or, Revisiting the Erasure of History
Language, flags, heroes, and symbols – as well as the forcible changing of these things – express who is in charge and what the nation stands for. ~ Christopher Roach[1]
Five years ago, I wrote about California Democratic Party State Senator Steve Glazer’s campaign to erase the history of the short-lived Confederate States of America (and its nascent attempt to establish itself through the unquestioned valor of generals such as Robert E. Lee) entirely from the state of California.[2]
Why? Because Senator Glazer willfully did not want to understand American history. Nor did he want any other Californian to understand American history either. To replace the fact those who fought and died for the Confederacy were secessionists – as every American understood until barely a generation ago – Senator Glazer was determined that every Californian redefine them as “traitors,” instead.
And so – as Pat Buchanan has written – “to have that sole acceptable view predominate, our elites believe(d) they must remove from public display the statues of any associated with the cause of Southern independence,” in order to “stigmatize them all as traitors.”[3]
Despite the fact that earlier Californians (like most Americans) observed some merit in General Lee’s strategic acumen, personal conduct, and feats of valor – I wrote, “to the demagogues out there who share the same warped view of our ancestors as Senator Steve Glazer, this is all irrelevant. Damnatio memoriae is the Latin phrase literally meaning ‘condemnation of memory’ in the sense of a judgment that a person must not be remembered. It was a form of dishonor that could be passed by the Roman Senate upon actual and real traitors or others who brought discredit to the Roman State. The intent was to erase someone from history.”
The intent remains. Erasing history.
Christopher Roach has written that the early efforts to eradicate reminders of the southern Confederacy was “simply pretextual. No one is calling for a restoration of the Confederacy. Rather, a war on Confederate symbols is part of a broader, large-scale revision of our history, where the nation’s past is rewritten as a story of ‘systemic racism,’ and thus, anything honoring an old, dead white guy is in jeopardy.”[4]
I also wrote, “Must all symbols of America’s variegated history now be approved by the Steve Glazer’s we have in our midst?” My answer was—”Yes.”
And so I wrote that because of Senator Glazer’s actions – from now on we would never be “safe from the hands of those who may choose to despise any symbol at a given time, because, even as the official analysis of his bill concedes, the goalposts will constantly be moving.”[5]
And so what has happened over the last five years within what country singer Dwight Yoakam has called our “late, great, Golden State”?[6]
Have the goalposts moved beyond Confederate generals – as predicted? We all know the answer because it is self-evident. The Mob Rules.
The mob who hates the United States of America and its history, heritage, culture, and traditions – warts and all – have become only more invigorated, encouraged, and emboldened. It would not have taken the clairvoyant powers of Cassandra to see this inevitability.
In the city of San Francisco alone some of our history which has been relegated to the Memory Hole since my original article on Senator Glazer includes the Californio[7] Vaquero,[8] a Franciscan missionary,[9] a Dominican saint,[10] the author who wrote the Star Spangled Banner,[11] an American president[12] who was Robert E. Lee’s Number One enemy during the American civil war – yet is apparently guilty now of having more respect for Lee than the cranks, misfits, and anarchists who attacked his statue[13] and the adventurer/explorer who discovered the Western hemisphere: Admiral Christopher Columbus.[14] Elsewhere in California individuals who have been relegated to the Memory Hole have ranged from President William McKinley, a veteran of the Union Army during the American Civil War,[15] to John Sutter[16] (he’s been hunted down everywhere)[17], to Prospector Pete – the personification of the California 49er.[18]
Who yet remains in the crosshairs of the new scolds, censors, and Red Guards of today? Everyone. Everyone from the father of our country, George Washington,[19] to John Wayne.[20]
How did this happen?
When Anders Koskinen wrote, “America’s knowledge of history is dead,”[21] was he correct? It certainly is in Virginia.[22] Apparently it is in California now as well.
Now that Senator Glazer’s virtue signaling has opened up the floodgates to what Kurt Mahlburg has labeled “a protest against almost any historical figure whose crimes involve being white, male, and dead,”[23] here in California – where do we go from here?
Will individuals who share Senator Glazer’s views continue to “display a deeply judgmental impulse by enforcing on people of centuries past, moral standards that we hardly agreed on five minutes ago?”[24] Of course. Senator Glazer is a politician. We can expect no less.
And so, as Buchanan writes, if “all are dishonored, with their statues pulled down and their names taken off cities, counties, towns, rivers, canals, bridges, buildings, highways, roads, streets, and dams, then what is left?”[25]
That is now the question we who still love the United States of America, its flag, its heritage, and its culture must ask ourselves.
Will we simply sit back and allow the Cultural Marxists to continue removing, renaming, defacing, and degrading our collective cultural memory? Since Senator Glazer has emboldened the mob our cultural decline appears to be inevitable.
