Posted on 06/20/2020 2:51:52 PM PDT by Ennis85
In the wave of cancellations sweeping America, Confederate statues have been particularly hard hit.
They have been graffitied, assaulted, and torn down, while authorities rush to remove them.
For his part, President Donald Trump has been a steadfast defender of the statues and other forms of recognition of the Confederacy. He has come out in favor of preserving the names of military bases named after Confederate generals and pointedly said that we should build on our heritage rather than tear it down.
Conservatives tend to think the same way. They reflexively oppose politically correct campaigns to destroy anything giving offense.
They fear where the slippery slope of woke iconoclasm will lead — first it’s Jefferson Davis, ultimately George Washington.
They value tradition and worry we are trashing part of our history.
This impulse, though, is a mistake. Confederate statues and symbols deserve to be reevaluated, and often mothballed.
n the wave of cancellations sweeping America, Confederate statues have been particularly hard hit.
They have been graffitied, assaulted, and torn down, while authorities rush to remove them.
For his part, President Donald Trump has been a steadfast defender of the statues and other forms of recognition of the Confederacy. He has come out in favor of preserving the names of military bases named after Confederate generals and pointedly said that we should build on our heritage rather than tear it down.
Conservatives tend to think the same way. They reflexively oppose politically correct campaigns to destroy anything giving offense.
They fear where the slippery slope of woke iconoclasm will lead — first it’s Jefferson Davis, ultimately George Washington.
They value tradition and worry we are trashing part of our history.
This impulse, though, is a mistake. Confederate statues and symbols deserve to be reevaluated, and often mothballed.
Cuck Review
It must have happened. It was mentioned several times in the Constitution of the Confederate States of America. Would think that they would have not wasted so much ink and time writing about all the protections and rights that slave owners in the Confederate States of America were entitled to, if it never happened.
“It seems National Review has outlasted its usefulness.”
They have no clue we’re in a war.
Whoever this author is, he’s deluded-this issue is Vandalism and anarchy—those statues do not belong to them, and they have no right to tear them down.
Get a petition and vote on whether to keep them, or take it to court and get a court order to demolish—that’s the American way in the USA.
No one elected this mob to do anything-arrogant jerks —I can’t say the names I’d like to call them, or I’d be banned.
History has value!
If they want to take them down then vote on it. It is not the property of mobs who probably don’t live there and don’t pay taxes!! I am not defending any particular statur. I am defending the rights of tax payers! Watching a mob destroy PUBLIC TAXPAYER PROPERTY and no one interferes, no one goes to jail, no one punished is absolutely disguating and evil. Can Christians go tearing down Planned Parenthood advertisements? They offend me...I shouldn’t have to look at them. Anti second amendment advertisements too.
Lowry has no idea what he is talking about. All the anarchist activity is a win for the commies. If all the Confederate monuments were toppled tomorrow it would not stop- the left is just warming up. People like Lowry do not understand that Antifa and BLM are the street militia of the left. If they are tearing down anything, it is not for any good purpose.
Another thing- for those who deride people who oppose desecration of these monuments- do you really want to be allied to and abetting Antifa and BLM, and the communists behind them? That is in effect what happens when you heap scorn on Southerners who oppose these monuments being ripped down. You drive away allies- an important consideration when you recall that Antifa and BLM are not your friends. Trying to appease them is a policy doomed to fail.
I know what you mean. I saw Rap music for what it was within
ten minutes, back in the late 80s.
The Left will discredit our country’s Founders, and then what they founded. The Confederate statues were easy parts of history to start with. Now they are going after Washington and Jefferson.
Lowry has slipped back into being an anti-Trump, faux conservative.
A real conservative should stand up against book burning, censorship (other than relating to child/children pornography and other mental illness supporting actions), and “history by elimination”. That was what Stalin used to do, erase people from photos, books, records, etc.
I have no love for Confederate statues. In fact, I live not far from a street named for a Confederate general. I just don’t think about it. Other streets named for Confederate soldiers have been renamed (if done properly, I have no objection), but there are statues to Marx and Lenin, Stalin, Ho, Castro, etc. in the US, often on college campuses.
By the Left’s/pseudo-conservatives thinking, they are “untouchable” but those representing views they disagree with or hate, are fair game for “historical erasing”.
Put things in their proper perspective. You can explain a lot more things by using them as props for a sane, educated discussion than you can by erasing them from history.
As a historian, who lost a whole European side of the family to mass executions and possible gassing in the Holocaust, I don’t want Nazi symbols and publications destroyed or banned (except for vandalism).
