Posted on 08/25/2017 6:44:08 AM PDT by Kaslin
The virus seems to be approaching its breakout phase. We could be looking at a full-scale epidemic here.
Zika? Ebola? Flu?
Nope. We don't have a great word for this sickness yet. "Iconoclasm" -- i.e., the destruction of images and monuments that offend this mob or that -- comes close, but the toppling of statues is just one acute symptom of the fever.
Indeed, the fight over Confederate statues is just a discrete and more understandable eruption of the larger trend. This stuff has been happening for decades. One of the first outbreaks involved the word "crusader." The term hurt the feelings of people who didn't know what they didn't know. Left-wing historians (and the Islamists who love them) convinced themselves that the Crusades were a trial run of Western imperialism and colonialism. They were, in fact, largely defensive wars intended to beat back the aggression of Muslim colonizers. Even the organization Campus Crusade for Christ changed its name to "Cru" lest people get the wrong impression.
Sports teams -- most famously the Washington, D.C., NFL Franchise That Dare Not Speak Its Name -- have been under increasing pressure to drop any association with Native Americans. Columbus Day is outre. And statues of Christopher Columbus may be heading to the pyre, if recent developments in New York City are any indication.
My National Review colleague Kyle Smith reports that Mayor Bill de Blasio has ordered a 90-day review of "all statues and monuments that in any way may suggest hate or division or racism, anti-Semitism -- any kind of message that is against the values of New York City." Translation: de Blasio wants a carefully composed list of stuff to tear down.
Orderliness is the one concession de Blasio's brand of progressivism demands of the mob.
But fear not, de Blasio has made it clear that the iconic statue of Christopher Columbus in New York's Columbus Circle is "obviously ... one of the ones that will get very immediate attention because of the tremendous concerns about it." What's next, Smith wonders -- Columbia University? The District of Columbia?
In New York, the drive to purge Columbus from the historical memory (save as a pioneer of imperialism, racism and genocide) is gaining newfound momentum.
"There obviously has been ongoing dialogue and debate in the Caribbean -- particularly in Puerto Rico, where I'm from -- about this same conversation that there should be no monument or statue of Christopher Columbus based on what he signifies to the native population ... [the] oppression and everything that he brought with him," Melissa Mark-Viverito, the speaker of the New York City Council, said this week.
I wonder what Colombians think about all this.
What fascinates me about this civilizational auto-immune disorder is how superficial it is. Mark-Viverito is from Puerto Rico. More than 95 percent of the people there speak Spanish. The dominant religion of Puerto Rico is Catholicism (85 percent). As far as I can tell, Mark-Viverito, who is of mixed European ancestry (her mother, Elizabeth Viverito, was of Italian descent and a prominent Puerto Rican feminist; her father, Anthony Mark, was a prominent doctor), does not speak Taino, the native language of the Arawak tribes who inhabited Puerto Rico when Columbus arrived. Rather, she speaks the languages of her alleged oppressors -- Spanish and, of course, English. She even attended Columbia University. I could find no mention on the Internet that she has burned her diploma in protest.
My point is not that the world ushered in by Christopher Columbus has been very good to Mark-Viverito, though it obviously has. It is that toppling some statues or even incanting some nonsense about "cultural appropriation" cannot separate the iconoclasts from the culture they live in. The mobs of students -- and their enabling professors and administrators -- renaming buildings and bowdlerizing the language are still products of Western civilization. Even the poseurs who think Googling a few phrases from Karl Marx and wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt make them anti-colonialists are disciples of Western thinkers. Where does Mark-Viverito think her mother's feminism came from? The Arawaks?
For centuries, to the extent that educated Muslims talked about the Crusades at all, it was to boast about how they emerged victorious from them. But Osama bin Laden and his ilk read too much Noam Chomsky and caught the Western disease of victimization and resentment.
That is the plague sweeping the land now. And tearing down some statues and renaming some streets isn't a cure, it's a symptom.
Maybe there is an upside to all this “offence”. Maybe we can start getting some of the intentionally offending “art” taken off display finally.
What does the article have to do with the author’s opposition to President Trump? Stick to the subject, or don’t comment at all
Indeed, evangelical Christians are succumbing to political correctness. The Harvest Crusade, a major evangelical Christian event held in Southern California every summer, has dropped the word "Crusade" and is now called simply the Harvest.
