“Detest all those white men if you will, but they were the ones who created the nation we inherited.” ~ Pat Buchanan, June 15th 2020
America witnessed a fairly intense campaign to remove or destroy statues memorializing revered and honored men of the Confederate States of America in 2017, and in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a policeman in Minneapolis, once again, America is seeing a broader range of destruction aimed at any and all statues, monuments, and memorials honoring all those men of impeccable character, who had some part in making America exceptional. Rioting, looting and burning American cities are no longer enough, and in their ignorance of historical fact, they peddle their revisionist history without factual foundation, and they also seek to destroy every last vestige, right down to the tiniest bit, of American history, even the movie ‘Gone With the Wind‘, while police and public officials stand down, and even encourage them.
The new word for “racist” is “white”. If one is white in America today, Her radical element views one as a racist, and as such, every statue of any white person is a statue of a racist and is subject to being vandalized and pulled down. Decades of propaganda that taught blacks to continue to claim grievances against white people for the sins of slavery that happened centuries ago have now shown their grim results, and it is a dark day for all America.
Regardless of what part they played in America’s founding, or even if they were simply those early explorers to the New World, none are now spared, from Christopher Columbus to Thomas Jefferson and Spanish Conquistador Juan de Onate. It is no longer the Confederacy under attack. These radical young turks desire the obliteration of Western principles in America and a clean slate so they can recreate the nation as they believe it should exist, casting aside history and all the outstanding achievements of so many, along with those terrible deeds and the institutions of slavery and Jim Crow.
In Richmond, Virginia, the Capitol of the Confederate States, a statue of Christopher Columbus was pulled down and thrown in nearby Fountain Lake. This same scenario has played out over the past few years, as America’s radicals claim Columbus represents “genocide”. The Antifa, MLK and LaRaza, Che Guevara commie types, forcefully assert that Columbus’s discovery brought the European invasion of the indigenous Native Indian tribal lands, something that the entire United States has been experiencing from Mexico, Africa and the Middle East since 1965.
All the nations of the globe have suffered an invasion of some sort at one time or another in their history. Why should the arrival of Europeans to the New World be seen as such a horrible historical event, when such an Exceptional Country was birthed from it? These anti-American detractors are pure evil and solely interested in destroying a country and a system that gave rise to freedom for more people than any other system or nation in the entire history of all mankind.
Some of our young turks refer to Columbus as “another notorious figure in the history of slavery”, even though 1492 far preceded the black Kingdom of Dahomey that created the black slave trade and the days that such a labor force was needed in the colonies. However, facts are irrelevant to these madding masses, and their “truth” is anything they pull from their nether regions that is emotionally satisfying.
So ignorant are they, it is surreal. Do they truly not know Columbus was merely searching for a new trade route to India, China and the Spice Islands?
The radicals in the streets and their hand-holders in Congress are now also going after all U.S. military bases named after Confederate generals
In continuing, please understand that nothing herein is an attempt, in any way, shape or form to justify the reprehensible and despicable evil of slavery or Jim Crow laws that were an inherent part of our heritage for much too long. It should have ended long before it did, but it shouldn’t have required a civil war and all that followed to see that black people were granted full rights as human beings from the very start.
The second week of rioting across America was coming to a close, when the radical Antifa and Black Lives Matter groups pulled down the statue of Thomas Jefferson, in Portland, Oregon on June 14th. They also defaced its base with vile graffiti and slogans.
Even though Thomas Jefferson owned many slaves, the times were such that any move to free the slaves shortly after our War for Independence would have virtually assured that the original thirteen colonies never would have joined in common cause in a “Union” of the states to form the United States of America. The “three-fifths” clause counting slaves as three fifths of a person for representation purposes was a compromise, one founded in the evil that would not easily relinquish its hold on those early day Americans.
