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Liberal intolerance — Tearing down monuments, rejecting history by Miguel A. Faria, MD
On August 14, 2017 radical protesters in Durham, N.C., torn down a Confederate monument that had been standing in front of the town Courthouse. , “the statute was pulled down from its perch with a yellow nylon rope as protesters cheered. Once the monument crashed down to the ground, several people spit on and kicked it.”
The protesters were led by members of the , a communist party in the United States, a divergent group from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) founded by radical Sam Marcy. In 1994, Marcy went to North Korea to express condolences on behalf of WWP on the death of dictator Kim Il-sung. This far-left group has sponsored demonstrations and espoused violence in the United States by supporting such violent groups as the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground, and openly still supports the communist government of North Korea in its threats against the United States. But neither this event in Durham, nor the nature of the protesters, was widely reported in the mainstream liberal media. Readers of GOPUSA.com were fortunate to have the UPI article in the News section, for at least some comparison with events in Charlottesville. In Durham, the protesters conducted their illegal protest unopposed, and the event was largely unreported.
According to the Charlotte News & Observer, in 2015, North Carolina passed a state law prohibiting the removal of any “object of remembrance” on public property that “commemorates an event, a person, or military service that is part of North Carolina’s history.” Transgressors can be charged with a misdemeanor and face a fine of $500 and 24 hours of community service. They are getting off lightly.
In Charlottesville, Virginia, there was wide media coverage. With the media sensationalization of the event, Unite the Right marchers were confronted and violence erupted. . Virginia State Police Troopers Jay Cullen and Berke Bates were killed when their helicopter crashed while observing the protests in Charlottesville, and a white supremacist used the new weapon of mass killing, a car and drove it into the crowd killing a 32-year old paralegal and injuring 19 others.
In Charlottesville, it was widely reported even by the BBC — which when it comes to reporting on Trump and U.S. politics has become an international wing of the mainstream liberal media — that Unite the Right marchers were responsible for the mayhem, both sides punched and threw rocks at one another. True. Unite the Right marchers triggered the incident but the equally rabid ), Black Lives Matter, and the communist counter protesters went unnamed. Every participant in Unite the Right, on the right or on the “far right,” was named. Nor was it widely reported that many of those radicals, who participated in the violent counter protests in Charlottesville, went on to tear down the confederate monument in Durham.
Likewise, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe condemned only one side. Trump responded correctly blaming both sides, but because he did not follow the prescribed formula of political correctness, he was unfairly attacked by the self-righteous progressive cultural establishment of the Thought Police.
In New Orleans, Mayor Mitch Landrieu also took down four Confederate monuments this year. This may have been a distraction given the fact , a situation made worse by Democratic politics in the city. Corruption is legendary and mismanagement is at an all time high. Yet, the city spent $2.1 million to remove the monuments. Confederate flags have been removed and calls for removal of more statutes have been made elsewhere — intolerant and repressive . And after the statues are taking down and monuments desecrated, will book burning be next?
Given the of events that came before their time, and neglecting what little they may remember of the lessons of history, the intolerant leftists are using the destructive and iconoclastic tactics of the mass murderers of communism, Islamic terrorists, and even the Nazis — the very National Socialists who they claim to hate — to express their mirror-image hatred. The Nazis burned books and destroyed what they considered degenerate arts and buildings.
One can only imagine these protesters, right-wing and left-wing, vying for power in the streets of a weaker nation without our tradition of the rule of law and our legacy of freedom. On one side, American brown shirts and Nazis fighting Maoist Red Guards and Stalinist communists on the other.
A recent article in the Telegraph stating that Confederate monuments deserve Soviet treatment is doubly faulty. First it compares the removal of Soviet communist monuments from Russia after the collapse of the evil empire, but conveniently neglects to discuss the antecedent history (read on), thus afflicted with selective omission by the truncation of inconvenient history. Second, the crimes of the Confederacy cannot be compared to the crimes of Soviet communism, either in war or in peace. Lenin, Stalin and the collective leadership were responsible for a huge slave force with an average lifespan of 3 months (hard labor) in the gulag system, .