You obviously have not thought of the good the removal if these terrible icons is creating. look at the minority Jobs created for each statue that is ripped from its base; How about the education of hundreds of black chilrens!; Look at wealth creation for the under class; Food and medicine for all poor people! Have you no heart? (Do I need to insert a sarcasm tag?)
Yes. Why don’t we hear about this on TV “know it all” shows? No one is bringing this up! I don’t think our congressmen and senators even know about this. And what about the Justice Department?
Trump is trying to Make America Great Again.
The Taliban Left is trying to destroy the history of this country and our record of how we became what we are.
Goldberg fails to see that these two things are connected. His lack of insight, his lack of understanding about the Swamp calls into question anything he writes.
But, but, but... what if Auschwitz ‘triggered’ uncomfortable feelings of guilt? Tear it down.
/s
The iconoclast crisis had struck earlier (8th and 9th century) in the East, where Christians were targeted with moral defamation by the Muslim invaders, who claimed, libelously, that the Byzantine Christian icons were idols.
Under Muslim influence (or simply reacting with fear), Christian iconoclasts (icon-smashers) destroyed thousands of priceless holy images in the Byzantine churches, even gouging off the eyes, faces, and hands of architecturally embedded images on structural pillars, mosaics, and frescoes.
The West suffered a spate of violent iconoclasm later, in the 16th-17th centuries, when Christian fought Christian. The anti-icon protesters smashed the crucifixes, Madonnas, stained-glass windows, rood screens, wood carvings of saints and angels and Christ, Stations of the Cross, statues and every kind of holy image, including even the little wax "Agnus Dei" (Lamb of God) discs that little English Catholic children used to wear around their necks.
It was a time of ignorance and terror.
Unlike anything we have today, of course.
...the unmaksing is starting.
:
"Their “rent a mob” agitators are ... fake.
Their looting will not persuade us.
We will handle their traveling bands of uninformed, masked clowns, and the lewd left will submit to us.
I know they are dangerous and highly motivated, but I also know who we are. We are Americans..."
above from link: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3580495/posts
You're right Blather... lift up the rock - shine a light on scurrying filth..
>
This idiocy over these statues and monuments is a perfect example of what happens in a modern, affluent society that has conquered almost every problem that has afflicted the human race for thousands of years. When people don’t have any problems to deal with, they’ll go out and fabricate a bunch of them just to manufacture a sense of purpose in their empty lives.
>
*DING* *DING* *DING* We have a winner. No more submissions, please.
One of ‘our’ own doing, too. Property theft, under color of law, by govt...given to others so they may not worry about providing\supporting themselves...The *EVERY* one go to college think (continued indoctrination)...do-nothing\dumbed-down classes = easy grades...
Rip out the (illegal) ‘safety net’ and those w/ enough free-time need start noodling where their next $$ comes from.
We’re barely limping along in this extension of the Tytler Cycle (...From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to complacency; From complacency to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage...).
IMO, we’re entering the apathy stage (47%+ already in the dependence phase).
https://www.educationviews.org/barack-obamas-ancestors-owned-slaves/
to consider fyi
” Obama’s great-great-great-great-grandfather, George Washington Overall...owned two slaves in Kentucky: a 15-year-old girl and a 25-year-old man. ... Obama’s great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, Mary Duvall, also owned a pair of slaves listed in an 1850 census record. They were a 60-year-old man and a 58-year-old woman. In fact, the Duvalls were a wealthy family whose members were descended from a major landowner, Maureen Duvall, whose estate owned at least 18 slaves in the 17th century.”
Weren't his ancestors on his father's side slave traders?
Old western disease as in Western Civilization
Not western as in the American Old West
Very interesting. But the MSM would never tell about this.
For later...
That law extended veterans benefits to Confederate veterans (of which there weren't any left) and their widows. It didn't make them US military veterans.
Much the same for the 1929 law. It said the government would maintain the graves of both Union and Confederate dead, but didn't make the Confederate dead posthumous US veterans.
There are some German and Italian POWs buried in US military cemeteries. Presumably, the US government maintains the graves, but that doesn't make them US veterans.
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