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Originally Posted by Robert Schunk
So, the white liberal theory concerning the recent wave of iconoclasm sweeping the US may be all well and good, but the practice clearly involves the systematic erasure of American history.
BLM began by saying that they only wanted to remove statues of Confederate generals and politicians, which point I could certainly see in the light of huge monstrosities I'd seen in my youth, such as a gigantic statue of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America, in Memphis, Tennessee. That statue, along with certain "colored entrance"-type signs (which, by then, thank God, no longer had legal effect) definitely gave the feeling that I was in an unwholesome society. I definitely understood that the purpose of that statue was to show that those who'd lost the war had certainly won the peace, and to serve as a warning to that effect to Northerners, local African-Americans, and local White liberals alike. I saw such monuments in the same light as the gigantic statue of Stalin in the middle of Budapest, or a similar statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad.
But this recent spasm of iconoclasm in my country has, by now, clearly revealed its aim as having nothing to do with slavery or racism. In Madison, Wisconsin, where I went to school, BLM pulled down, decapitated, and threw in Lake Mendota a statue of Col. Hans Christian Heg, commander of the 15th Regiment of Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry, who died of wounds received at the Battle of Chickamauga while leading his men against the Confederate rebels FROM THE FRONT! Prior to his joining the army, he had been a leader of the Free Soil Party (which sought to prevent the extension of slavery in the West) and, later, of the newly-founded Republican Party. He had also been a leader of a citizen's militia organization known as the "Wide Awakes" which acted against slave-catching bounty hunters who captured runaway slaves (and sometimes free people of color) and sent them back south. Yet, his statue was desecrated, as was that of Col. Robert Gould Shaw (commander of the 54th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry (Colored)) in Boston, who likewise died leading his men (including two sons of the great former slave Frederick Douglass, one of whom was, himself, seriously wounded) FROM THE FRONT in a frontal assault against Fort Wagner, South Carolina. As if that weren't enough, the City of Boston is planning to remove a statue of Abraham Lincoln from its current position in front of City Hall. Furthermore, a statue of Union General Ulysses S. Grant was toppled in San Francisco. Finally, a statue of Christopher Columbus was removed by the City of Providence from an intersection here.
Some may say that these acts are the acts of a few misguided university kids, save for the fact that the nationwide, systematic scope of these acts, effectively sanctioned by the local civil authorities (invariably members of the Democratic Party, which ruled the Confederate States of America, as well as the Jim Crow postwar South, and which sponsored the Ku Klux Klan as its paramilitary enforcement arm) implies an aim at censoring and controlling the narrative of my country's history by forces hostile to the bulk of my country's people of all races, but particularly those of European, African, and Asian heritage. This constitutes a crime against humanity known as "Cultural Genocide", as was practiced by the Red Guards against the deeply religious Buddhist culture of Tibet during Mao's Cultural Revolution.
So, think again before jumping on the most radical bandwagon moving though town assuming you'll be forgiven by history for having been caught up in the moment of a crazy time.
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