In a handful of past NER posts, I’ve mentioned the pulling down of monuments. While I can’t validate the probity of keeping or destroying every separate monument, I’m generally against their destruction in the US. It’s time to look at this is closer in light of the ‘woke’ revolution that we’re now in. It seems quaint now to point out that the destruction of monuments uniformly destroys our consciousness of history, good and bad, or that the Taliban and Islamic State understood the utility of monument destruction in destroying cultural underpinnings to clear the way for their iron grasp on uniform submission of the conquered. But most monument destroyers don’t have the cranial wattage to understand anything but the slice of history and culture they’ve been told to destroy.
Personally, I’m not passionate about monuments except ones that are classically beautiful, or jaw-dropping well done. Assumedly, this is not the case with most historical statues. I’m a traditionalist with a small ‘t’, but that doesn’t preclude the notion of never changing monuments. Some places, there are too many or poorly executed ones that should be quietly removed. I’m of an age where I won’t have to live with the presence of a particular monument for a long time and I generally don’t care what environment you [the revolutionary] choose for yourself. I only hope that if you personally burn something down, that you should be forced to live there with the consequences for a long-long time. What I do care and am passionate about is the danger of group-think hysteria, about the masses of minimally informed throwing their minds into a metaphorical pile and being used as pawns by their ideological and political overlords. Statue dumping often is, and especially now, is a primary manifestation of crowd and movement manipulation.
In June 2020, why are statues coming down now? There’s a wave of statue dumping with every wave of riots, resulting from a single injustice that shocks the public just a little more than the dozens or even hundreds of other cases that escapes mass attention. The statue has nothing to do with the crime at hand, it’s a third or fourth priority, after the legitimate peaceful protest, the illegitimate violent one, and two or three waves of looting. This is distinct from a historical revolution where a power change occurs, and the new regime imposes their values.
Ask yourself just one question: Why were you not incensed six weeks ago? If you’re a politician, did you enter a measure for the remove of your local questionable statue last year? I’m sure a couple of you did. I’m also sure that the majority of you did not and thus you’re a bald opportunistic hypocrite. The crowd yelled and your knees buckled, contemplating the electoral implications. You now have deep ‘heart felt’ convictions that materialized out of nowhere. It’s too bad that your party of affiliation didn’t queue you in a little earlier. If you’re a protestor, last year maybe you were just thinking about getting through the semester, your gaming, or getting laid. You got religion just the past couple of weeks. Your head has been appropriated.
My main problem with statue dumping in the present context is that it’s an easy way for you to avoid doing anything substantive for people of color. I know that in your system of thought, your feeling you did something or thinking about the feelings of a community of people toward a statue trounces every roadblock and hurdle for collective racial progress, but you’re a fool. You bullshit yourself and every person of color. You stood by and cheered as block after block of a community was burned to the ground. You stood by and did nothing to reform the police in the overwhelmingly Democrat jurisdictions that practice the most heinous law enforcement behaviors. You don’t give a damn that thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands of minorities suddenly have no job, no work place, no place to pick up a prescription or even groceries, but you sure as hell knocked over that damn bronze of some dead white man who lived 150 years ago! Way to go brother! You deserve a badge!
Among the politicians and protest leaders, there is the propensity to start with the symbolic and move toward the barely useful and to keep wholesale and real change in the forever distant future.
We might want to exercise a little more caution. Liberal Europe appears to be keeping their monuments. We’re dumping ours. What do they know that we don’t? Maybe they understand a little bit more about depth of history because they have so much more of it while we’ve already forgotten ours as we prepare to refight our own civil war all over again.
If you need a headline, a march, or a riot to pull down your statue, you’re the problem. Pulling down a statue and calling all objectors ‘racist’ is so easy compared to getting your party and elected officials to change your racist policing policies, keeping intact families of color in your controlled cities, or giving their children a real education in your crony infested school systems. Every child of color that looks on that empty pedestal will surely beam with pride.