I want them explained to their viewers/readers so that they know what they stand for, and have that help to make sure that Nazi Fascism/Genocide never happens against. That also applies to Communist Genocide and aggression (I was in So. Vietnam and Cambodia as a pro-American journalist).
I possibly know more about communist genocide in SE Asia than most so-called history teachers (and have written major works on the subject, including for Congress) yet I see universities such as Cornell having turned out the best Hanoi disinformation and apologists in the world, out of Prof. George McT. Kahins Southeast Asian program. Today guys like Turse, Moise, Young,Chomsky, Edwards, Porter and Ladderman remain some of the top sources of communist disinformation or just plain incompetent research, that are used in both high school and college courses on the Vietnam War.
Just for a point of order, I was the only journalist to testify before Congress about the Khmer Rouge plans for ideological genocide in Cambodia (1974) based on a Secret report I was able to get declassified on the subject and completely ignored by the mainstream media.
I lost new friends in both Cambodia and So. Vietnam to communist aggression and murder, as well as a former college fencing teammate, KIA, 1967.
Among my personal and professional friends, I have/had a number of concentration camp survivors, freedom fighters in the Resistance, US Army camp liberators, and journalists who saw the genocide first hand.
I am also one of the few Jewish journalists (that I know of) who attended a combined American Nazi/KKK rally in an undercover capacity. I knew real Nazis, white racists, and wackos, including Moslem/Arab/Palestinian supporters of genocide against the Jewish state of Israel.
One of my editor’s lost a son to Hezbollah and another just missed a PLO/JRA bomb explosion in a foreign country. I’ve also met one of the Mossad agents who physically captured Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, as well as an Israel who prosecuted him.
Another friend tried to deal with Eichmann in a trucks for kids deal which Eichmann never intended to do. Dr. William Perl then organized an escape “line” for Jewish children to get over the Alps and to Palestine or the US, thus saving an estimated 40,000 lives.
I also interviewed controversial Rabbi Meir Kahane in the mid-70s for two newspapers. He was murdered by an Al Qaeda operative in New York City in the early 90’s.
I’ve interviewed both No. Vietnamese POWS and defectors, VC defectors (Hoi Chans - ralliers), Cambodian civilian and govt intelligence agents who escaped from the VC/NVA, and one of Mao’s former bodyguards/Red Guard defector, as well as one of Mao’s early personal secretaries.
Also met a survivor of a No. Korean invasion attack that killed doctors and patients in a So. Korean hospital during the Korean War, Dith Pran and Hang Nagor (Cambodia survivors), lots of friends who were tortured in the Hanoi Hilton or survived VC death marches.
I did my homework, even going 8,000 miles away to field classes in SVN and Cambodia. If we are going to teach about the horrible My Lai massacre, then we must teach about what “haters” and practioners of Genocide did, said, wrote, and the symbols they used, not destroy them or hide them in closets.
You should never be afraid of the truth nor afraid to teach it. If you are a sane, concerned person, you can and will claim from the “bad” as well as the good, the “Ying and Yang” of history.
Don’t fear the evils of history. Learn from them so that you can help prevent them from ever occurring again.
Today, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, Sunrise Movement, the Black Bloc anarchists, and assorted communist/Marxist parties and organizations are doing just what the communists and Nazis did from the 1920’s thru Venezuela today, distort, hide, and destroy the “truth”.
They are afraid of the truth, because, as the old saying goes, “The truth shall set you free”, but don’t expect it from the NY Times, Wash. Post, Cable leftist news networks and in many history classes in academia.
As we Jews say, “Never Again!”
Thank you
A cogent post lost on a many assholes on this forum
You have my gratitude
What you said
Hear hear
The leftist propaganda like this article is endless.
JoMa
What Lowry doesn’t get is that the statues were part of the healing process of bringing Americans back together. Lincoln’s “with malice towards none.”
Blacks and libs have made up this slavery myth and I am sick of it, it never happened.
The right of self rule you fascist loon.
Yeah, riiiiight.
Yes. I have no love for Confederate statues but have even less love for the sight of mobs pulling them down.
“Blacks and libs have made up this slavery myth and I am sick of it, it never happened.”
The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. [...] Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it—when the “storm came and the wind blew, it fell.”
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.
Alexander H. Stephens,
Vice President of the Confederate States of America
March 21, 1861
It must have happened, the VP of the Confederacy seems to think it happened. Also, didn’t see much in the way of the right of self rule in this.
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