Monday 21 August 2017

"He Who Controls The Past Controls The Future"

And that was why, between 60 and 100 years after the Civil War, statues and other elaborate monuments were put up to commemorate long-dead men who had committed treason against the United States.

Washington and Jefferson owned slaves. But neither of them ever committed treason against the United States.

Lincoln was a racist towards the African-Americans, and he was a genocidist against the Native Americans. But he never committed treason against the United States.

FDR interned the Japanese-Americans, and Truman nuked the Japanese. But neither of them ever committed treason against the United States.

Are you starting to see the point?

There would not be a statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford if he had waged war on the British Empire.

There would not be a Stalin Road in Colchester, or a Stalin Avenue in Chatham, if Stalin had been on the other side in 1945. (There would not be much else, either.)

This is not about slavery. It is not even about the memorialisation of the recently fallen, which the Confederates were not by the time that these things were erected.

This is about treason.

And as such, it is a crossroads moment for paleoconservatism as surely as it is for the Trump Presidency.

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