PrintWashington, DC wants to 'memory hole' American history
One of the things that totalitarians do is erase history to ensure that there are no historic facts that might conflict with their present policies or utopian plans for the future. That ideology lives on in Washington, D.C., where its leftist mayor, Muriel Bowser, convened a committee to comb through D.C. for signs of racism.
The committee has now recommended that Washington, D.C. erase every name from the city associated with its past. President Trump, with remarkable prescience, warned that this would happen. Americans need to rise and stop this totalitarian impulse immediately.
When most people remember the Charlottesville riots of August 2017, they think one of two things. If they're either leftists or senile Joe Biden, they believe that Donald Trump praised white supremacists. If they're informed, intelligent people, they know that this is a hoax and that Trump specifically said he "condemned totally" neo-Nazis and white nationalists. (Fortunately, most Americans have learned that the left is lying.)
At the same time, Trump had some important words about the leftist impulse to delete history:
Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. So this week it's Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You really have to ask yourself, where does it stop?
America's leftists immediately mocked Trump over his concerns. John Oliver represents that mindset:
"I'll tell you where it stops," Oliver replied during an episode of his weekly show. "Somewhere! Any time someone asks, where does it stop, the answer's always ... somewhere. You might let your kid have Twizzlers, but not inject black tar heroin. You don't just go, 'Well, after the Twizzlers, where does it stop?'"
Oliver's nastiness notwithstanding, leftists always give in to their inner totalitarians. In the Soviet Union, following the Great Purge that saw Stalin execute as many as 750,000 people who threatened his power, Stalin followed up by erasing all records of those people. The most famous photograph is the one showing Stalin with Nikolai Yezhov, whose image Stalin's apparatchiks erased after his execution:
In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he wrote after seeing communism at work, his protagonist, Winston Smith, worked in the "Ministry of Truth." His job was to place in the "memory holes" (which led to incinerators) all documents that contradicted Big Brother's present political and social positions.
In keeping with this mindset, Mayor Bowser formed a committee to determine what institutions in the city should be renamed, given informational placards, or removed entirely to erase references to any historic person who was associated with slaves or discrimination, no matter how unrelated that association was to the reason for the person's fame. The committee came up with a doozy of a list:
The committee said in its report that it considered whether the honorees owned enslaved people or supported the institution of slavery, whether they created laws and policies that disadvantaged women and minorities, whether they belonged to "any supremacist organization," and whether they discriminated against marginalized groups in a way that would violate D.C. law.
Those who violated delicate 21st-century sensibilities included Andrew Jackson, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Woodrow Wilson, John Tyler, Alexander Graham Bell, and even Benjamin Franklin.
If you're wondering, Bell supported eugenics because he thought white people should have more children. He disapproved of doing anything to stop other races from having children. Franklin thought it was a mistake to introduce African slaves, whom he referred to as "blacks and tawnys," arguing that it was enough to have "the lovely white and red." Knowing Franklin, this was an abolitionist argument, not a racial one.
I can see the future now. We can rename the Washington Monument the Obama Tower. Or the Jefferson Memorial, after the statue is removed, can honor Al Sharpton for his contributions (ahem) to racial harmony.
Because leftists always live in an imperfect present, based upon an evil past, while looking to a glorious future, they lack any wisdom or perception. For those who lived in the 18th and early 19th centuries, abolition was a new and slowly growing concept grounded in Christian doctrine (something else leftists hate). Slavery was the norm and had been since the dawn of mankind. These men were bounded by the values of the times.
The only person on that list who ought to have known better because norms had changed was Woodrow Wilson, a progressive Democrat. Wilson was the president who took an integrated federal workforce, one in which blacks could rise in status, and deliberately segregated it, reducing blacks to solely menial tasks.
Fortunately, Donald Trump is still in the White House, and his administration pushed back hard against this revisionist madness: "President Donald J. Trump believes these places should be preserved, not torn down; respected, not hated; and passed on for generations to come."
Bowser is backing down for now. But the left never stops. It continually pushes, forcing incremental change until it's won its entire point. Or as the saying goes, give them an inch, and they'll take a mile.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. That's never more correct than when gathering the energy to fight against every leftist initiative, no matter how small or crazy.
Image: The Washington Monument at Sunset by Adampdx09, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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