One person was killed and several injured during protests Aug. 12 after a rally by white nationalists protesting the planned removal of a statue of Lee.
While recognizing the important roles both Washington and Lee played in the nation’s history, church leaders wrote that the decision was made that it would be best to remove them because they “create a distraction in our worship space and may create an obstacle to our identity as a welcoming church and an impediment to our growth and to full community with our neighbors.”
News of the church’s decision was first reported by the Republican Standard website.
York-Simmons and other church leaders spent much of September discussing the matter with members of the 1,800-person congregation.
York-Simmons characterized the meetings and listening sessions as “heartening.”
“People responded beautifully and faithfully, listening in a lot of ways that showed our church at its best,” she said.
York-Simmons would not discuss whether there were parishioners who advocated for keeping the plaques. “I’m not going to speak for my parishioners. We have been through an intense process of listening to our community’s thoughts on all sides of the complicated issue,” she said.
The nation’s first president and the commander of the Confederate army both played significant roles in the early history of Christ Church.
Washington was a regular worshiper. Lee and his family were also parishioners. Mary Custis Lee, Robert E. Lee’s wife, gifted the church $10,000 to help begin its endowment.
Even though much of the recent national debate has centered around Civil War memorials, church leaders said they thought that it was important for the plaques to be considered together. They noted that both were placed at the same time and visually balance each other in a way that “maintains the symmetry of the church’s sanctuary.”
“We understand that both Washington and Lee lived in times much different than our own, and that each man, in addition to his public persona, was a complicated human being, and like all of us, a child of God,” church leaders wrote.
Christ Church, founded in 1773, is not the only congregation to struggle with how to balance their legacy with shifting views about historical figures. After two years of tense debate, an Episcopal parish in Lexington, Va., named for Lee, who was once a prominent member, voted to change its name.
York-Simmons said the plaques will remain in place until a new location for them is identified some time next year. A committee will be formed to deliberate on a new place of “respectful prominence.”
While some may criticize the church’s decision, York-Simmons emphasized that this is not about changing the past but about finding a way to place the church’s history in the proper context.
“We are deeply committed to our history, but even more we are deeply committed to the worship of Jesus Christ,” she said. “The question is, how can we reflect both?”
What the Left Hopes to Achieve by Attacking the Founders
If the leftists can convince the nation that America’s founders were good-for-nothing, slave-owning racists, then their ideas can be more easily trashed.
Walter Williams
The Stream
October 25, 2017
Our nation’s leftist progressives have long sought to undermine the American values expressed in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
Though typical Democrats and Republicans do not have this leftist hate for our nation, they have been willing accomplices in undermining the most basic value the Founding Fathers sought to promote — limited government.
Leftists have had their greatest successes in undermining American values on the nation’s college campuses. Derelict and dishonest college administrators, professors, and boards of trustees have given them carte blanche.
Let’s look at some of it.
Racist Statues
Students at the University of Virginia desecrated the statue of Thomas Jefferson, the university’s founder. Students at the University of Missouri want Jefferson’s statue gone.
Why? He was a slave owner. Many in the college community supported Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential bid. They welcomed Sanders’ belief that the United States was founded on “racist principles.”
There have also been calls for the removal of President George Washington’s and President Abraham Lincoln’s statues. Some have called for the renaming of schools that honor Washington, Jefferson, and 11 other slave-owning presidents.
Leftists have called for the renaming of streets named after slave-owning presidents. There have been many leftist calls for the elimination of Columbus Day. Their success at getting Confederate statues taken down has emboldened them.
Attacking America’s Founders
What goes unappreciated is just why America’s leftists’ movement attacks the Founders. If they can delegitimize the Founders themselves, it goes a long way toward their agenda of delegitimizing the founding principles of our nation.
If the leftists can convince the nation that men such as Washington, Jefferson, and James Madison were good-for-nothing, slave-owning racists, then their ideas can be more easily trashed. We find the greatest assaults on our founding documents on the nation’s college campuses.
The average parent, taxpayer, and donor has absolutely no idea of the bizarre lessons that college professors are teaching students.
Professor Adam Kotsko of Shimer College teaches, “Whether or not your individual ancestors owned slaves, you as a white person have benefitted from slavery and are complicit in it.”
Micah Johnson, a research assistant and graduate student instructor in the University of Florida’s Department of Sociology and Criminology and Law, teaches that the American notion of patriotism is “drenched in whiteness” and that patriotism implies that black people are “un-American.”
The U.S. Military Academy’s Rot
These types of attacks on American values have reached one of our most prestigious institutions of higher learning — the U.S. Military Academy.
The administration at West Point knew of 2nd Lt. Spenser Rapone’s disqualifying insubordination at the academy, extremist political views, and regulation-breaking online activity. Proof has surfaced that West Point leadership knew as early as 2015 that Rapone was an avowed communist and held Marxist anti-American beliefs.
One of his Facebook posts read, “F— this country and its false freedom.” Despite Rapone’s conduct and demonstrated hatred of our nation, the U.S. Military Academy’s administration saw fit to allow Rapone to graduate in 2016.
