The New Jersey Star-Ledger’s Paul Mulshine took
on the “national effort by the left to cleanse history of historical
figures with checkered pasts.” In The
alt-left's attack on history: And they think Trump's crazy?, Mulshine notes that “New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio [sic] has
called for a review of the historic
relevance of public monuments in the city.” Among them are monuments to Ulysses
S. Grant and Christopher Columbus.
Like a lot of conservatives, [[U.S. Senate candidate Jeff] Bell
argues that the effort to remove historical artifacts has its roots in the
Stalin methodology that George Orwell highlighted in "1984."
"Orwell satirized the
idea of a 'memory hole' and now the left is starting to have a memory
hole for anything they don't believe in," he said. "They don't want
Americans to be proud of their country. They want to change the story into a
triumph of evil."
True enough. But Mulshine goes on to include
Confederate monuments in the category of historic American artifacts that
deserve to be preserved. That’s where we differ.
First of all, there is no “alt-Left”. The Left
has always been anti-American, at least since the rise of the New Left half a
century ago. It stands to reason that they’d want to remove true American
heroes, and morally equate a Washington with a Lee. Under cover of the white
nationalist, alt-Right controversy, the New Left is making a direct assault on
reason, individual rights, limited rights-protecting government, and free
market capitalism.
Having said that, count me among those who would
remove statues that hold up Confederate leaders among America’s heros. They are
no such thing. True, history is messy. Most historical figures were mixed bags,
morally. Plus, context is everything. We should be very
careful about where we draw the
moral lines. It should not be taken lightly. Many factors must be balanced. But
we can and should draw moral lines.
People like George Washington, despite
being a slave owner, fought for and help Found a country based on the
principles of political equality that rips the “justifications” for slavery to
shreds. It is they who gave the philosophic firepower to the Abolitionist
Movement led by people like former slave Frederick Douglass. Christopher
Columbus’s courageous explorations and discovery of the New World, extending
Western Civilization with its science and progress to a primitive land,
ultimately setting in motion the chain of events that resulted in Founding of
the United States of America.
Confederate “heroes” fought to create and
protect a reactionary breakaway nation that explicitly rejected the proposition
that all men are equal in unalienable rights. The Confederacy had to reject
those principles and turn its back on America: slavery could not indefinitely
coexist with the Declaration of Independence, America’s philosophic blueprint.
One or the other had to go, and they knew it. The Confederates dumped the
Declaration of Independence.
You don’t have to excuse their ownership of
slaves to recognize the great achievements of a Washington or a Jefferson.
America inherited slavery, and thanks to visionary leaders like Washington and
Jefferson, America became part of the solution. They were on the right side of
the struggle for a fully free country for all people, and on balance we have a much
better country and world for their heroic efforts. The Confederacy was part of
the problem. It was willing to reject America’s Founding principles and tear
the United States apart to protect a racist slave dictatorship.
We should always remember history in its full
context. But that principle does not forbid moral evaluations or require moral
agnosticism. The Confederacy is part of history—but not part of American
history. The same applies to the New Left. Both promote slavery—in the case of
the Confederacy, racist slavery; for the New Left, Marxist egalitarian slavery.
Both represent the rejection of Americanism.
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