Posted on 08/18/2017 7:19:40 AM PDT by Kaslin
Look back on the great men and women of history. Most of them fare poorly when subjected to modern scrutiny. They launched wars, murdered rivals, enslaved enemies, enriched allies and violated most every moral norm valued by people today.
Yet their tombs are venerated, their distinctions are celebrated and their successes are lauded. Their memories are enshrined through statues, paintings and photos. Their names are affixed to buildings, streets and universities. Should we adopt the old Soviet technique of airbrushing out those who fall from favor? If the Left has its way, few Americans of note would survive the resulting historical jihad.
Of course, the role of some significant figures should not be celebrated. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong are among the monsters of history. These are not men of their time with mixed legacies. They epitomize evil, the very depths of human depravity.
But then you have the typical British king. Or German prince, Italian cleric, Prussian general, French knight, and even Roman emperor. Or American Founder, Confederate general and pro-slavery Unionist. None of these people would be invited to a Washington cocktail party, New York salon or Hollywood preview today. However, one shaped the modern world, while another helped make America the world’s greatest nation.
Of course, the focus of today’s hysteria are Southerners who led the Confederate States of America. Given the centrality of slavery to the Civil War, history has rightly judged the Confederacy harshly. Yet even its leading figures were complex. Robert E. Lee opposed slavery and secession before the Civil War and promoted reconciliation afterwards.
Moreover, when the City of Baltimore recently removed several Civil War era statues, it took down one of Roger Taney, Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. He remained loyal to the United States. His earlier opinion in the Dred Scott case deserves to be reviled, but at the time seven other justices agreed with him. And his career was much more than one case.
Taney served almost 30 years as the nation’s most important jurist. He freed the slaves he inherited from his father and supported those too aged to work. During the Civil War, he defended civil liberties, including the Doctrine of Habeas Corpus, a bulwark against unjust imprisonment. Before joining the high court he served as Secretary of War, Secretary of the Treasury and Attorney General. But now, because of that one opinion, he is an historical persona non-grata.
One wonders if even Abraham Lincoln is safe from the Left. He spent much of his career favoring colonization, that is, sending freed slaves back to Africa. Worse, as he famously wrote Horace Greeley, “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it.” Why honor a man who really didn’t want to free the slaves?
Perhaps America’s Founders also should be dumped into history’s wastebasket. Many were slave owners. Their attitudes toward women and Native Americans were unenlightened. After just a couple of generations, U.S. leaders conducted brutal campaigns against the continent’s original occupants and an aggressive war against America’s neighbor, Mexico.
More recently elected officials fail new tests centered around social liberalism too. Measured by the Left’s standards, even President Barack Obama was dilatory in backing same-sex marriage. So why build any monuments to him?
We need a statute of limitations on expecting historical figures to be perfect and prosecuting them for thought crimes.
Great Britain recognized slavery and indentured servitude in its American colonies. These practices continued to be widely accepted when the country was founded. Few who lived then recognized what we see clearly today – that human bondage is a great evil that contradicts America’s founding ideals.
Even those who understood the full implications of declaring all men to be equal, such as Thomas Jefferson, saw no political escape from the practice of African slavery, since no one, in the South or North, was willing to accept millions of freedmen as equals. This failure made the Civil War inevitable.
Yet most of those involved were decent people struggling with their natural imperfections, limited understanding, and deeply-established social constraints. Americans today make their own ugly moral compromises—with abortion, for instance.
It is appropriate to reassess history and address practices now recognized as unjust. So is changing how we recognize and commemorate figures and causes now understood more clearly.
However, that doesn’t mean eradicating the past, even those parts that most challenge us. Instead, we should seek to understand and place in context those who did great deeds while simultaneously tolerating and sometimes supporting what we now see as great evil. In the future, our descendants will likely judge us by the same standards we apply to those who came before us.
Or, perhaps even more harshly.
We’re all these statues gone when Obama was President?
And of course, everybody ignores the fact that continuing slavery was the default condition of the Union had the South not left.
An unbroken Union would have continued legal slavery.
Historic figures always must be judged two ways, one, in the light of the times they lived in, and how they responded to it, and two, in the light of eternal principle. Since all of us are limited by the time and place in which we were born, we have always to judge others, including historical personages, with some humility. We have to judge them, as we are trying to understand them, but with the same humility we hope our great-great-grandchildren will afford us.
Progressives NEED history to be forgotten.
They can never get marxism/communism/socialism in the US if people remember all the other times/places it’s been tried.
ANTIFA would have to change their name if people remembered Ennio Flaiano in 1930’s Italy saying “In Italy, fascists divide themselves into two categories: fascists and antifascists”
Liberals will be laughed at when they insist today’s racism is worse than the 1950’s by anyone who know history of the 1950’s.
The way democrats want blacks to be taken care of while not being able to buy property (as in land, not TVs) or having education opportunities that let them escape their situation looks a lot like the way democrats in the 1800s (pre & post civil war) wanted blacks to be taken care of without being allowed to buy property or have a path to escape slavery/servitude. Best to erase pre-1960 history or blacks may start making the connection.
