American Outliers: The Destruction of Historical Monuments
- Oct 27, 2017
- 5 min read
Since May 1st, 2017, our country has seen quite possibly the largest scale cleansing of our history that has ever occurred. What first began as the removal of Confederate monuments in the city of New Orleans, under the leadership of mayor Mitch Landrieu, soon became a metaphorical book burning that took place across the entire country. On May 1st, the protests, both for and against the removal, came to a head in a small-scale riot at the site of the Jefferson Davis monument in New Orleans. This brought an even larger protest of the removals on May 7th, 2017, which brought groups like Three Percenters, Oathkeepers, Louisiana Patriot Militia, Battle of Berkeley veterans, and other pro-monument supporters to the city from all over the country. Internet celebrities such as Michael Tokes and Baked Alaska even made their presence known. Groups supporting the removal, such as Take ‘Em Down NOLA, Black Lives Matter, New Black Panthers, and New Orleans ANTIFA all made such violent threats that the New Orleans Police Department asked for Department of Homeland Security to send federal police in to help control the crowds. After the police stood down on an order from the mayor, it was surprising to many to see that the police were doing their assigned jobs.
What has followed in the wake of the New Orleans protest is no less than a desecration of American culture and identity. The first instance of this began in 2015, when a young man opened fire on a church in South Carolina, and used Lee’s Battle Flag of Virginia often in his social media pictures. The “Confederate Flag” (although it was not, in fact, the actual Confederate flag) was then labeled even more as a symbol of racism, and the push to remove any trace of Confederate history went through in full swing.
In the aftermath of the riot that was Charlottesville, communist and far-left affiliated groups began demanding the removal of Confederate statues by any means. In Durham, North Carolina, groups forcefully removed a Confederate statue, an act of vandalism that took place while the Durham Police Department stood by and did nothing. Monuments have also been removed in places like Missouri, Texas, and Florida, and the movement continues to grow in strength, with those in favor of removal believing themselves to be “on the right side of history.”
What does it mean to be “on the right side of history”? How does one qualify that? History is not and has never been linear; rather, it encompasses all of the past actions of mankind, both good and bad. The equivalent of 6 million men died in the Civil War, and more than that were permanently injured or disfigured on both sides. Journals from soldiers at the battlefield in Shiloh recount that one area where a natural spring ran was so saturated with blood—with men clamoring for a drink of water—that the pond smelled metallic and the water was crimson red. To this very day, that area, known as “Bloody Pond” serves as a somber reminder. Photographs from the battlefield of Gettysburg and Antietam show thousands of bodies scattered everywhere, unknown men the casualties of war. The war was a painful reminder of division; brother against brother, household against household. An American War of the Roses that saw the end of one era, and the birth of another. In some ways, the war brought a macabre poeticism to one of the darkest chapters of American history. It was the clash of cultures and ideology. How ignorant are we that we forget our own history as we ignite similar division today? It has been said, “those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.” How prophetic those words are now! It seems we have forgotten that we stand on the once blood-soaked soil that our forefathers fought on. As much as we’d like to ignore the atrocities of war, we cannot. Should we then forget the atrocities of both World Wars? Of Vietnam? Of the Civil Rights movement? Of the Great Depression? Should we then forget the atrocities of the Crusades and the Moors, and the fall of the Roman Empire?
Unfortunately, it seems that we already have.
As much as we want to forget the atrocities of those before us, we cannot. We cannot undo the evil that has been done. We cannot undo slavery when it still exists. We cannot undo war because it is ongoing. We cannot undo the past for the promise of a better future. It is foolish of us to believe that we ever could. The true tragedy is that too many Americans don’t know the truth behind the monuments. In one instance, I asked a man if he knew who Jefferson Davis was, or what he stood for. He could not give me an answer. As a child, I clearly remember reading very, very little on Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee unless I researched it on my own. Americans are not being taught their history in school. Even at the university level, it is rare for most American students to scratch the surface of history unless they focus their degree on it. How then, if we do not teach our children, will they ever know the truth?
It is an egregious failure on the part of our country that we have allowed our children to believe that we as Americans have no unique identity or culture. It is an intentional silencing of the American identity for the purpose of multiculturalism. America has always been a melting pot, a land where people of all races, creeds, and backgrounds can come together and enjoy liberty. Over the last fifty years, we have forgotten that America’s unity is what has propelled us—not our differences. In places like Cudahy, California, Spanish is more widely spoken than English. Mexican flags fly more than American ones. It is a city of largely illegal Mexican immigrants who wanted the privilege of living in America without assimilating to the culture. How many of these immigrants know the history of our country? How many of these men, women, and children are willing to adopt the title of American citizen?
If we forget our roots—the places from whence we came—then we forget who we are as a country. We cannot allow toxic ideologies to distract us from the American experiment. We cannot allow ourselves to become distracted by fleeting ideology. We cannot allow ourselves to forget what has made America the haven for the rest of the world. We cannot allow communism to win. Vladmir Lenin once said, “the goal of Socialism is communism.” Have we really fallen that far?
When the Bolsheviks took power, the first thing they did was get rid of the history before their reign. The Khmer Rouge did the same thing in Cambodia, and ISIS has systematically destroyed millennia-old artifacts and writings, all in the name of an ideology. Soon, if we allow this to continue to occur, we will have no identity. We will have no culture. We will be yet another country overrun with communism, illegal immigrants, and our way of life as we know it will collapse.
The time has come where we must preserve our past. As Orwell once said, “he who controls the past controls the future.” He also wrote, “the most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of history.” Let us not destroy ourselves by obliterating our understanding of our past. The second we forget is the second that we cease to be America.
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