Posted on 08/20/2017 2:24:46 AM PDT by Daffynition
In the wake of Charlottesville, a chorus of media outlets, political activists, and random people on the Internet have called for the removal or destruction of Confederate statues in cities across the country. They say we shouldn’t honor a bunch of racists who fought to preserve slavery, and that it’s long past time for these painful reminders of our past to come down—stow them away in a museum or smash them to pieces, just get them off the streets.
This iconoclastic impulse is a mistake, even after the harrowing events in Charlottesville last weekend. It’s a mistake not because there was anything noble about the Confederacy or its raison d’être, which was slavery, but because there is something noble—and, for a free people, necessary—about preserving our history so we can understand who we are and how we should live.
(Excerpt) Read more at thefederalist.com ...
Undermine Confederate history, undermine the American Civil Rights movement.
“For the Left, the Confederacy is just a small part of a much larger problem, which is the past. Iconoclasm of the kind we’ve seen this week is native to the Left, because the entire point is to liberate society from the strictures of tradition and history in order to secure a glorious new future. That’s why Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China torched temples and dug up ancient graves, why the Soviets sacked Orthodox churches and confiscated church property, and why various governments of France went about de-Christianizing the country during the French Revolution.”
Great article. That sums it up beautifully. He has a great quote from Edmund Burke, too.
Well put.
Great article. That sums it up beautifully. He has a great quote from Edmund Burke, too.
Only it appears to totally miss the point that the groups and individuals organizing the protests are/were supporters of Mao and the Soviets.
No, he mentions that in the article. But the tactic of erasing the past goes beyond the specific group doing it at the moment and is remarkably consistent throughout the history of all leftist groups at all times: destroy Tradition, destroy any connection with the past and inherited wisdom and morality.
The quote from Burke deals with the French Revolution, long before Mao or the Soviets, but you could plug in the name of any leftwing faction in any era and it would be the same.
History is history. You can try to rewrite it, ignore it, remove all memory of it but you can’t change it. Try all that and you’re doomed to repeat it.
I say F that.
If you want to beleive this simplistic leftist cookie cutter view of US history go ahead be ignorant.
You’ve done your part to propagate the leftist mantra of lies. You tried to spew your hate about the ridiculous and simplistic meme that the Civil War was “all about slavery”. You are leftist witch.
Sorry, unless I missed it, I do not see anywhere in the article where the author makes it clear that the protest organizers are/were supporters of Mao and the Soviets.
You make my point for me.
A group of anti-Confederate protesters aren’t happy enough with the declaration by the city of Memphis that it wants to dig up and move the remains of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest.
I make up nothing. You do it yourself.
Dear Dr. Scott:
Respecting your August 1 inquiry calling attention to my often expressed admiration for General Robert E. Lee, I would say, first, that we need to understand that at the time of the War between the States the issue of secession had remained unresolved for more than 70 years. Men of probity, character, public standing and unquestioned loyalty, both North and South, had disagreed over this issue as a matter of principle from the day our Constitution was adopted.
General Robert E. Lee was, in my estimation, one of the supremely gifted men produced by our Nation. He believed unswervingly in the Constitutional validity of his cause which until 1865 was still an arguable question in America; he was a poised and inspiring leader, true to the high trust reposed in him by millions of his fellow citizens; he was thoughtful yet demanding of his officers and men, forbearing with captured enemies but ingenious, unrelenting and personally courageous in battle, and never disheartened by a reverse or obstacle. Through all his many trials, he remained selfless almost to a fault and unfailing in his faith in God. Taken altogether, he was noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history.
From deep conviction, I simply say this: a nation of men of Lee’s calibre would be unconquerable in spirit and soul. Indeed, to the degree that present-day American youth will strive to emulate his rare qualities, including his devotion to this land as revealed in his painstaking efforts to help heal the Nation’s wounds once the bitter struggle was over, we, in our own time of danger in a divided world, will be strengthened and our love of freedom sustained.
Such are the reasons that I proudly display the picture of this great American on my office wall.
Sincerely,
Dwight D. Eisenhower
A group of protesters started digging up the grave of Confederate general Nathan Beford Forrest in Memphis
The activist shoveled a patch of earth out of the grave, saying they were unhappy with a lack of progress by lawmakers to have the memorial to Bedford Forrest removed
The city’s mayor, AC Wharton, began a push to remove the body and statue in the wake of the church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, but needs approval from several branches of government before he can take action.
Members of the protest group, who call themselves the Commission on Religion and Racism, removed only a small patch of grass from the park, but threatened to return with heavy machinery to tear down the wartime symbol.
Isaac Richmond, the group’s leader, told local station WREG: ‘If he’s gone, some of this racism and race-hate might be gone. We got a fresh shovel full, and we hope that everybody else will follow suit and dig him up.
As in the case of the 10s of millions of people murdered by Mao and the Soviets, two of the many communist regimes that today's protest organizers supported then, and now.
Exactly.
The Civil War wasn’t only, or even mostly, about slavery.
Not all slaves were black.
Not all slave owners were white.
Most Americans today have zero connection to slave holding.
Most Confederate soldiers were poor, uneducated farmers who just wanted to take care of their fields and their families.
I appreciate my veteran forefathers - Union and Confederate. And I wish today’s culture knew what “honor answering honor” means.
The men who, in all righteousness, fought on the side of the Confederacy during the Civil war, not because they believed in the institution of slavery, but because they believed the individual state had considerably more authority to control many matters within their own borders than was being granted to them by the Federal government at the time, had drifted into a conundrum that is still instructive to us today.
Erasing these men and their accomplishments (and there were MANY good men who fought on the side of the Confederacy) is to deny history, much as the Communists of Russia denied the history of the Czars. Yet curiously, many of the statues of Lenin and even Stalin still exist in the Russian Federation, as a continuous reminder of the excesses and failures of the Soviet regime.
Memorials are our physical reminders of a specific time in history. And to how the lessons from that history may be applied to the world going forward.
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