Black people who were never slaves are now fighting white people who were never Nazis over statues erected by Democrats who are now ashamed of their own slave-owning ancestors. And this is somehow Trumps Fault???
He decries historical revisionism and then resorts to it himself.
Liberals don’t believe that any American is worthy of note. They don’t even talk about FDR and Kennedy any more. Nothing before the advent of the Total State is notable and no reminders of the past will be allowed to persist after the assumption of the Total State.
You said it.
Southern white folks are more likely to disparage Negroes in casual speech while treating their coworkers and, yes, friends, as equals or as white folks if you will. Northerners have no Negro friends, only comrades. It is a different animal. Friends defend each other. Comrades work side by side in a task but should one deviate from his assigned part he is cast out of the comradeship. Comrades can be friends but usually are not. Northerners are functional racists acting as if Negroes are incapable of success or even supporting themselves without the protection and assistance of white people. Southerners may talk more trash but on the street they treat individuals as individuals. Northerners, among themselves, are more universally diaparaging of Negro abilities than are Southerners.
We’re all these statues gone when Obama was President?
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It’s like they must not have been there for 8 years.
We hear that the south lost so they should have no celebration of their heritage.
Africans were the biggest losers. They were sold by their own people into slavery. Should they not be able to celebrate their history?
It is horrible that slavery ever existed but it has throughout history. The Egyptians held Israelites as slaves. Millions of Europeans were captured and became slaves to muslims. No group had more slaves and was more brutal to slaves than Arabs but there doesn’t seem to be much outrage from the political left.
Yeah, it's here.
Excuse me but who do you mean by he?
“U.S. leaders conducted brutal campaigns against the continent’s original occupants and an aggressive war against America’s neighbor, Mexico.”
Bull. Mexico started that war by trying to take American soil.
Well, I don’t doubt that they are ultimately paid with our tax dollars after being laundered through the Democrat Party.
The author.
So? The Left owns the media. They own the schools. They have effectively used the freedoms granted by our unique founding documents to subvert the values underlying those freedoms. They are now generations who have been taught the virtues of socialism, lack of personal responsibility, and no moral standards. The tipping point is come and gone. The adults have been outgunned in the war of words, and there’s not a blessed thing we can do to persuade the entire country back to its founding values. The most anyone can hope for is fractionalization, an end to federalism, leaving individual states to set their own common ethical standards. Short of some ridiculous, extremely bloody revolution, the US is toast. And there is not a blessed thing we can do about it, so articles such as this are worse than useless- they just create frustration and despair. I’m tired of alarmist rhetoric with no solutions.
People today do not understand how slavery was perceived by the majority of our Founders. They knew they could not overturn the institution overnight. It was so deeply planted in our soil that it would require being torn out by the roots at a later date. So, adding a few words about it in the Declaration would have had no effect. Thomas Jefferson's first draft tells what he really thought about it.
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE AND THE DEBATE OVER SLAVERY
(Summary) When Thomas Jefferson included a passage attacking slavery in his draft of the Declaration of Independence it initiated the most intense debate among the delegates gathered at Philadelphia in the spring and early summer of 1776. Jefferson's passage on slavery was the most important section removed from the final document. It was replaced with a more ambiguous passage about King George's incitement of "domestic insurrections among us." Decades later Jefferson blamed the removal of the passage on delegates from South Carolina and Georgia and Northern delegates who represented merchants who were at the time actively involved in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Jefferson's original passage on slavery appears below:
"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."
Sources:
Thomas Jefferson, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and other Writings, Official and Private (Washington, D.C.: Taylor & Maury, 1853-1854).
I
Confederate soldiers, sailors, and Marines that fought in the Civil war were made U.S. Veterans by an act of Congress in in 1957, U.S. Public Law 85-425, Sec 410, Approved 23 May, 1958. This made all Confederate Army/ Navy/ Marine Veterans equal to U.S. Veterans. Additionally, under U.S. Public Law 810, Approved by the 17th Congress on 26 Feb 1929 the War Department was directed to erect headstones and recognize Confederate grave sites as U.S. War dead grave sites. Just for the record the last Confederate veteran died in 1958. When you remove a Confederate statue, monument or headstone, you are in fact, removing a statue, monument or head stone of a U.S. VETERAN.
18 U.S. Code § 1369 - Destruction of veterans’ memorials (a) Whoever, in a circumstance described in subsection (b), willfully injures or destroys, or attempts to injure or destroy, any structure, plaque, statue, or other monument on public property commemorating the service of any person or persons in the armed forces of the United States shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both. (b) A circumstance described in this subsection is that— (1) in committing the offense described in subsection (a), the defendant travels or causes another to travel in interstate or foreign commerce, or uses the mail or an instrumentality of interstate or foreign commerce; or (2) the structure, plaque, statue, or other monument described in subsection (a) is located on property owned by, or under the jurisdiction of, the Federal Government.
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