Over the last six weeks, America has been rocked to its cultural foundations by a wave of attacks on monuments and memorials to persons and events traditionally held to be historically significant. What began as an assault on statuary dedicated to the memory of former Confederate generals has evolved into an all-out war on the national narrative.
No one or thing is safe. Statues of George Washington. Abraham Lincoln and slave-born abolitionist Frederick Douglass have all been recently vandalized as have those dedicated to the memory of musicians Stevie Ray Vaughn and Jimi Hendrix.
Little of this makes sense. The protests that began in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death have evolved into riots, looting, and general mayhem stoked by anarchists and progressives who not only want to destroy Donald Trump but everything they believe he and his presidency represent.
They have a distorted view of history – as their defacing and destruction of statues of Washington, Lincoln, and others who led crusades on behalf of freedom and equality prove. Whatever they learned in school, it had little to do with the hard decisions and moral choices we may all at some point be called upon to make in life.
Would it have been better if the founders, because they could not agree to end slavery had abandoned America’s bid for independence? Or if only those that would abolish slavery had proceeded, leaving them to fight both the British crown and the colonies that remained tied to the King? Or, as most all of us have long believed, the struggle for the independence and equality of all men and women began with this effort of some to secure liberty for themselves and those like them? And for that, we owe them our gratitude and a certain degree of reverence?
Things have progressed well beyond the sensible out to the absurd. Reason no longer applies. The U.S. and Canadian press Tuesday reported that a memorial to victims of Communism under construction in Ottawa had been vandalized. According to The Post Millennial, the fence surrounding the site in the Canadian capital city was defaced by the phrase “Communism will win” in spray-painted in yellow alongside three depictions of the Communist hammer & sickle.
The American memorial to the Victims of Communism, which was completed more than a decade ago and sits at the base of Capitol Hill was similarly defaced with graffiti related directly to the Black Lives Matter movement in early June.
If this is meant to be some sort of cry for social justice, it is wrongly directed. Adolf Hitler, typically held up as the ultimate state-sponsor of evil in the 20th-century evil if not all time, led a Holocaust in which somewhere between 11 and 13 million people were killed according to most estimates. The leaders of the countries and rebel bands that formed the international Communist bloc – Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Che, and others all the way up to Kim Jong Un, who is still with us today – are responsible for the deaths of at least 10 times as many people.
Communism is neither just not equitable. American schools don’t do a good job teaching that if they teach it at all– which may be while those responsible in recent weeks for so much destruction in Seattle have left the Lenin statue there unmolested. They and those who’ve joined with them in cities like Richmond, Atlanta, Rochester, N.Y., and Washington, D.C., aren’t interested in rewriting American history. They want to erase it so they can replace it with a narrative of their own that leads to a justification of the demands they have today. History, before it can be rewritten, must be destroyed. The Confederate statues were just the beginning, low-hanging fruit, easy to get before the progressives could start reaching for objectives much higher on the tree.