Progressives and social justice warriors love to attack, belittle, moralize and blame. They talk about white supremacy movements as if they’re a clear and present danger to civilization. Of course such movements are evil and irrational. But they don’t pose nearly the threat that Islamic terrorists and left-wing terrorists such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter do. Those movements are not subject to any moralizing or intimidation by social justice warriors who claim to care about the rights of individual humans. Go figure!
I once met a woman – a friend of a friend – who showed people her family photo album which included pictures of her ex-husband and children. She had cut out the face of her ex-husband in all the pictures, while leaving the photos otherwise intact. She was proud of this, thought it a good thing and wanted people to know it. That’s what I found the most interesting.
And that’s what I think of when I hear of people wishing to tear down statues of Civil War generals and the like. It’s almost as if doing so will make it like things never happened. It’s also a way of trying to make a point, in a pathetic and virtue-signaling kind of way: “Look at me. I don’t like the Confederacy. So what if the slave-endorsing country was soundly defeated 150 years ago? It’s a chance for me to look virtuous and noble. So there.”
Notice the options such people don’t take. They don’t petition their local government to remove the statues from public property, assuming it’s public property. They show no respect for civil order or law, even though it’s these things they count upon others to follow once the new policy—of a removed statue—is in place. It’s worse than hypocrisy. It’s worse than narcissistic arrogance. It’s a spirit of totalitarianism totally at odds with what America was supposed to be about.
The terrorists who want to tear down every Civil War statue they can find, or burn every Confederate flag they see, are the same people who openly threaten to pull people out of a peaceful Donald Trump rally and beat their brains out (and have done so). How are we supposed to believe it’s love of liberty and American freedoms that motivate them?
It’s also delusional. I agree with what Condoleezza Rice said: “I am a firm believer in ‘keep your history before you.’ So I don’t actually want to rename things that were named for slave owners. I want us to have to look at those names, and realize what they did, and be able to tell our kids what they did and for them to have a sense of their own history.”
Rice makes an entirely reasonable and plausible point. Yet if you make it, you’re called a Nazi and a racist. And your point does not count. Because you’re wrong, brute force must be implemented to give the opposing view its way. That’s that. It’s kind of like cutting the ex-husband’s face out of the family photos and thinking this somehow changes things.
We’ve all heard the cliché that those who don’t study the mistakes of history are condemned to repeat them. It’s a cliché because it’s true. It’s true because if you don’t grasp the nature of your (or another’s) past errors and where such errors can lead, you can make the same mistakes again.
A statue is not necessarily an endorsement. Yes, one can argue about not having statues in tax-funded government buildings at all. But to be fair and consistent, we’d have to get rid of all of them. I’ve read about statues of Marx and Lenin on publicly owned property in cities around the country. Will we get rid of those? Not a chance. What would happen if a bunch of Trump supporters took the law in their hands and tore them down? It would be a moralistic feeding frenzy like none seen since the Civil War itself. Kind of like what we’re getting now.
Rational people do not condone or endorse things like slavery, racism or any form of infringement on liberty. But rational people don’t act, speak and think the way these irrational social justice warriors do, either. They’re no better than what they claim to oppose. And increasingly, they –not the relics of a bygone era like Robert E. Lee – are the biggest threat to individual rights and human liberty. Shame on them all.
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