Yet, Buchanan has a wise response to politicians such as Steve Glazer as well: “You cannot lead a people whose history and heroes you hate.”[26]
For those of us who have studied history, examined it in context, and observed its cyclical patterns what we are witnessing today is not as inevitable as it appears. Patriots react, pendulums swing back again, and a society rooted in the foundational principles of the United States Constitution will eventually shove back.
Students of history – scholars such as Victor Davis Hanson for example – have stated, “Revolutionaries are now sowing the wind, but they have little idea of the reactive whirlwind they may soon reap.”[27]
Military theorist William S. Lind knows this as well. Currently those who are attempting to erase history are living in a fantasy “Year Zero.” The Jacobins of the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks of the Russian Revolution, and other radical Left-Wing movements have all done this in the past. But after causing extensive damage the fantasy eventually withers away in the light of reality. We’re already seeing this in the “occupied zone” of Seattle, Washington. Eventually reality reasserts itself. It always does. Thus – when William S. Lind says “when reality returns, it will come in a tsunami,”[28] the fact is in the end – Californians (and Americans) can only take so much of the tripe, the hot air, and the gobbledygook before they choke on it and eventually they seize upon truth. And having seized upon truth they then embrace it. And defend it. With passion and vigor.
And all the virtue-signaling in the world won’t stop the Cultural Marxists ending up where all of their brethren always end up. On the ash-heap of history.
But only after causing extensive damage – to include loss of property, loss of income, the break-up of families, eternal enmity, envy, resentment, and seething hatred, despair – and, of course, loss of life.
Sooner or later the American people will figure out this is all the forces of The Left will ever have to offer.
Despised by their fellow citizens, scorned by their society, detested by their children, ridiculed for having made a mockery of their own nation’s highest ideals, and cast out into the outer darkness where the wretched always dwell, the Senator Glazer-types eventually inhabit the same world as Ray Bradbury’s Autumn People: “They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. In gusts they beetle-scurry, creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen, and surely cloud all clear-run waters. The spider-web hears them, trembles- breaks. Such are the Autumn People. Beware of them.”[29]
Normally these people couldn’t even organize their own sock drawer – and the only entity they’re capable of leading is a mob. And so now we are in that moment where the mob rules. For now we’ve plunged into a dark age. No one can know how long it will last. But eventually civilization returns. Usually at great cost. But civilization always comes back.
And one thing is certain: no one will be building any monuments to Steve Glazer.
[1] https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/unmasking-marble-and-bronze/
[2] https://aliveeastbay.com/state-senator-steve-glazer-pragmatic-problem-solver-not/
[3] https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/blog/cancel-the-white-men-and-whats-left/
[4] https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/unmasking-marble-and-bronze/
[5] http://www.capoliticalreview.com/capoliticalnewsandviews/state-senator-steve-glazer-pragmatic-problem-solver-not-bay-area-leftist/
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW704NwL8iU
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Californios
[8] http://www.vaqueroheritagedays.com/index.php?page=california-vaquero-history
[9] https://topstoriesusa.com/insanity-san-francisco-removes-racist-cowboy-statue-where-does-it-end/
[10] https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/st-junipero-serra-statue-torn-down-in-san-francisco-park-81125
[11] https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/jacobinism-in-golden-gate-park/
[12] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jun/20/ulysses-grant-statue-toppled-in-san-francisco/
[13] https://www.civilwarprofiles.com/grant-protects-lee-from-treason-trial/
[14] https://news.yahoo.com/christopher-columbus-statue-removed-san-192931206.html
[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_William_McKinley_(Arcata,_California)
[16] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-06-16/statue-of-colonizer-john-sutter-removed-after-being-defaced-in-sacramento
[17] https://lancasteronline.com/news/general-sutter-inn-in-lititz-removes-statue-of-john-sutter/article_a0f881a2-b16d-11ea-aa88-8b85f6cfe229.html
[18] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/03/us/cal-state-prospector-pete-statue.html
[19] https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/san-francisco-paint-debated-george-washington-mural-64133993
[20] https://voiceofoc.org/2020/06/moodian-and-smoller-its-time-to-rename-john-wayne-airport/
[21] https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/white-privilege-and-the-real-slavery-record/
[22] https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/old-virginia-weeps/
[23] https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/you-cant-learn-from-a-history-thats-been-deleted/
[24] https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/you-cant-learn-from-a-history-thats-been-deleted/
[25] https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/blog/cancel-the-white-men-and-whats-left/
[26] https://www.takimag.com/article/how-long-will-the-vandals-run-amok/
[27] https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/how-cultural-revolutions-die-or-not/#slide-1
[28] https://www.traditionalright.com/the-suicide-of-the-left/
[29] SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES by Ray Bradbury