September 10, 2017
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
The Campaign to Take Down Monuments is Part of a Marxist
Campaign to Totally Transform the Nation
===============================================
Friends,
This
morning I revisit the current national frenzy to remove monuments and other
symbols which offend certain loud pressure groups in our society, and what that
effort represents.
Of
course, the present feverish campaign began in earnest back in 2015, after the
murder of several black parishioners in a church in Charleston, South Carolina.
But the movement to take down and ban certain symbols, monuments and flags that
are considered politically and ideologically incorrect, “racist,” or examples
of “white supremacy,” dates back much longer. Its real origins go back to the
1960s and early 1970s, and the triumph of a form of what has been called
“cultural Marxism” in our universities and colleges, and a resultant and
progressive transformation of views of American history in our popular culture.
Recall
that even into the late 1950s and certainly up until the “Civil War Centennial”
(1960-1965) not only in our popular culture, but in most of the history taught
in our schools and colleges, the South, and in particular, the Confederacy, were
viewed with some respect, if not sympathy. If slavery was condemned—and not
just in the Northern states, but also by the South—still, in particular, the
veterans of the tragic Confederate military odyssey, were portrayed by
Hollywood in such films as “The Raid” (Van Heflin), “Rocky Mountain” (Errol
Flynn) or “Jesse James” (Henry Fonda, Randolph Scott), as noble and heroic figures
doing their duty. And who can forget such popular television programs as “The
Rebel” (1959-1961, with Nick Adams) or “The Gray Ghost (1957-1958, with Tod
Andrews) with their romantic portrayals of those soldiers fighting for the
“lost cause”?
And
Southern culture and society, itself, was seen with considerably more nuance
and appreciation than today’s rigid and universal damnation. Again, Hollywood
produced such superb cinematic visions as John Ford’s “The Sun Shines Bright”
and Disney’s “Song of the South,” and countless others.
In
the academy, classic histories by Avery Craven, William Dunning, Charles W.
Ramsdell, Charles Sydnor, Francis Butler Simkins, and others were prominently
used and taught in colleges. And the monumental ten-volume, “A History of the
South” (published by the LSU Press) seemed to offer the final word on
discussions of the Southern past. Yet, by the mid-1960s newer
historians—Kenneth Stampp, Stanley Elkins, and others, influenced by a more
Leftist ideology and more concentrated on the role of race—soon dominated the
writing of Southern and American history. It was their students and succeeding
generations of historians who made no excuse for their blatant Marxism, whose
views eventually permeated not only the academia, but also our popular and
political culture.
The
dominant narrative for these ideological academics was that “race” and “racism”
had been and continued to be the central issues that affected, influenced, and
determined the rest of American history. And, thus, the logic went, since the
Old South, most prominently the Confederacy, defended slavery and was then, by
definition, “racist,” the symbols and monuments that memorialized it in any
positive way represented that “racism”
and a “racist” past that needed not only to be re-interpreted, but “cleansed.”
But
the assault on the Confederate past and on its visible artefacts and reminders,
its flags, its monuments, it symbols, is, as we clearly now see, only the tip
of the iceberg. For those who wish to remove our monuments honoring General Lee
or Jefferson Davis, have made it manifest that Lee, Jackson, and Beauregard are
only the first step in a much larger and all-consuming campaign to thoroughly
“purify” and radically transform American society.
A
few weeks ago one small frenzied group in Durham, North Carolina, the Workers’
World Party, organized a violent demonstration and the destruction of the
Confederate veterans’ monument in that university city. Like other such
groups—the “antifa” organizations, Black Lives Matter, and similar
organizations—Workers’ World supporters call for: the abolition of capitalism, disarming of the
police and ICE agents, the fight for Marxist revolution, and the defense of
“Black Lives Matter.” All symbols and reminders of “white supremacy” and of
“racism” must be eradicated and destroyed. And those symbols are not limited to
the Southern Confederacy, but encompass nearly all of this country’s Founders,
most of its 19th century presidents and political leaders, its
earliest discoverers and colonizers, and, in fact, its basic historic culture.
What
is remarkable is the extent to which such avowedly extremist and Communist
organizations now seem to dictate and shape the larger discussion and debate
over monuments and symbols. It is as if the Democratic Party, the near entirety
of the media, and vast swathes of the GOP frantically accept the narrative of “racism”
as the central and dominant issue in American history, from which all else, all
events, all history, flow. And, as such, this domination represents the general
triumph of cultural Marxism in establishing both the standard terms of acceptable
debate and the required outlook, against which no dissent is permitted.
Given
this situation, it is extremely difficult for me to have any sympathy whatsoever
for WRAL-TV’s main newscaster, David Crabtree, in Raleigh, North Carolina, who
continues ad nauseum to blubber about
the “hurt” and the “hatred” that monuments to Lee or to the “Women of the
Confederacy” (on the North Carolina State Capitol grounds) inflict on poor black
youth living in the Tar Heel State’s capital city in 2017. Like other
“religiously-oriented” personages who have accepted the cultural Marxist
narrative, Crabtree clothes his views in a language of supposed Christian love
and charity, and a desire for “social justice.” But in fact, he has swallowed
whole hog the Marxist vision of society and de
facto turned his back on historic, traditional Christian belief and on our
historical and cultural legacy. He has become, perhaps unwittingly, one of
those “public dogs” wagged by the revolutionary Marxist “tail,” who uses his
public persona and widely-heard voice to advance its longer range program of
destruction, deformation, and complete transformation of what is left of the
American nation.
Such
pawns of the Revolution are useful idiots, but useful only to a certain point,
after which they are usually discarded as having fulfilled their purposes, but
not permitted to “cross over Jordan into the Promised Land.” Like the Mensheviks and Social Democrats in
Russia in 1918, they will be eliminated or liquidated after the Revolution
moves on to it next stage.
Crabtree
and others like him may fret about the “pain” that a statue to Lee may give,
but his logic leads ineluctably to much more than just the purging of
Confederate images: it leads to the denuding of American history and the end of
anything resembling the America created 241 years ago—it leads to the fearsome silencing
of those who oppose that transformation—and it may well lead to the scaffold,
as all such fanatical revolutions usually end in pools of blood.
Frankly,
those facilitators of revolution always seem to get finally what they deserve—a
bullet to the back of the head, as they wonder, simple-mindedly and
incredulously, why their “social justice” concerns weren’t implemented by their
one-time allies amongst the hard core extremists.
For
the rest of us it is to do our best to defend our patrimony, to
demonstrate—like the articles of the Nicene Creed where denying one precept undermines and implicitly
denies the others—that to destroy
Confederate symbols opens the door wide to the destruction of all our symbols
and the radical Marxist redefinition of the American nation, itself.
It
appears an almost insuperable task, but it is our duty before the shadow of our
ancestors and before the verdict of history.
No comments:
Post a Comment