I’m starting to see a very worrying trend emerging in the US Political landscape. The far left is, probably unintentionally, trying to whitewash US history. Things in our past are ‘problematic’ and anything reminding them of that ‘problematic’ issue must be removed and eliminated. Antifa and BLM vandalized a statue in Atlanta called Peace, it was an angel holding an olive branch over a confederate soldier putting down his rifle. At the outset of the war some of the Atlanta City Gate Guard, a local militia, were among the first to take up arms against the North. After the war, a group of survivors went to the North on a peace tour and would go meet Union troops to help reunification and promote unity. The statue was created to honor them.
But Antifa/Blm don’t care. The Confederates were not brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers split apart in the single most devastating war in America’s long and bloody history, an event so powerful these groups mere existence today is a ripple in its wake. These people see the Confederacy as an evil ‘other’ personified and anything remotely reminiscent of it they feel needs to be wholly expunged. They want to see history, their history, utterly erased. In this effort, they are literally no different than ISIS, who have been destroying monuments, historical artifacts, and entire people groups of far deeper significance for years now.
And I’m appalled and disturbed. Monuments are powerful things. Reminders symbolic (and in the case of the civil war often grim) of a different time, of things and people and events that were never intended to be forgotten. Instead of defacing, removing, or destroying these monuments, they should be taught about, plaques placed with them explaining the significance and reason for the memorial. Local schools should take field trips to these places for their history lessons. Most importantly, this is a physical history that should be taught. Children should learn the US is not, and never was a perfect nation, but instead a nation that strives onward, in an eternal attempt to become a more perfect union. That people back then, the Andrew Jacksons, Robert E. Lees, the FDRs, and John Paul Joneses, they weren’t black and white, good or evil, but rather deeply complex and important people from whom we can glean the psyche of the American Spirit. Looking back and judging history from a modern sensibilities is absolute madness.
But the saddest part of the whole damn mess is this: The only people who seem to care about the monuments and their importance to history is the worst America has to offer. Nazis and White Supremacists. The average person cannot attempt to stand in the way of the extreme left’s demolition and revision of history or else they’re labelled as nazis, alt right, misogynists or whatever flavor thereof themselves by the media both traditional and social. And yet these same people who tear down and attack these statues (they even vandalized the freaking Lincoln Monument) in the name of moral outrage at these historical evils turn a blind eye to statues of Lenin in Seattle, or Chavez, or Castro, and they wear shirts with Che Guevara prints, and hold signs with Socialist/Communist slogans while dressed in black and red. In their riots and hate against their evils, they are becoming and spreading an evil just as dark and deadly themselves.