But the rot at our premier military academy goes beyond the traitorous ideas of Rapone’s. That was revealed in an open letter written by retired Army Lt. Col. Robert Heffington, once a professor of history at West Point.
Heffington’s letter exposed widespread corruption, cheating, and falling standards at the academy to which the administration has turned a blind, politically correct eye.
In response to Heffington’s widely circulated letter, the superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy, Lt. Gen. Robert L. Caslen Jr., released a standard bureaucratic letter saying the administration will address the concerns raised in Heffington’s letter about falling standards.
It will also investigate the revelations that it not only managed to graduate Rapone but also sent him on to Army battlefield units, thus enabling him to spread his anti-American ideas.
The American people need to stop being sheeple and put a halt to the undermining of our nation taking place in our institutions of higher learning.
The Orwellian War on History
Brendan O’Neill
The Australian
August 19, 2017
Everyone’s smashing statues. From Islamic State hotheads sledgehammering ancient artefacts in old Mesopotamian cities to plummy students at Oxford demanding the removal of busts of old colonialists, waging war on the past is all the rage.
A Year Zero mentality is on the march. People seem hellbent on wiping out history, making it invisible, and starting society all over again, cleansed of the likenesses of dead people of whom they disapprove.
This fury against monuments is presented as good and radical. The statue-smashers say they simply want to erase the faces and names of people who did bad things to show how far society has progressed and to make minority groups feel more comfortable when they’re out in public.
In truth, there’s nothing good in this mob-like erasure of history. It’s a reactionary, even Orwellian, movement. The urge to ethically cleanse public life of “bad history”, to shove down the memory hole any bust or tribute to past folk whose values make us bristle today, is intolerant, illiberal and profoundly paternalistic.
During the past week, the irrational fury against inanimate objects moved up a gear. First, there were the disturbances in Charlottesville, Virginia, when disagreements over a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee descended into violent clashes between leftists and neo-fascists.
A couple of days later, protesters in North Carolina tied rope around the neck of a statue of a Confederate soldier and dragged it down. They kicked and spat on it. There was a weird intensity to their statue abuse, bringing to mind the wide-eyed fury of Islamic State agitators as they stamp on what they view as idolatrous historic carvings in the ancient cities of Palmyra and Nimrud.
Then, in an extraordinary move, the mayor of Baltimore, Maryland, ordered the removal of four Confederate statues in the city. In the dead of night, workmen dragged them down. What had been everyday monuments for decades, seen by people as they walked to work or went for a jog, suddenly were viewed as a poisonous presence, liable to harm people’s self-esteem and the city’s stability. And so they were memory-holed, in the black of night, exposing the febrile streak to this statuephobia.
Year Zero agitation has been gaining ground for a few years. Students at Oxford want a bust of old British colonialist Cecil Rhodes removed. They describe the statue as “problematic”, a word PC zealots use in the same way Islamists say “haram”: to indicate something is wicked and should ideally be extinguished.
One of the protesters against Rhodes says, “There is a violence in having to walk past the statue every day.” There’s a medieval feel to this, this idea that even things made of stone have great power and evil in them.
For an Oxford student to describe a statue as an act of violence really is similar to the Islamic State hammer-wielders’ belief that pre-Islamic icons have the power to pollute men’s souls and thus must be destroyed.
Anyone who thinks this policing of the past will stop once all statues of Confederates and colonialists have been knocked down is in for a shock.
In the US, the Year Zero mob has turned its sights to statues of the great Thomas Jefferson (he owned slaves). And this week Yarra council in Melbourne decreed that it would no longer refer to January 26 as Australia Day, out of respect for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
So a historic fact – the arrival of the First Fleet into New South Wales in 1788, the basis of Australia Day – is made unmentionable. It’s unremembered, erased, as surely as Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four must erase old newspaper reports about events that now embarrass the party. Today’s cleansing of images of history smacks of the dark antics of that fictional Ministry of Truth.
The history erasers claim they only want to show how fair our societies now are. Rubbish. This isn’t about making the present better, it’s a projection of political correctness into the past. It’s the punishment of historical figures – even good historical figures, such as Jefferson, and good historical events, such as the settlement of Australia – for not sharing our exact modern world view.
And it reeks of PC paternalism. The idea that minority groups can’t cope with seeing statues of dead people who did some dodgy things is an affront to their intelligence and autonomy. It infantilises them, even suggesting they will feel physically wounded by history: after all, “there is a violence” to these statues.
It’s disturbingly ironic: this treatment of certain groups as fragile, as needing to have public life sanitised on their behalf in the way a new mum might baby-proof her home, is riddled with some fairly racist assumptions of its own.
One of the great things about public life is that it’s a patchwork of the historical events that made our nations. Take a walk through a city and you’ll see statues of soldiers, politicians, authors, suffragettes and others who shaped our societies. And most of them will have held views or done things we would consider questionable in 2017. So what? The point is they made history, and it’s right for the public sphere to reflect that.
The logic of the Year Zero crew is that we should see only historical figures they approve of (if there are any). They police history with an eye for policing what we citizens can see and by extension think about the societies we live in.
It’s a low, brutal form of censorship, and we should have no truck with it.