We Remove the Civil War Monuments to Bigotry, While the Left’s Bigotry Flourishes (Guest Post)

 
Like it or not, Civil War monuments, like the Civil War itself, represent an eternal human struggle: How much of our soul, how much of our free thinking, do we give to the monolith of our society? The Left is history’s ultimate monolith and greedily wants our obedience and refusal to question. And that’s fine, so long as society is “correct”. But what happens when it isn’t? What happens when the monolith controls so much of the Means of Information and Education that the enlightened individual can no longer raise the alarm?

When the hard Left rewrites our history it is always to slant in their favor this question of social-individual balance.

The Civil War is the perfect opportunity to teach how different forms of bigotry come and go, but that bigotry itself is what is harmful for the way it closes an open mind. And today, thanks to the sexy new-age bigotry of the hard Left, we might be less perfect people than we think.

The hard Left intends to make a caricature of the Civil War (and all of American history) by failing to teach this central piece of the American experience; the balance of power between government and the individual’s free thought. Where is the line? The question will always be asked. And nowhere on earth was the line pushed so far for the individual as in America, as the Civil War itself proves. Until the Left got busy pushing it back down our throats with Political Correctness. The center piece of the Left’s success has been to caricaturize the Civil War and American history to reduce them to black-white issues, rather than portraying them for what they are, a complex, fascinating tapestry on the individual vs. the monolith, even when the individual is sometimes wrong.

Millions of people in the Civil War South, and the North, dismissed by the Left as “racists”, chose to support the South and were not racists, and believed slavery would cure itself without a shot being fired, as it had with the wash of peoples’ own good conscience, in Maine, New York, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Vermont, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois. The last nation to give up black slavery was Brazil in 1881.

America is the only country where the slave holders fought amongst themselves to free their slaves. The constant beat up of America by the Left acts like the good never overcame the bad. It seems a well calculated ruse to keep our eyes off their history, and their bigotry. How is supremacy and bigotry any less destructive when Democrats wallow in it today? Because their’s is “true”? Listen to the Left argue why only THEY should be in charge of everything – they’re simply better people than us lowly Negroes, and no facts can console them otherwise.

I think we have learned NOTHING from our slavery and supremacy past, and the hard Left is the enduring Exhibit A.

The complexity of the Civil War should not be reduced. Robert E. Lee was not comfortable with slavery. He believed slavery would evolve away. Stonewall Jackson openly broke Virginia law by teaching slaves to read. Should we guard Stonewall’s statues?

Mitch Landrieu asks helplessly in his speech on removing the monuments what should be said to the little black girl to explain the Civil War statuary:

The invaluable lesson of the war is the cost of bigotry and how sometimes the monolith is right. But tomorrow, who can be sure? Before the days of the hard Left, Democrats and Republicans respected one another. Each side was loyal enough to the Constitution that they let even fools freely have their say, confident that society at large would see the fool for what they were, and no lesson taught better than this lesson of openness and patience. But the Left shows no such confidence, for some reason. Energized by its supremacy, it takes the power of force and war to stifle all fools so viciously that I wonder who is the fool and who isn’t, any more. Supremacy and bigotry, whether racial or Democrat Party, are only harmful because they risk your assessment of reality. The perfect irony is that the Left, history’s most grievous enslavers and fans of genocide (115M dead since 1917), habitually rewrites history because our most invaluable lesson, the miracle of individual liberty, the miracle of letting individuals question any monolith, even that of the hard Left, bobs to the surface like an apple so long as we teach that history, including the Civil War.

Supremacy should be challenged in all shades, like when the Left hurries our kids to trample civil liberties in a hot flush to “cure” “incurable” maladies like homophobia, racism, sexism and global warming.

How much can the individual challenge the monolith? As a libertarian-Republican living in DC, I see the Left’s intolerance growing, in spite of its history and claims. I see kids being taught less history in its schools. Is this the plan?

Mitch Landrieu, acting as a tool for the rising specter of the hard Left in America, should not take American history and rewrite it, oversimplify it, hide it, fail to teach it, or score cheap points against it to grow a new generation of ideological bigots instead of racial bigots, bedazzled by the fun of new age hate and the power to cut off the push back of their fellow citizens. It is a sin against us all and what we have accomplished. Black, white or otherwise.

History and human invention are so complex that we never know when this right to push back will come in handy. Just because some of us have used it unwisely is no cause to let the Left remove it by stealth.

It is America, the Civil War, and the world, in microcosm.