Demolishing American Heritage

  The culture war against American heritage has gained steam in New Orleans, Louisiana. Four monuments tied to Confederate history were put in the crosshairs in 2015, and two of them have been removed in the past three weeks. At the order of Mayor Mitch Landrieu, the Liberty Place Monument was removed under cover of darkeness on April 24 by masked construction workers with police snipers overhead. The Jefferson Davis statue was removed last Thursday. According to the mayor, the monuments to Generals P.T. Beauregard and Robert E. Lee will be taken down “sooner rather than later.” It’d be easy to dismiss these actions as isolated examples of “progress” in race relations. The problem is that removing the monuments is just the next stage in a decades-long process of removing powerful symbols critical to American history and identity. As Dr. Samuel Francis wrote in 2000 in “The War on White Heritage”:

But the non-white demand for the erasure of white ethnic and cultural symbols also includes the major symbols of the entire American nation and its past. Indeed, Randall Robinson, a black activist who played an important role in lobbying for sanctions against South Africa to end apartheid, writes that America “must dramatically reconfigure its symbolized picture of itself, to itself. Its national parks, museums, monuments, statues, artworks must be recast in a way to include … African-Americans.” It does not seem to matter to Mr. Robinson that the historical events many of these cultural monuments commemorate might not have included blacks; the past must be recreated to include them. Black rejection of not only the Confederate but the American heritage is clear in the removal of the name of George Washington from a public school in New Orleans. On Oct. 27, 1997 the Orleans Parish School Board, with a 5-2 black majority, voted to change the name of George Washington Elementary to Dr. Charles Richard Drew Elementary (Drew was a black surgeon who made advances in preserving blood plasma); the school itself is 91 percent black. “Why should African-Americans want their kids to pay respect or pay homage to someone who enslaved their ancestors?” asked New Orleans “civil rights” leader Carl Gal-mon. “To African-Americans, George Washington has about as much meaning as David Duke.” The same school board also has stripped the names of Confederate Generals P.G.T. Beauregard and Robert E. Lee from schools, under a policy adopted in 1992 that prohibits naming schools after “former slave owners or others who did not respect equal opportunity for all.” Southern slave owners and Confederate generals are, of course, mainly of Southern and local interest, but George Washington is probably the most significant national symbol in the American pantheon. The New Orleans school board decision, the New York Times commented at the time, “underscores the maxim that history is written by those with the power.” In this case, those who have the power are blacks who insist on celebrating their own race and discarding the national heroes of whites.

The removal of the statues therefore is simply the next stage in a process started twenty years ago. In fact the black, self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist political science professor at Southern University, Malcolm Suber, has been on a mission to remove symbols relating to both the Confederacy and the Founding Fathers for a quarter century. He was part of the group that forced the removal of Washington’s name referenced above, and is an organizer of the Take ‘Em Down NOLA Coalition in support of the ongoing removal of monuments. According to the New York Times, “he would be delighted to see the statue of Washington over by the New Orleans Public Library come down, too.” As is becoming standard, events presenting the opportunity to spit on American history attract Antifa Communists like flies to garbage. In New Orleans this manifisted itself through vandalism of the monuments and the attempted intimidation of patriots defending them, including the macing of a wheelchair-bound woman. Although such groups as Save Our Circle and the Oath Keepers have sought to defend the monuments, legal channels appear to have been exhausted, and given the militarized power of the state, the remaining two monuments will likely be taken down in short order. James Kirkpatrick offers a cogent case for the impossibility of descendants of the Historic American Nation to appeal to and reason with (let alone coexist with) their self-avowed enemies on the anti-American left:

The Beltway Rightand its remaining hapless followers don’t seem to understand that the American identityis already fatally deconstructed. Even discussing what is best for America on issues like taxes, health care or the economy seems pointless when there is no longer any agreement on what the nation itself is. And that’s why the events in New Orleans are ultimately more important even than what is happening in Congress today. The “Marxist-Leninists,” motivated by their hatred of European-Americans and determined to destroy their symbols, simply can’t be spoken of as belonging to the same people as the Historic American Nation. Therefore, it’s not just pointless but obscene to speak about how conservatives can appeal to such types.

He goes on to suggest that perhaps the statues should be removed anyway:

Not as a surrender to the egalitarians. But because the cities themselves are no longer worthy of American heroes. These dead statues have more inherent worth than the living rulers of these Third World embarrassments.

For Europeans it may sound out to refer to a white identity, especially when generations of mass media repetetion have made the concept virtually synonymous with “racism” and “Neo-Nazis”. Unlike in Europe however, most American whites don’t have a clear idea of where they came from. Their ancestors may well have been a mixture of a half-dozen different European nations or more, none of which do they now identify with. As American demographics have shifted since the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, which prompted mass, non-European immigration, identity politics have become the norm. Every ethnic group in America promotes their own interests first, while most whites are resistant, if not oblivious to do so. The election of Donald Trump might signal a change of direction as he was the first candidate in modern history to successfully appeal to white interests (albeit implicitly), primarily through the immigration issue. It may be too late however for large swathes of the United States, particularly in urban areas like New Orleans and the San Francisco Bay Area where I was born. Sooner or later the battle lines will be drawn and it’s almost certain that significant violence will follow. Further reading – Abolishing America: AntiFa Faced Down Again in the Battle of New Orleans