Under Stalin, leaders became “nonpersons” and were erased from history, cut out of archival photographs even before the days of Photoshop. The lucky ones were summarily shot. The others were sent to the dustbin of the gulag consigned to the memory hole of history. Likewise, inconvenient events were wiped out from the historic record, deleted from pages of the Soviet encyclopedias and replaced with new pages sent by mail to be pasted in place of the old ones.
The demolition of historical monuments and the rejection of history are reactionary and divisive tactics of the bad guys from time immemorial. The desecration (as with the statue of Robert E. Lee at Duke University) and the tearing down of Confederate monuments are only steps behind what mass murderers have done to erase and rewrite history. It is not unlike what Stalin did with the destruction of thousands of churches, including the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, rebuilt by Putin; not unlike the destructive crimes of Mao and his Red Guards during the cultural revolution; not unlike the demolition of towns, villages and decimation of people by the Taliban in Afghanistan; what ISIS has done with the vandalizing of museums in Iraq and the destruction of historic monuments and , etc.
It is the denying and rejection of history as well as an attempt to erase history. But these actions are and should be criminal. In fact, the UN, not a conservative but a globalist organization, considers historical vandalism a cultural war crime, and those crimes are now being prosecuted by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
For example, the crimes committed by the Islamic terrorists in Mali, who are linked to al-Qaeda, committed cultural war crimes when they occupied Timbuktu in 2012, imposed sharia law in the city, and destroyed Timbuktu priceless books and mausoleums listed in UNESCO’s World Heritage sites. and he pled guilty at the International Criminal Court (ICC) last year. Despite expressing remorse, he was sentenced to nine years in jail and fined $3.1 million in restitution.
Those who reject history today are of two types: Those easily manipulated by ignorance led to reject the past without even knowing their history. The others are the communists, socialists, and fellow travelers of whom there are today legions in the Democrat Party, who knowingly are following the footsteps of their secret, venerated Marxist saints, Stalin and Mao.
President Trump has transcended political correctness by correctly condemning both sides. Violence does not attain a moral high ground for either side. He is also correct when in dealing with the issue of the removal of the statues, he asks, “And after Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, who then, George Washington?”
Written by Dr. Miguel Faria
Miguel A. Faria, M.D. is a retired clinical professor of neurosurgery and long time medical editor. He is the author of Vandals at the Gates of Medicine (1995); Medical Warrior: Fighting Corporate Socialized Medicine (1997); and Cuba in Revolution — Escape From a Lost Paradise (2002). His website is https://HaciendaPublishing.com
This article may be cited as: Faria MA. Liberal intolerance — Tearing down monuments, rejecting history. HaciendaPublishing.com, August 17, 2017. Available from: https://haciendapublishing.com/liberal-intolerance-tearing-down-monuments-rejecting-history-by-miguel-a-faria-md/
This commentary also appeared on the Telegraph (Macon) and GOPUSA.com on August 17, 2017.
Copyright ©2017 Miguel A. Faria, Jr., M.D.
3 thoughts on “Liberal intolerance — Tearing down monuments, rejecting history by Miguel A. Faria, MD”
Dr. Miguel A. Faria enters the debate over Confederate monuments in a September 9, 2017 interview on Close-Up with Randall Savage, Channel 13, WMAZ-TV, Macon, Georgia.
Excellent interview. Miguel has expressed some very important principles and represents those who have escaped tyrannical governments and risked life and limb to come to one of the freest, most open and greatest countries on earth. Those of us who have spent our lives in this great country can learn valuable lessons from men such as Miguel. May God bless him.—Truth Teller (2017) Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJvuiw8RMLo
The Southern states had seceded and drawn up their own constitution, one which forbade using government tariffs and revenues from being spent on subsidies for private commercial endeavors. As a result tariffs at Southern ports were much lower than in Northern ports. Fort Sumter was a Union fort located on sovereign CSA state soil and controlling access to South Carolina’s Charleston harbor. When, in the midst of ongoing negotiations for turning the fort over to South Carolina, Lincoln suddenly sent armed warships carrying troops and military supplies to reinforce the fort, He left South Carolina and the CSA little recourse but to open fire.— Chris Meissen (FB)
Yes, and not all those statues have been removed. I know they are occasionally seen in the former Eastern bloc countries.
