"The attack on New Orleans's historic monuments is an omen of worse to come. History itself tells us this, just as surely as it tells us the story of the Confederates. It is hoped that the fight-back will grow."
Monica Showalter "Totalitarians always seek to erase history.
The sad preamble to the horror of 9/11 was in the Taliban's brazen destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, a magnificent old relief sculpture that stood as testimony to Afghanistan's rich and many-layered history as a crossroads of civilization. To know of that history was anathema to the Taliban, which wanted absolute power over the lives of the Afghanis they terrorized. Allowing the Buddhas to stand could only allow Afghanis to take strength from their past.
"The same dynamic was also seen in 1917, when the Bolshevik atheists destroyed most of Russia's abundant churches and synagogues, literally grinding their relics into the mud and leaving hollowed out dead shells to spiritually devastate the devout public. Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote at length about this effort to deracinate Russia from its past to create a spiritual "exhaustion" or wasteland.
"We see the same dynamic now with the left's movement to wholesale destruction of Confederate monuments in New Orleans. The Washington Post has an interesting, fairly reported article on an old Confederate group's effort to stop this postmodern move from the radical left. Like the Confederacy itself, it's probably a lost cause, but it's heartening to see some fight-back, because the Confederacy deserves to be known and understood objectively, meaning neither romanticized nor demonized. Wiping out the evidence of its existence deracinates New Orleans from its history and makes it just another generic U.S. city with nothing to speak for it other than crime and the other failures of Democratic one-party rule." . . .
. . . "My other thought is this: if the left succeeds in destroying Confederate monuments, who do you think is going to be next? It's California's mission heritage. California's fascinating history began with the work of selfless Franciscan friars who sought to save the souls of Indians as their religious mission by setting up missions whose cities now bear their lives. But they also sought to save Indians' lives. Spanish troops were slaughtering native Americans across two continents on the grounds that they found them "useless." It happened in Argentina; it happened a lot of places. The Franciscans of California, by teaching the Indians skills, destroyed the Spanish justification for massacring the Indians. It's significant to me that real descendants of California's Indian tribes understand this and know this history in all its good and bad aspects objectively, while left-wing activists – who seek to erase this California history as well as its beautiful architectural legacy – completely ignore it." . . ."
*Burn, loot and pillage! Destruction of antiques during China’s Cultural Revolution. What useful idiots do.
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