The same war, a different battle

National Statuary Hall

“Sausage fest”? What does that mean, anyway?

Too many men?

Too many euro-whites?

Too many white supremacists?

Oh, you mean too many Americans!

Truth to tell, none of the founding generation would qualify as politically correct.

Nor would many of our leaders or other politically, historically, or culturally significant people for a very long time after that.

Do you want a hall of historically important Americans all the way back to the founding and maybe even to colonial times?

Or do you want a hall of the most important Americans the most orthodox and correct – politically and morally and religiously correct – of today's liberals would approve of?

Silly question, eh?

We know what they want.

One has to realize that in this whole matter of public monuments, public memory, and the public version of history there is no clear line between remembering and revering, between recalling and celebrating.

Or in other cases between recalling and blaming, recalling and condemning.

And all this revering and condemning is far from being directed merely at what was done.

At least equally importantly it is directed at who did it, or is alleged to have done it.

And more importantly still, it is directed at us, their progeny and remoter descendants and political,  social, cultural, and economic heirs.

Even within the limits of truth, what we see, what we recall, what is recalled to our attention is always only part of the truth, the part someone - and in these public cases certainly someone not our individual and powerless selves - has selected for us.

And that is why we are witnessing these conflicts.

The portions or aspects of the past selected for our admiration and celebration have an acculturating, values-teaching function that contending powers, factions, pressure-groups, and partisans seek to control.

That, really, is what the war over Columbus Day, Thanksgiving, and the public recollection of the European discovery, conquest, and colonization of America is all about.

And, yes, it is all just one continuous war in which all these apparently unrelated fights are just individual, particular battles.

Like those holidays, the selections from the past represented by the Hall of Statuary reflect and encourage the values of the victors in an older America.

And they likewise celebrate the victors and their victories.

And, not to be harsh, but those were the victories all over the Americas of colonialists and their successor settler states, made up of and ruled by and for European whites, partly powered over much of the terrain by enslaved Africans whose status was excused by beliefs in their inferiority, not only cultural but explicitly racial.

Likewise, the subjugation and displacement of the Indians over the whole continent by advancing whites was thus excused - to the extent it was thought to require excuse.

And these whites were overwhelmingly Christian, living in a society whose domination by males was sanctioned by its religion and its morality.

Much of this past is still present and in fact not much regretted, if at all, by the white Christians, male and female, who make up most of America, and even more of the culturally, politically, and economically powerful of America.

They continue, for the most part, perfectly willing to celebrate this past, though with reservations about slavery, racism, and the like, and perhaps annoyed by the dissent of those descended from defeated enemies and victims of long ago.

Not to mention the shrug of those who can honestly say to themselves and to others, after all, that they did not do any of that.

But neither that past nor the present attitude of America toward it is politically correct, a moral concept that has been defined for us over the years out of hatred by the radical left, and that has become increasingly influential with the passage of the decades.

And so even the mainstream liberals, nowadays, at least to a degree, follow the communist radical Howard Zinn and those even more extreme in a reverse racism, an anti-Christian bigotry, and a radical feminism fully misanthropic in the narrower sense that rejects the American past and all its heroes, adopting the bitter hatreds of its defeated enemies and victims.

It is a kind of eliminationism, a kind of racist and sexist and religious exterminationism of the imagination, all their own.

Hence their longing to deny the America that is - the mostly white and Christian America where to a very great extent people continue in traditional sex roles - in favor of an America that is not and in some respects almost certainly will never be - a mostly non-white, non-Christian America in which people are distributed over roles in a manner that is random with respect to sex or favors women with roles of wealth and power.

[Aside.

Given population trends and the sources of American immigration, the non-white, non-Christian parts are possible but unlikely, with the latter much more unlikely than the former.

And as to the sex roles part, that is an absurd fantasy mostly built on lesbian hatred.

/Aside]

An America in which whites pay reparations to blacks and Indians for the harms done their ancestors by those of the whites, defined as crimes against humanity by liberal moral dogma.

An America in which women dominate in many fields and men in few, if any.

And perhaps, to help us get there, an America that discriminates in its immigration policy against whites and includes some sort of affirmative action to seek out non-Christians.

[Aside.

I recommend Buddhists. Stay away from Muslims, please.

/Aside.]

And perhaps an America that adopts racial, religious, or sexual quotas for candidates for office and maybe also office holders - quotas effectively discriminating against you know who.

In the face of this essentially racist and misanthropist cultural onslaught of hatred and blame orchestrated by the radical left and the resentful, non-white losers of the world, the right has been and remains largely missing in action.

They have noticed the religious side of the thing, however, and in reply have mounted an extremist and silly, clericalist counterrevolution.

As for the rest, they do little but bleat defensively in early October and late November, and undermine private and public affirmative action.

Do you suppose today's Italians have to go through all this sort of hateful rot about the slavery and other brutalities of the Roman Empire whose monuments have a pervasive presence and cultural influence in their country?

It is certain that Christian and Muslim triumphs led to episodes of book-burning and cultural purges to wipe out the hated paganism they had conquered.

All this reminds you of the Taliban blowing up those fantastic Buddhist monuments in Afghanistan, doesn't it?

Yes, I'm saying that in this connection, this matter of a politically correct rectification of public monuments and celebrations, it's the American left who deserve comparison with the Taliban, not the Christian right, though so far as I know the Taliban are far from being the race-haters our radical left are.

I believe I have read that the Euroleft is putting the Italians through a lot of baloney, nowadays, about the historic warfare between Christian Italy and the Muslim powers of the Mediterranean, and demanding reparations for Moroccans from the Spanish for the Reconquista.

And for the Algerians from the French.

What a load of hate has to be borne by the whites, the Christians, and the males of the Occident, today!