There is a theme park in Lithuania called “Stalin World”, and it is full of old statues of Stalin, and other paraphernalia from that era.
I think we talked about it on the old Haciendapub.
I suppose, they are just harmless and funny looking Soviet replicas. Statues under the Bolshevik seem to be minimalist, and my guess is that this is line with Lenin’s and Stalin’s (particularly Stalin’s) policies on art. That makes them rather bland, but If Lithuania wants to mock Stalin like that, they have the right to, after all he did to the Baltics. Contrast this to the Confederacy, which was full of all kinds of people, and there are such inconvenient statistics like only 9% of Southerners owned slaves. Also, we know General Lee didn’t own slaves, and was personally against slavery.
So if you take all of that, it can’t be these are all statues of “old and evil dead white men.” Perhaps the official reason for our civil war was a break over interpretation of the Constitution, and “state’s rights.” Perhaps slavery was very important to some, but not others. Even you recently brought up a quote of Lincoln’s that indicates he’d somehow keep the union intact, with or without slaves in it. That shows what Lincoln was fighting for, as we have always known he personally was not fond of blacks. He simply did not believe any human being should be enslaved, but nowadays that could make him a racist, because he didn’t specify that blacks shouldn’t be. Maybe Lincoln didn’t believe that, but it looks like his stament means that was not his foremost consideration.
The Whites in the Russian Civil War were also a diverse group, with many reasons for wanting the Bolsheviks out of government. Sure, some did want a restoration of the monarchy, but there were others who wanted different forms of government altogether.
Even today, Stalinists point to the incredible feat of modernizing Russia from 1929-1939. Yes, that was incredible if you didn’t care what conditions Stalin forced people to work and die under. Yet, there were Whites who agreed with the Bolsheviks that Russia had to be modernized, or go under, but they thought it could be done under more humane conditions. Disgust with Nicholas wasn’t confined to the Marxists, and even while Nicholas still ruled, there were many who considered some form of Democracy a viable experiment. It is disgust with his weakness and poor policies I am refering to, not Nicholas the man.
I don’t know. I know we can get anything done in the USA under our system of government, but respect for human dignity and rights mean it is usually much slower than by using Stalin’s methods [but it’s true many of Stalin’s favorite projects were architectural disasters, like White Sea-Baltic Canal of 1931-3, built much too shallow, at a cost of 25,000 people]. Russia would have modernized, but I’m sure it would have taken much more than ten years. Would this have been a problem if Hitler still wanted to invade Russia when he did? Perhaps, but then under some more acceptable form of White government, maybe they would never have made sneaky deals with the Nazis, only to have them backfire? Also, White leadership probably wouldn’t have had a system where the head of the country could micromanage every military action, as Stalin did. If there were sufficient delegation of powers, Hitler might have been pushed out of Russia much sooner.
For me at least, a person’s character does not have to be good if I want to appreciate their statue. Statues are just history, or can be an encouragement to learn it. So I am just trying to show there aren’t many great reasons for wanting to destroy them, as that is destroying history.
*** I wrote this on Facebook. I am still not sure of Lee’s inner intents. For now, it will suffice to repoduce my comment:
I have to check some facts out. It appears there is now debate about Lee’s views and ownership of slaves. It may not be as simple as I recalled it. I know Lee was not in favor of equal treatment of blacks and whites under the law, but I was certain he believed, like Lincoln, that nobody deserved to be enslaved. It might be more complicated than that.
The problem with Lee and other confederate leaders is that in the last few years, there has been much historical revisionism from the left to make them into totally evil characters. That corresponds with their campaign to tear down statues.
Finally, Lee’s last illness is a study in neurology. I have found one article on it, and it seems rather reasonable for speculation.
https://n.neurology.org/content/82/10_Supplement/P1.294
I trust the speculation on Lee’s aphasia, since he died in 1870, after Broca’s (1861) publication, although they did not know the pathological substratum of Wernicke’s aphasia until 1874. Nonetheless, a general diagnosis of expressive aphasia could be made in 1870. Still, I find Lee’s doctors to be substandard for the era. I am going by their statements recorded concerning his neurological diagnosis. This era had seen better, such as William Hammond, and Edward Seguin (1871).