Jefferson, the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence, noting “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”, was also a fine common sense analyst of the complexities of the times. Regarding the incongruity between the words of the Declaration and the fact of slavery enshrined in the Constitution, in 1820, he would later write: “But, as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”
Confederate statues have also recently been damaged and toppled in Mississippi, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee, while Virginia has had the Richmond Howitzers Monument vandalized and the statue of Confederate leader Williams Carter Wickham toppled. The out-of-control lawless groups, in Richmond, even toppled the monument of Confederate President Jefferson Davis on June 10th, 113 years to the date of its dedication on June 3rd 1907.
Rioters in Portsmouth, Virginia beheaded four Confederate statues that encircle their Confederate monument on June 10th, without any regard for the law. They acted pre-emptively, because they were angry over Portsmouth’s City Council’s decision to delay moving the monument.
The radicals are apoplectic over Jefferson Davis who was the President of the Confederate States of America for approximately four years of a life well lived. Most of his life was spent in the service of the United States of America, as a military officer, a U.S. Senator and as the U.S. Secretary of War. During his military career, he fought in the Mexican-American War, leading a successful charge against Fort La Teneria in the Battle of Monterrey. Davis was also U.S. President Zachary Taylor’s son-in-law and he argued against secession. The statue of Davis was erected for good reasons.
Ironically, while Speaker Nancy Pelosi calls for the removal of 11 Confederate statues in the Capitol, her own father, Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr. dedicated monuments to two Confederate generals, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, in 1948, when he was Baltimore’s mayor. D’Alesandro suggested that people should be inspired by these men and should “emulate Jackson’s example and stand like a stone wall against aggression in any form that would seek to destroy the liberty of the world.”
Congressional Democrats are now also wailing and screaming for all military installations and ships bearing the names of Confederate generals, such as Bragg, Benning, and Hood, to be renamed. Initially, President Trump insisted he would not even begin to consider such a move, since very often these places were the last places seen by those fighting men who were sent to Europe, Asia and the Middle East, over the decades, and in the words of White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, “to suggest these forts were somehow inherently racist and their names need to be changed is a complete disrespect to the men and women.”
Unfortunately, President Trump is now revisiting the matter, as if he might be open to renaming them. This developed shortly after the Senate Armed Services Committee approved Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass) amendment to the annual military spending bill — by a voice vote — that would require the Defense Department to change the names of all installations and assets named for Confederate leaders. And incredibly, some GOP Senators, such a John Kennedy of Louisiana, are standing ready to help push this anti-American rename agenda.
As Pat Buchanan, noted author and former consultant to President Nixon, Ford and Reagan, recently observed: “Liberals will fight for the right of Marxist radicals to burn the American flag to show their hatred of it but cannot tolerate working folks flying the battle flag of the Confederacy to show their love of it.”
On June 10th, HBO Max announced it was removing ‘Gone With the Wind’ from its movie library. This 1939 movie, one of the best all around stories one might ever watch on the Big Screen, or one’s 13″ television, is based on a bestselling novel that romanticized the Civil War. HBO has stated it could bring the movie back, after some discussion of its historical context and importance.
In part, the Democratic Party’s goal is to once again hijack the narrative by presenting a one-sided view of American history that is now ascendant, as the nation’s official “truth”, something they are challenged to deliver in reality. They want all Americans to see the South’s secession from the Union as an act of treason based in an ideology of white supremacy.
Far from the revisionist historical idiocy peddled by the anti-American media and their communist ilk in Antifa and Black Lives Matter, the Civil War was the result of irreconcilable differences over states’ rights, economic policies, slavery and a long litany of other complex issues, and the resulting defeat of the Confederacy was a crucial turning point in U.S. history. And even General David Patraeus has succumbed to the same brand of idiocy, accusing General Robert E. Lee of treason, without regard to the fact that it was Lincoln who violated the U.S. Constitution by invading sovereign states who freely joined the Union and had the inalienable right to freely leave the Union; any treason was committed by Lincoln to force the Union upon the Secessionist states, regardless of Lincoln’s noble or ignoble intent.
These ignorant revisionists shouting “racism” fail to understand that in the days of the Civil War, the general view was one’s home state was one’s country. The U.S. Constitution gave governing power to the sovereign states, and anything not specifically granted to the federal government by the Constitution fell under the auspices of the states. All of this changed after Lincoln’s war, and largely independent states became vassals of Washington, D.C.
