One of my wittier friends told me today “I’m starting a movement to ban Dixie cups.” If I’d have been less startled by his gallows humor I’d have replied – “Just wait a week. They’ll probably drop the ‘Dixie’ name themselves.”

The Charlottesville syndrome is upon us. Recently in Franklin, Ohio, a quiet town a little north of Cincinnati, one of the spineless breed of careerists that run most local municipalities had a miniscule plaque depicting Robert E. Lee removed. The city leaders did their work in the usual courageous bureaucratic way -- which is to say they had a crew of city workers cart the monument off in the middle of the night. An organization no one had ever heard of, “Showing Up for Racial Justice” (SURJ) had threatened to make the town less quiet if the offending image of a man on a horse was not expunged. This is really quite remarkable. Franklin is a 97% white community. Its black population is under 1% -- and I would be surprised if more than a handful of them have made a career of being offended by the rest of the town. The threatened protest was the work of outsiders -- people who had never been to Franklin, who just decided that its monuments didn’t suit them. It should be added that if you want to be offended by a monument to a Confederate war hero in Ohio, you have to look pretty hard. We were on the Union side. Thank the internet’s inventor, Al Gore, that young activists have a way to find innocuous antique bronze plaques to be triggered by. After the removal, someone put up a crudely made sign protesting against the protestors. An enterprising SJW ripped the sign down, while screaming something shrill and incoherent about fascism. Residents, who were not given a choice about any of this, showed up at a city council meeting in droves -- probably as angry at the hired bureaucrat who stole their plaque as they were at the self-appointed guardians of propriety from SURJ who descended on them with all the love of justice one would anticipate from a Viking raid.

Tempted though I am to point out the double standard of having to quietly tolerate the violent, racist rap chanting that has boomed out of passing cars for decades now, I will limit my complaints to the careless eradication of history by people who want nothing less than to pull our society out by the roots. I will spare you the obligatory “I condemn white supremacists but…” because, in plain unashamed white Anglo-Saxon English, the cultural battle lines have been drawn, and attempting to mollify the “progressives” who drew them is a waste of effort. Patriotic Americans must stand together, good and bad, clean and unclean. War is being waged on Western civilization. In that struggle, we can neither be excessively polite to our globalist enemies nor fritter away effort repudiating the bigots among us – real or imaginary. Western civilization has survived its share of bigotry. It has yet to survive what “progressives” have in mind for it.

History is not offensive. It is history. History is not a tool of oppression. It is history. It is the record of what was. It remembers what was best about us -- as well as what was worst. People who seek to erase our cultural memories make war on us as surely as any terrorist does.

I neither hate nor love Robert E. Lee -- but I think he was important enough to be remembered. In Mongolia, they have an enormous equestrian statue to Genghis Khan. Genghis burned whole cities to the ground, ravaged much of Eastern Europe, and may have killed as many as 40 million people. He is history. He existed. Who am I to tell the Mongolians that the statue of their national hero offends me? Are today’s leftists so weak of spirit they must believe humanity was born in Teletubbyland, and will die peacefully one day in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood? Are they so blind to their own hypocrisy that they are willing to threaten or beat bloody anyone who denies their pacifist multicultural delusion? Yes – they are. We’ve all seen the videos to prove it.

Leftists have no respect for history because they’ve never actually read any. They’ve only read the likes of Howard Zinn. They’ve been indoctrinated from the cradle. Anything done before last year was racist, misogynist, transphobic, and laughably outdated. What the West is experiencing now is little different from China’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s: mobs of emotionally enflamed young people encouraged by their socialist elders to tear the culture down. Leftists don’t need history to guide them -- that is what the propagandist media is for. Their past, present, and future are all cynically constructed lies. The person who knows history contradicts those lies. The person who knows history can see the writing on the wall.

I neither hate nor love Robert E. Lee -- but if they tear his monument down today, they’ll be burning the U.S. Constitution tomorrow, triggered by the historical artifact of the three-fifths clause. Today they burn cars -- tomorrow they’ll burn people. People made into nonpersons by the simple expedient of calling them racists or fascists. We cannot expect our local councilmen or hired city managers to protect us. Their only interest is in keeping their own pampered, unprincipled hides out of the fire. We must stand together as our ancestors did -- one nation under God.