Joined: 07-20-2020 Posts: 8,947
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A pretty good summation of what the totalitarian-minded "beautiful, pampered people of today" have been doing. The Orwellian Assault On The Past ContinuesAuthored by Roger Kimball via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”Quote:That line from George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” might serve as a sort of motto for the woke apparatchiks who run our lives today.
Perhaps it’s because they have, as one wag put it, mistaken Orwell’s stern admonition about the dangers of totalitarianism for a how-to manual.
In any event, the present’s attack on the past by those holding the reins of power continues apace.
And the goal, just as in Orwell’s novel, is to revamp the future by redefining the past.
John Calhoun was an apologist for slavery, so the college named for him at Yale must be renamed.
Never mind that he was valedictorian at Yale, a member of the House of Representatives, a senator, Secretary of War, Secretary of State, and vice president.
Never mind, too, that he was one of the most powerful minds and greatest orators of his day.
He had beliefs that the beautiful, pampered people of today find objectionable.
So he had to go.
It was the same with the great mining magnate Cecil Rhodes.
He made a stupendous fortune in what’s now South Africa, endowed Oriel College, Oxford, with part of his fortune, and established the Rhodes scholarship program.
He too was insufficiently enlightened, so a campaign to besmirch his memory and remove all traces of his presence from Oriel College has been underway for years.
From 1924 to 2021, a large equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee stood in a place of honor in Charlottesville, Virginia.
In the wake of the Black Lives Matter riots, the statue was removed. Last fall, in a sort of pyromaniacal ritual, it was cut apart with a blow torch and then melted down.
Last month, President Joe Biden had the 109-year-old Reconciliation Monument removed from Arlington National Cemetery.
Just a few days ago, the Biden administration announced that it was removing a statue of William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, from a park that had been his home.
That spot will undergo a “rehabilitation” and, in place of Penn, the administration will place a statute of an American Indian in order, to provide a more “inclusive ... interpretation of the Native American history of Philadelphia.”
The attack on the past is proceeding apace.
Its goal is to efface the contributions of white Europeans, especially white male Europeans, to the formation of Western civilization.
Over the past several years, we have seen a rising tide of assaults on statues and other works of art representing our nation’s history by those who are eager to squeeze that complex story into a box defined by the evolving rules of political correctness.
A vocal minority, claiming victim status, demands the destruction, removal, or concealment of some object of which they disapprove.
Usually, the official response is instant capitulation.
It’s worth noting that the monument controversy signifies something much larger than the attacks on the Old South.
Indeed, the attack involves not just artworks or commemorative objects.
Rather, it encompasses the resources of the past writ large.
It’s an attack on the past for failing to live up to our contemporary notions of virtue.
More...
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/orwellian-assault-past-continues
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