General Robert E. Lee, a graduate of West Point, spent a lifetime fighting wars for the United States, against the frontier Indians and the Mexicans, as a Union officer. Lee had no plantation, or 200 slaves as falsely asserted by some graduates of the public “fool” system, who simply wish to defame the Good General. And he was so highly regarded that Lincoln first offered him a Union command, when the Civil War appeared to be inevitable; but, Lee was a Virginian and so he refused to lead an army to invade his country, his home, to ensure his fellow Virginians were not force-marched back into the Union they had just voted to leave, as was their right as a free people.
Lee simply fought for Independence, the same as George Washington, who owned slaves his entire life. That shouldn’t disqualify Lee from the company of decent men.
Far too many Americans, including some Republicans, in their rush to jump aboard the Purge America wagon, seem to forget our Declaration of Independence set America’s course and enabled Her to become this exceptional country that has created more liberty for more people worldwide in the entire history of all mankind. The Constitution carried the mechanisms that eventually moved America to free Her black people from slavery and end Jim Crow laws. And, although our nation and culture would fight and endeavor over the centuries to rise to meet its creeds, inherent within our founding document was equality for slaves, the poor, our indigenous Native American Indians, women and the UnBorn Children. Our Founders had a dream that one day all Americans would live free and equal, regardless of race, or creed or the color of one’s skin, a dream that Dr Martin Luther King Jr. would echo on August 28th 1963.
On May 8th 2017, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Fox News: “I am a firm believer in ‘keep your history before you’ … Confederate heroes should be viewed in the context of their time instead of through the prism of modern values.”
But all of this is smoke and mirrors utilized effectively by the Democrats and their evil cronies, their Brown Shirts in the streets. The Declaration of Independence and the fine oration of Dr King do not mean a damn thing to this new breed of American. who haven’t any real answers other than to cry for America’s downfall and hope something better rises from the chaos and the ashes.
America could destroy every Confederate monument and rename all 109 public schools carrying the name of Lee, Davis or some other Confederate icon to the Martin Luther King Jr. or the W.E.B. Du Bois Middle School, and that would still not satisfy the left, especially the Black Caucus and some black and Hispanic communities across America. They would continue this cultural cleansing aimed at white society. Behind their remorseless drive against white culture is an egalitarian extremism rooted in hate and envy.
Constitutional conservative-minded Americans — All Americans who love this country — must stop the recently accelerated movement to erase America’s heritage in its entirety, because it is a tool used by the racists of the regressive Democratic Party and the Black Caucus and their foot-soldiers in Antifa and BLM to gain more power and destroy our constitutional republic. Their campaign, as always, uses “white supremacy” as the excuse to attack the Western and Judeo-Christian principles that built America.
And, as we ask again, where will this all end, most of us already know that it doesn’t end, until the radicals have destroyed us, or the good and decent Americans have stopped them.
In their zeal to create a sanitized fantasy world, where every bad thing to ever happen in America’s history is “Whitey’s” fault, the Democratic Party and their radicals in Antifa and Black Lives Matter and the anarchists and nihilists, in general, are destroying American and black history and eliminating anyone, and anything, they deem “racist” from the public square and the annals of history. The radicals are racing full steam ahead to destroy Western civilization and America’s founding, in order that they may seize the reigns of power and create their hellish vision of an authoritarian socialist regime in America.
It is so greatly distressing for any true American patriot to see Her TRAITORS working doubly hard to destroy Her everyday. And each day, I pray God delivers America a miracle that may avert us from certain disaster.
June 21, 2020
~ The Author ~
Justin O. Smith has lived in Tennessee off and on most of his adult life, and graduated from Middle Tennessee State University in 1980, with a B.S. and a double major in International Relations and Cultural Geography – minors in Military Science and English, for what its worth. His real education started from that point on. Smith is a frequent contributor to the family of Kettle Moraine Publications.