RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectator.us/great-self-hate-statues-roosevelt/

Only a society that sees a need for ‘self-esteem’ counseling could be so susceptible to such destructive illusions.

A group of children recently gathered one morning near the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in Riverside Park. The adults in charge handed out brightly colored pieces of chalk and soon the sidewalk and plaza were cheerfully adorned with mottos such as Black Lives Matter, Black Trans Lives Matter, Tell Me Why the Police Need Tanks, Let Justice Roll Down, and — my favorite — Burn It Down.  Burn down the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument? No need. New York City has had it roped off for years as it crumbles away.  

The 96-foot monument was in its time a tribute to the New York soldiers and sailors who fought for the Union during the Civil War. The cornerstone was laid in 1899 by Gov. Theodore Roosevelt, two years before he was sworn in as President. Poor Teddy. Once the very embodiment of American confidence and aspiration, he was just voted off the island (Manhattan in this case) by the board of trustees the American Museum of Natural History. A statue of Roosevelt, astride a horse and ‘flanked by a Native American man and an African man’, as the New York Times describes it, stands on a plinth in front of the museum. The museum’s board was offering preemptive surrender to the mob that has graduated from burning and looting to toppling statues and defacing monuments. Teddy Roosevelt, the closest America has ever come to genuine colonialist in the White House, was too tempting a target.  

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/the-link-between-george-orwell-george-floyd-and-the-jews-opinion-632825

Anybody who believes that the goal of the protesters has been to raise consciousness about the unfair treatment of blacks is missing the point and the bigger picture.

George Orwell’s iconic book 1984 depicts a dystopian post-revolutionary world in which an all-powerful “Party” rules a totalitarian universe through the use of “Thought Police.”

In Part Two of the prophetic novel, the protagonist of the story, Winston Smith, tries to impress upon Julia, the woman with whom he is having a dangerous and forbidden love affair, why it is so impossible to rebel against mind control. “Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished?” he asks rhetorically, during one their trysts, while recounting tales of his time as a forger of records. “If it survives anywhere, it’s in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there.”

He goes on, “Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

These words – published in Britain in 1949, four years after the end of World War II – are particularly chilling today, in light of the current upheaval in the US.

THE OSTENSIBLE catalyst for the explosion of what could be called the “cancel-culture revolution” was the May 25 killing of African-American George Floyd by a sadistic Minneapolis police officer. The ground was already fertile for the mayhem that ensued, however.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/06/white-self-hatred-and-the-cancel-culture/

” Where did it come from, this eruption of rioting and demands that statues and history be torn down? Well, much as the Black Lives Matter crowd might seem of recent origin, it is the Sixties where it all began.”

Violent, uncontrolled demonstrations, vicious attacks on the police, bitter condemnations of ‘white privilege’, the comprehensive ‘cancellation’ and fabrication of history, and the destruction and vandalization of historical monuments under the umbrella of the Black Lives Matter campaign have become central features of the current radical assaults on Western societies.

The massive involvement of semi-hysterical young white people is one of the most striking features of this ‘cultural revolution’. Anxious to be associated with black protesters in the vanguard of destruction and chaos, they run back and forth in their designer black ‘Ninja’ outfits, elegantly masked, shrieking abuse and baiting police, throwing stones and Molotov cocktails, attacking bystanders, inanely kicking and punching toppled statues as they push them into drains, and smashing shopfront windows to loot items their parents would buy them without a second thought. And then, on social media they attack viciously anyone who dares to disagree with them or question how their over-hyped involvement helps the campaign for racial justice.

In seeking to understand this frenzied phenomenon of ostentatious self-abnegation it is necessary to discuss its ideological and activist origins in the far-left terrorist groups of the Sixties. This venture into history might serve to forewarn where this might all be heading.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/06/black-slaves-matter/

“There is no money nor kudos in trying to end the Muslim slave trade, but the likes of Black Lives Matter most definitely recognise the rewards to be tapped in the bottomless reservoir of Western guilt. Meanwhile, black slaves are chained, abused and castrated as the same activists avert their gaze”

The criteria that broadcasters and newspapers used to sort what was newsworthy from what was not always eluded me. It seemed that they regularly ignored or failed properly to foreground what was self-evidently startling or essential. They also appeared to highlight reports that were less shocking but also less important examples of the items they hid or downplayed. Long after I left the British Council, I would amuse myself by checking the internet or the inside of the papers I bought for the sort of “suppressed” stories that might more aptly have graced the front page.

On January 17, 2015, I stumbled on an article hidden deep in the Weekend edition of Le Monde so extraordinary that I cut it out. It was entitled, “En Mauritanie, prison ferme pour trois militants anti-esclavagisme” [“In Mauritania, imprisonment for three anti-slavery activists”].

