Those of us who hold to an historic, traditional understanding of the meaning of America are facing a choice in the coming days. The progressive cultural Marxists driven by identity politics based in Critical Theory are hell-bent on destroying the original vision of America.
The destruction of statues in the last few weeks are just the latest expression of their hatred for this country. Many of them were memorials to Confederate leaders and the legacy of slavery, but they’ve also attacked statues of Abraham Lincoln, the World War II monument and statues of Christopher Columbus.
The attacks on statues of Lincoln, the World War II Memorial and Christopher Columbus felt like non-sequiturs to me. Columbus I could sort of understand because he and his crews enslaved the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean. But why Lincoln—he freed the slaves. And why attack the soldiers of the “greatest generation”? They weren’t perpetuating slavery; they were liberating innocent countries from oppression.
A light went on for me while reading John Davidson at The Federalist. Of the statue and memorial purges, he writes,
“Their target is not the Confederacy. It is the United States. They mean to destroy symbols of American history writ large, because to them all of American history is racist and genocidal. Their goal is not to cleanse a nation they love of monuments to Confederate traitors who tried to secede, but to cleanse their consciences of ever having loved such an evil and irredeemably racist country in the first place.”
(I’d say they never even “loved” this country. What they’re doing is responding to what they’ve been taught about America. They are doling out punishment, not doing penance.)
“That is why you see mobs defacing statues of abolitionists like Matthias Baldwin and Union war heroes like Adm. David Farragut and Gen. George Thomas. That is why the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier of the American Revolution in Philadelphia was vandalized this past weekend with the words “committed genocide.” That is why statues of Christopher Columbus were torn down or beheaded in three cities last week. That is why officials in Dallas recently removed a Texas Ranger statue from Love Field Airport. That is why a mob of college students toppled two statues of American pioneers on the University of Oregon campus. That is why Black Lives Matter protesters in San Antonio, Texas, are threatening to march on the Alamo.
“To suppose this has anything to do with the Confederacy or the Civil War is to misunderstand completely the nature of what is happening right now in America. The people who are pulling down monuments, defacing statues, and demanding U.S. military bases be renamed do not have a limiting principle. They don’t distinguish between those who fought for freedom against the British Empire and those who fought for union against the slave states of the South. To them, the Union itself was a crime against humanity long before the South seceded. What kind of moral monster would ever fight to preserve it?”
This makes complete sense to me. It’s of a piece with blacks demanding whites kneel in subjugation before them; of capitalizing the words “Black” or “Brown” in news stories; of updating the dictionary definition of “racism” to include a reference to “systemic racism,” which is not clearly defined or proven.
According to the cultural Marxists, you can be anything but white in this country. White culture rooted in colonial America must be eradicated. Any culture but the original is approved and the original must be destroyed.
The change isn’t being done through the courts or Congress. It is being driven by millions and millions of immigrants—both legal and illegal—from countries where the concepts of freedom and the rule of law as a basis for governance are as foreign as they are. In addition, the “long march through the institutions” is a fait accompli, and the most recent generations have been taught that America is an imperialist, racist and evil creation. That lie is reinforced through our religious, political, legal, media and other cultural institutions.
It is too late to reverse what is happening. There is no “going back.” The Marxists are ascendant and run largely unopposed in the superstructure of our society, forcing the conservative Right and like-minded Libertarians to operate from a defensive position.
Thus we have a choice in the making, emerging with the subtlety of a developing Polaroid as the realization dawns: we will be forced to fight or submit. It’s a dreadful choice but one that is, like so many recent statues, tipping toward submission more than anyone wants to admit.