EILEEN TOPLANSKY-STATUES AND TYRANNY
NO URL:
Virtue signaling comes from all quarters about which statues should be destroyed in this country. Is there a difference between the ISIS wielding fanatics who decimated statues dating as far back as antiquity and the black-clad people who destroy in the name of radical leftwing ideology? Read on and digest the standard leftwing/Marxist imprimatur.
The viral removals of monuments symbolizing racial terror are a corrective to a culture that valorizes violence and embeds false narratives about history into its landscapes. But to what end? The real work of dismantling monuments that embody white supremacy doesn’t end by toppling a few statues — but their withdrawal from the public realm is a long overdue start.
Addressing the fundamental problem of racism in our country will take more than erecting new monuments or toppling old statues. The system that installed statues of Confederate generals and violent police chiefs, and lovingly maintained and protected them, is the same system that built highways through black neighborhoods, invests more money in law enforcement than in schools, and created a surveillance state. These racist symbols are somehow more obvious than statues, yet more surreptitious. As Che Gossett said: ‘Tear down all the monuments to slavery, especially jails and prisons. Removing these visual emblems will be the ultimate accounting.’
For those who do not know, “Che Gossett is a trans femme writer, and archivist. They are currently an archivist at the Barnard Center for Research on Women and a doctoral candidate in trans/gender studies at Rutgers University. Gossett grew up in Massachusetts with their sibling, activist and filmmaker Tourmaline.” Note the leftwing use of the pronoun their even though only one person is being spoken about.
Moreover, reviewing the history of the anti-Columbus movement begun in the 1960s is quite eye-opening wherein “anti-Columbian sentiments attracted funding and participation from agitator-activists of all sorts, including globalists.” Marxist historian Howard Zinn depicted Columbus as a major villain and students were filled with “erroneous, agenda-driven history.”
Historically, the decimation of a culture begins with the burning of books, and the looting of cultural artifacts. If allowed to continue, the end result is the genocide of certain groups of people. And lest one think that it is only the uneducated who destroy, it should be noted that many literary men applauded the notion of Delenda Est Bibliotheca or “The library must be destroyed.”[1] Consider the present-day leftwing professors who have molded those who think it is laudable to destroy works of art. The ultimate reason for the wholesale destruction is always the same:
an educated people cannot be governed; because the conquered peoples must change their history or their beliefs . . . because only the illiterate can save the world, a common theme of the millenarian preachers of every era; because the nature of a great collection of books is a threat to the new power. The book is the double of the man, and burning it is the equivalent of killing him (x).
So what does this have to do with statues? Statues and art are the visual representation of the man. Bruce Thornton explains that “[f]or months we’ve watched two-bit anarchists and race-hustlers knocking down monuments from our history as a graphic repudiation of America and its defining principles––a 21st century version of the old Roman damnatio memoriae, in which enemies of the state or emperor were disappeared from history by removing any public reference to them in inscriptions, statues, or books.”
In fact, damnatio memoriae is meant to deface and ultimately efface. This is nothing new and the sad irony is that humans have progressed not a whit as they employ the same methods of decimating a culture.
While the Left will maintain that certain symbols are representative of evil, it is a cover-up for the fact that they are the evil mongers. Art and cultural heritage looting and destruction of objects of local, regional, national, and international significance are now endemic. White privilege is the new enemy and hence anything the Left deems as representative of so-called white culture must be obliterated. It is a stealth operation in semantics but a clear-cut technique to destroying America.
It always results in the smothering of history, the stifling of speech, the destruction of art, and ultimately the intimidation of others. It is a totalitarian instinct and the Left is very adept at it. They lure impressionable minds into believing that wrecking a statue of Robert E. Lee is tantamount to bettering the lives of others. Yet the action does nothing meaningful to help people. Thus, ruin is the road to heaven even when the object of their destruction has actually freed slaves, i.e., John Greenleaf Whittier, abolitionist. How ironic and revealing, though.
David K. Shipler asks what does it mean to tear down a statue?
Therefore, as Americans rally to tear down and deface the offensive symbols of a shameful past, it is worth considering what vacuums will be opened and how they will be filled. A country without heroes, which is what the United States is becoming, can be a land adrift, susceptible to demagoguery and absolutism. The challenge is to make the empty pedestals into foundations of conscience and self-correction. If destruction is the only result, trouble looms.
. . . history should not be erased. Dictatorships do that with abandon to suit momentary political doctrine. But neither should history be sanitized and distorted. Let the Confederacy be taught by scholars who parse the competing impulses of its leaders. Let museums educate in context. If Confederate figures are retained in public squares, let them be accompanied by their opposites: abolitionists, slaves who joined the Union Army, memorials to all the useless deaths of that war. If Jefferson Davis must have a statue, stand Abraham Lincoln beside him.
Since real human beings are never perfect, it might be legitimate to regard certain statues as monuments to ideas rather than to people. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a womanizer, unfaithful to his wife but instrumental in raising the conscience of the nation. Should his name be scrubbed from streets and schools, his statues removed because of his philandering? Of course not.
But it is crucial to remember that the Left assiduously works to falsify history, i.e., 1619 Project or the latest shameful exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture which is a Smithsonian Institution museum.
Thus statue destruction is but one spoke on the Leftist wheel to upend America altogether.
If the statue offends, then create another statue, or affix a plaque demonstrating what the individual stood for, how events have changed our understanding and perceptions, and, in the case of the Confederate statues, how the country evolved into the freest land on the face of the earth. To destroy means the same evil can recur — with different leaders, different slogans — but with the same intent.
Rob Natelson asserts that removing historical monuments is a bad idea because “[w]hile most Americans watch helplessly, our stateside Taliban vandalizes and removes long-standing public monuments . . . the destruction weakens our consciousness of history, including history’s darker side.” In fact, “virtually everyone acts in ways consistent with contemporaneous social norms—norms of which later generations may disapprove. If we disqualified all figures because we now reject their society’s practices, we would commemorate few people indeed, and we would deprive ourselves of many sources of inspiration. ”
Moreover, these statues are pieces of art. Every bronze sculpture requires a huge amount of human handwork to produce — their destruction is yet another blow to human creativity and freedom – but this is precisely the Left’s modus operandi.
Simon John explains that “[s]tatues can teach us about history, but they do not convey some immutable truth from the past. Instead, they are symbolic of the fixed ideas of a specific community regarding its past, as captured at a particular point in time. In a way, statues do tell us about the past, but that is not to say that we should accept what they tell us uncritically.”
But destruction does not educate anyone; it just erases opportunities to truly have an open forum. The wanton destruction that is occurring in America is the face of barbarism.
Eileen can be reached at middlemarch18@gmail.com
[1] Lucien X. Polastron. Books on Fire: The Destruction of Libraries throughout History, 2004. p. 300.
Comments are closed.