Revealing that ‘Mauritanian justice’ had just sentenced the activists to two years in jail for making ‘racist propaganda’, Charlotte Bozonnet, the author of the piece, said that the punishment was:

A conviction that highlights the taboo subject of slavery, a practice officially outlawed since 1981, but still extremely widespread in Mauritanian society. The three accused are Biram Ould Abeid, Director of the Initiative for the Resurrection of the Abolitionist Movement, an anti-slavery NGO, Brahim Ould Bilal Ramdane, one of his deputies, and Djilby Sow, president of an association for civic and cultural rights.

Arraigned before a tribunal in Rosso in the south of the country, they had been arrested in November 2014 … while they were leading a ground campaign to denounce the practice of slavery  … “Biram” is a big name in the struggle against slavery in Mauritania, himself from a family of Haratines — the caste of slaves and the descendants of slaves’.

The discussion about the removal of Confederate statues was a valid one, but that didn’t last long before the mob started going after all statues like predators after wounded prey.

Matt wrote a post yesterday detailing just how idiotic the anti-statue crowd has become:

There’s a memorial statue Lincoln Park in Washington D.C. that depicts President Abraham Lincoln holding a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing a slave. The Emancipation Memorial, also called Freedman’s Memorial, apparently offends Black Lives Matter protestors, who, on Tuesday, vowed to topple it down.

That’s right, Lincoln is getting canceled for freeing the slaves by the people who want racial healing or something.

Many have noted that the stupidity displayed by these young people shows how badly our public schools have failed them. In a column I wrote last week I made the opposite point: this is the triumph of our public education system because whitewashing American history to turn the younger generations into an easily controlled mob has been the point of it all for decades.

During our weekly VIP Gold live chat on Wednesday my colleagues Stephen Green and Bryan Preston both agreed that the statue nonsense is an expression of impotent rage on the part of the woke mob. Ever the curmudgeon, I just look at it as wanton destruction of public property and think all involved should get to cool off for a night or two in their local city or county jail.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/sowing-sixties-winds-reaping-todays-whirlwind-bruce-thornton/

From one perspective, the surreal absurdity of the current protests, vandalism, and riots is not even close to the disruption and mayhem of the political violence in the Sixties and Seventies. We have not yet seen the kidnappings, murders of judges, and scores of bombings that roiled that era. In 1967 alone there were 159 riots, and in the Seventies 14 people were killed and 600 wounded by politically motivated bombings.

But what’s going on today is more dangerous, for the ideologies driving the disorder reflect just how successful the leftist “long march through the institutions” has been at corrupting American education and culture over the last half a century. As a result, ideas and behaviors that by consensus were out of bounds then, have now been normalized and abetted by civic leaders and politicians, as well as popular culture, schools, and even sports.

I spent the Seventies in college and graduate school, so I had a front-row seat for the “long march.” In the early years there were, of course, radical professors who opposed the war in Vietnam and hated free-market capitalism. They preached abandoning the bourgeoisie virtues like self-restraint of desires and appetites, especially of sex. Those virtues were redefined as tools of political oppression. As cultural Marxist Herbert Marcuse put it, “The civilized morality is reversed by harmonizing instinctual freedom and order: liberated from the tyranny of repressive reason, the instincts tend toward free and lasting existential relations––they generate a new reality principle.”

Such opinions were a minority among an otherwise liberal faculty. But as the decade progressed, they steadily became more mainstream. One reason is that a consumer-driven economy had long found sex to be a great marketing tool, and impulsive behavior to be good for business. And so this corrosive politicizing of promiscuity was promoted by many big businesses.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/07/06/i-accuse/#slide-1

Behind indiscriminate claims of racism there is a dangerous propaganda strategy

Cuba’s Communists have long railed against the U.S. embargo. Yet the “blockade,” as they cleverly call it, is the crown jewel of their propaganda strategy — the excuse for all their failures, the justification for every new abuse. In America, progressives have now embraced a similar strategy. The good intentions that originally led them to abandon the Democratic Party’s racist legacy are now obscured by rapid-fire accusations of “racism” targeting anyone who disagrees with them about anything.  

Witness how progressives have manipulated the death of George Floyd. They have blamed President Trump for his killing (which happened in a city controlled at every level by Democrats), have attempted to justify rampant rioting and assaults on police, and are now seeking to defund whole police forces. Not a word about how they and their policies have contributed to the conditions they are protesting. “Black Lives Matter” to them, but not to the point of admitting a mistake of their own. And where anarchy ensues, they will doubtless use that as an excuse to further expand their power. 

One shudders to think what more they might want. The head of the New York City Council’s health committee, Mark Levine, recently declared that any spike in COVID-19 infections arising from the protests is really the fault of “racism.” Over 1,000 health experts signed an open letter declaring that protests against racism “must be supported,” despite the risk of a new spike in COVID-19 infections. They made space to warn that protests for other reasons — particularly protests against their preferred policies — should still be suppressed. 

