“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…. Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” — George Orwell.
Now officially condemned as “racist” by the leftist San Francisco Board of Education are Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Monroe, Lincoln (President Obama’s favorite), Garfield (an abolitionist and Union general in the War Between the States), and McKinley (another Union soldier), revolutionary patriot Paul Revere, environmentalist John Muir, and many other notables. So all city schools named for these heretofore heroes will be renamed at a cost of close to half a million tax dollars.
Even the school named for California’s liberal Democratic Sen. Diane Feinstein will be renamed because in 1986, as mayor, she had a Confederate flag in need of repair replaced at City Hall.
In the new “woke” America of 2021, great people’s accomplishments are utterly irrelevant and they are reviled as villains if contemporary leftists find they ever did or said anything the leftists don’t like. Indeed, in the tradition of the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks, and the Chinese communists’ Cultural Revolution, today’s politically correct standard is nothing less than 200-proof progressive perfection. How proud Chairman Mao would be of America’s Red Guards!
This is all part of today’s cancel culture, in which leftists seek to destroy – professionally and personally – anyone daring to deviate from their orthodoxy. Thus, a record number of Americans – famous and ordinary alike – have been removed from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social media. Indeed, when a U.S. president can be banned, we are all vulnerable.
Major pressure is now put on advertisers to stop sponsoring any TV or radio shows whose political views offend the Left, and many major corporations no longer do business with any company whose politics are insufficiently progressive, for fear of leftist boycotts.
This same effort to purge our popular culture of non-leftist ideas also seeks to excoriate or even erase from history anyone deemed to have ever deviated from the rapidly-evolving present dictates of political correctness.
So we see a record number of statues being torn down, most because of leftist charges of “racism,” with no regard to historical context. Not just Confederate monuments are toppled, but statues of our Founding Fathers (especially Washington and Jefferson) are defiled as well.
Statues on the chopping block even include those of Abraham Lincoln, the man who did much more than anyone to free the slaves. “The great emancipator” is now disdained by leftists for not adhering to present attitudes toward American Indians and for having made some racial statements no enlightened person would make today but were tragically the norm two centuries ago.
Even a statue of the greatest abolitionist of all, an escaped slave and father of America’s civil rights movement, Frederick Douglass, was destroyed last year in Rochester, New York.
We erect statues of historic figures to pay tribute to their contributions, not to honor their flaws — flaws being far less remarkable than contributions. That someone was able to accomplish a lot of good in spite of weaknesses only makes his achievements more impressive, and perfect people don’t make history. As William Faulkner understood, “You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.”
Of course we wish President Lincoln had done more to protect Indians and had never said a racist word. But how many of the four million slaves he helped to free — or their descendants for several generations — cared about any such remarks?
Instead of stripping President Washington or Jefferson’s name from schools, why not teach students about the totality of their lives, and let each student decide for himself how to assess them? Teach all the facts, freely discuss a variety of interpretations, and let students think critically for themselves.
But totalitarians have no faith or interest in letting people think for themselves. By definition, they have no tolerance for any but their own views which they zealously seek to impose on the rest of us as unquestioned dogma.
Throughout our vast, corrupted educational-industrial complex, such leftists eagerly seek to completely delegitimize America itself (especially our Western Judeo-Christian capitalist foundations). The goal is to convince the youth that our founding and entire history are so irredeemably stained by racism, imperialism, classism, and sexism that our national heritage is not worth preserving.
But, as Dennis Prager points out, it’s not fair to compare America to a utopia that never existed — but to the rest of the world. And can you name a better country that’s done remotely as much good for remotely as many folks all over this planet?
Finally, as Christ said, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone” — John 8:7, King James Bible.
Dr. Douglas Young is a retired political science professor at the University of North Georgia.