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Home Front: Culture Wars
Buchanan: If We Erase Our History, Who Are We?
2017-08-15
[Townhall] When the Dodge Charger of 20-year-old Nazi sympathizer James Alex Fields Jr., plunged into that crowd of protesters Saturday, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer, Fields put Charlottesville on the map of modernity alongside Ferguson.

Before Fields ran down the protesters, and then backed up, running down more, what was happening seemed but a bloody brawl between extremists on both sides of the issue of whether Robert E. Lee's statue should be removed from Emancipation Park, formerly Lee Park.

With Heyer's death, the brawl was elevated to a moral issue. And President Donald Trump's initial failure to denounce the neo-Nazi and Klan presence was declared a moral failure.

How did we get here, and where are we going?

In June of 2015, 21-year-old Dylann Roof gunned down nine Christians at an evening Bible study in Charleston's Emanuel AME Church. A review of Roof's selfies and website showed him posing with the Confederate battle flag.

Gov. Nikki Haley, five years in office, instantly pivoted and called for removal of the battle flag from the Confederate war memorial on the State House grounds, as a "deeply offensive symbol of a brutally offensive past."

This ignited a national clamor to purge all statues that lionize Confederate soldiers and statesmen.

In Maryland, demands have come for removing statues and busts of Chief Justice Roger Taney, the author of the Dred Scott decision. Statues of Gen. "Stonewall" Jackson, President Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee have been pulled down in New Orleans.
Posted by:Besoeker

#10  Robert E. Lee would be mightily offended, to see what sort of rabble imagine they are defending his honour, back here on Earth. He would think of them, and the other trash attacking them, in much the same way. He would look over the New South, and much prefer the old one. But he has better things to do now, and incontestable reasons to look away, look away.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru   2017-08-15 15:26  

#9  In a picture of a group tearing down a stature of American history were hispanics. People from Central America.
Posted by: Threatch Jeamp8135   2017-08-15 15:26  

#8  Little different than ISIS blowing temples in iconic protest.
Posted by: Skidmark   2017-08-15 15:10  

#7  Buchanan may not be into erasing History, but he does seem to like re-defining it a lot.
Posted by: Pappy   2017-08-15 14:50  

#6  It's democrats removing statues that democrats put up. They own all of this - they are masters and commanders of all of this bullshit.
Posted by: newc   2017-08-15 11:46  

#5  Got to remember, the globalists are trying to destroy national identity. Thus the destruction of history as a common shared experience. In doing so they miss the warning that those 'evil' statutes represent, a form of tribalism. Those southerners were manipulated by their leadership to die to preserve their interests by exploiting the tribal identification which in 1860 was the state not the nation. They fought with their tribe be they Virginia, Georgia, Texas et al. They miss the warning of the break up of their Soviet Union along lines of long established tribes, Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine, et al. Their own practice of exploiting race, gender et al is just another form of tribalism. What they can't grasp that in their own efforts they are in the process of creating an even bigger tribe which they do not and can not control. When they erase their history, they remove the anchoring of those inherit aspects of Western Civ which includes tolerance and mercy that are so lacking in the history of other cultures. They will inherit the consequence.
Posted by: Procopius2k   2017-08-15 06:54  

#4  We need to remember our history. All of it. The good and the bad. The noble and the dark side of our past as a nation. We haven't allways lived the ideals our founders espoused in the Declaration and Constitution. One of the problems with those who would impose their view of morality or social justice today on the past is they are all too often willing to find fault in all the actions of former generations. I can admire the courage displayed by the average Southern soldier during the American Civil War. Just as I can admire the courage of the men in the Irish or Iron Brigades. But I can also understand what the root cause of the ACW was. And how it still affects our lives today. And that cause was slavery. I can also understand how some elements in society both the North and South benifited keeping other human beings in bondage. And why some saw it as morally repungnent. It was the radicals on both sides that touched off actual conflict. Starting in Kansas and leading to prehaps the most divisive presidential election on American history. That of 1860. The question today is do we let the radicals on both sides drag us down the path again.
Posted by: Cheaderhead   2017-08-15 06:12  

#3  That's the Idea
Posted by: g(r)omgoru   2017-08-15 03:35  

#2  Slight correction - we're not erasing our history, lefties are.
Posted by: Raj   2017-08-15 02:53  

#1  I guess we need more statues of war criminal William T. Sherman laying waste through the U.S. state of Georgia. (We won't mention the Plains Indians.)
Posted by: DooDahMan   2017-08-15 02:53  

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