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/06/24/defund_the_thought_police__143523.html

Due process is not the strong suit of mobs. Neither is nuance, open discussion, or disagreement. These inherent defects should be painfully obvious as mobs pull down statues, seize sections of cities, and demand the public approach them on bended knee, literally. Anyone who dares push back, perhaps with a mild tweet saying “All lives matter,” faces immediate censure. If the mob is successful, any offenders will lose their jobs. Feckless employers are all too eager to appease the mob and hope it turns on another target.

In this perilous environment, the most frenzied voices do more than dominate the public square. They monopolize it by silencing dissent. They have received full-throated support from the tech giants that control electronic discussion and the media giants determined to shape the narrative rather than report the news. Twitter and NBC are the poster children for this assault on free and open discussion. Their suppression in the name of “social justice” betrays the idea, best articulated in John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty,” that competing, divergent views lead to greater understanding and better decisions.

The idea of an open forum, so basic to democracies, already lies a-moldering in the grave of academia, at least in the humanities and social sciences. Imagine applying for a job in Gender Studies and saying you oppose abortions after, say, Week 38. The term for such a person is “unemployed.” Imagine merely calling for a discussion on the pros and cons of affirmative action, taking the negative side, and hoping to win tenure in political science, sociology, anthropology, or history. Bad career move. There is more robust political debate at the Academy Awards.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/protests-urban-chaos-americans-will-seek-to-avoid-big-cities/

 I n Aesop’s Fables and Horace’s Satires a common classical allegory is variously retold about the country mouse and his sophisticated urban cousin.

The city-slicker mouse first visits his rustic cousin’s simple rural hole and is quickly bored and unimpressed by both the calm and the simple fare.

When the roles are soon reversed, the country cousin at first is delighted by big-city mouse’s sumptuous urban food scraps and the majestic halls where they may scuttle about. But as the crafty clawed house cat and sharp-toothed guard dogs threaten both, and the noise and bustle mount, the stressed-out country mouse scampers home — at last realizing that his unappreciated quiet and safe abode trump action and sophistication every time.

These Greek and Roman fables reflect the classical world’s paradox of not particularly enjoying life in the fetid, plague-ridden, and dangerous big cities of Athens, Rome, and Alexandria that nevertheless gave the world Socrates, Virgil, and magnificent libraries. As towns grew into metropolises, their sheen as heady places for art, literature, and cultural change began to fade. In response, the once commonplace farm and distant town were increasingly romanticized, especially in such genres as pastoralism and bucolic poetry. The escape to the country estate was the ideal of the Roman senator, the same way that the “ranch” sometimes becomes the getaway from the Washington swamp for American presidents.

Originally, city man was “astute” (asteios/astu: town)  and country man a rustic agroikos or bumpkin (argoikos/agros: farm). But it was not such a simple dichotomy, as even today “urbane” is not always an unqualified compliment, and “rustic” is sometimes a grudging commendation of authenticity.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/22/the-con-of-the-surrender-cons/

The column, written in the heated aftermath of George Floyd’s killing, sounded like a typical anti-American screed published in the New York Times or posted on MSNBC.

“Racism in America is a fatal wound,” the author lamented. “Every time another incident occurs we put a Band-Aid on it, but the Band-Aid keeps falling off. Band-Aids are not enough to ever stitch this country back together.”

She went on: “Nothing can bring George Floyd back to life. But if his horrific and needless death proves to be a turning point to make Americans finally end the ugly racism that stains our nation’s history and afflicts us like a cancer of the soul, he will leave behind a legacy we sorely need.”

That inflammatory, crude condemnation of America—not to mention the glorification of Floyd, a man with a criminal record who was doped up on drugs and committing another crime when the fatal encounter occurred—was made by Kay Coles James, president of the Heritage Foundation. James, the first woman and first African American to head the conservative think tank, like so many on the performative Right, jumped on the Left’s latest anti-America crusade while betraying the constituency her organization purports to represent.

Embracing the Left’s Language

It is a reflex, unfortunately, that’s commonplace on the establishment Right, an infuriating capitulation to our country’s most insidious foes. The Left intends to destroy the nation and use race as the carpet-bomb—and that approach is working even as blacks continue to make solid economic, occupational, and educational gains.

So, what was James’s point? There is no evidence Floyd’s death had anything to do with race. One incident, or even a random handful, hardly proves her diagnosis that racism is a “fatal wound” to America. The unfolding mayhem and chaos that followed Floyd’s death would have been a perfect opportunity for James to explain why conservatives, not radicals on the Left, have better solutions to improve the lives of all minorities. James, after all, has a triumphant personal story of her own; her success is a testament to our country’s unparalleled progress on matters of race and equality.