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June 21, 2020

First, they came for the Confederates...

By Monica Showalter

First, they came for the Confederates...

Now that they've toppled Robert E. Lee, and various lesser emblems of the Old South, they're going after far more important targets, and worse still, getting away with it.

Is it too extreme to compare the mass destruction of the public monuments and faces adorning cities across the U.S. to the monstrous dynamic that propelled the Nazis to kill? Yes, it's far from the same degree, but the underlying dynamic of what's happening is the same - a spiraling vortex of outrage, which being unchecked, eventually hits home. 

Three of the latest from San Francisco, are purest Taliban, and provoke nothing but revulsion in anyone with any tie of identification to this country:

First, the attack on Cervantes in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park:

 

 

The historic illiteracy here is amazing. A man who was enslaved by African pirates was the target of the attack? It shows the ignorance at best of the scum who did this, but more likely, the hatred of all things European, a reverse racism every bit as bad as any other kind of racism. Spaniard in a ruffled collar? Quick, destroy him - everything that happened before us was bad, every emblem of Western Civilization, every emblem of greatness. We're the only virtuous ones, see. 

Yet Cervantes' five years in the hands of African slave owners marked his work and prompted him to write of freedom. Red State points out this passage from his work:

“Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts that heaven has bestowed upon men; no treasures that the earth holds buried or the sea conceals can compare with it; for freedom, as for honour, life may and should be ventured; and on the other hand, captivity is the greatest evil that can fall to the lot of man.”

The attack Cervantes also amounts to an attack on literacy itself. Cervantes was one of the greatest writers who ever lived and his works are still marvelled at today, by readers in all languages. The attack on the great literary figure of the West was an attack on reading and writing. Like Pol Pot and his evil minions, these maggots seek to kill anyone with a pair of glasses to make sure they can't think for themselves. Reading itself, of unapproved party-line propaganda, is an attackable offense.

Red State reports that Spain's government had the gumption at least to protest. 

 Second, the attack on St. Junipero Serra, and to me, this one's the most heart-sickening:

 

 

Serra's the founding father of California, a man as important as the heroes of the Alamo in Texas, or the the founding fathers of the emerging nation to the far eastern side of the continent. He was a man who left a successful life as a philosophy professor in Spain to share the word of God as he saw it to the Native American peoples. He spent eight years in Mexico first as a pastor, and then as a old and injured man with a bad foot, made the arduous trip to Alta California on a donkey or on foot to construct nine missions up and down the state. The missions were protective missions for the Indians, he set them up to protect the Indians from the Spanish soldiers, who otherwise slaughtered the Indians, he'd seen enough of it across the continent to know it would happen.

Here's what cultures that had no church missionaries going along for the ride to try to protect the Indians were like:

Indeed, we do know what did happen when religious groups were not present to try to protect native peoples and were not involved in colonial expansion into native territories. The example of Indian removal from many regions in the 19th century U.S. is a grim instance. In fact, if there was genocide against native peoples in California, it happened during the gold rush, in the 1850s, when Americans offered bounties for Indian scalps and the native peoples of Northern California were brutally decimated and oppressed.

Whatever their faults, no Spanish or Mexican missionary in California ever came close to uttering the refrain that was heard among 19th-century North Americans, that "the only good Indian is a dead Indian." And nothing on the scale of Sand Creek or Wounded Knee ever occurred in connection with the California missions.

Serra's missionaries taught the Indians skills and the Indians came to the missions willingly. He was a tough little man, and patronizing for sure, as he enforced discipline, toughest of all on himself, for he was no hypocrite. But Serra loved the Indians and loved being with them. He was happiest when he was with them, learning their languages and affirming them. The people couldn't stand were Spanish bureaucrats and soldiers and he constantly bickered with them. When he died, the Indians gathered in great numbers to honor him at his funeral. The crimes against Indians attributed to the missions came well after his death.  The National Catholic Register has a pretty good rundown from a secular historian of what his life was like and why he became a saint from Jesuit historian Fr. Thomas Reese, S.J.

I don’t know what Pope Francis intended by announcing the canonization of Serra. But I can  understand that, in Junípero Serra’s willingness to sacrifice the comforts of a very successful career, to forego climbing the academic and ecclesiastical ladders, to travel halfway around the world in order to live the rest of his life among people he had never seen but whom he deeply and genuinely loved, and to go without many advantages he could easily have gained, one sees qualities that are very consistent with what the church has long held up as indications of sanctity.  

Serra himself was also the Spanish missionary who gave much of California its name and character. Every little kid who grows up in California has a connection to this - we all build clay missions in our classrooms, and often take tours of the old missions to look at architectural digs. I recall not paying much attention to those things much when I toured the missions in class because I was always in such awe and marvel at the peaceful beauteousness of these missions, the spirtual sense of calm of them. Nobody wants to look at dirt when the bells are glinting through the towers and the rose garden is peeking through the spotless calm of the adobe and bricks. 

Want to know where names of the coastal cities and the red tile roofs and adobe walls and pretty Mission architecture such as the campanarios, or walled bell towers, so unique of the state come from? None other than Serra himself, who modeled his nine missions based on the simple architecture of his native Mallorca, Spain, except that he wanted them also to be Native American creations, so he integrated Native American artistic conventions, too. California's mission-style architecture is probably one of the last great things left about the state. 

To erase Serra is to erase the heart of California, something the rabid left would be delighted to do. 

Most disturbing of all, the attack on a religious figure opens the door to more attacks on religion. Want to bet they won't start entering churches, raking out the statues, and burning them in the streets? It's what happened in Chile as the authorities there stood by and did nothing. The Red Guards of this statue-smashing spree are known to have ties to that bunch. They will do it here, too.

Spain, to its credit, has protested:

 

 

San Francisco's Mayor London Breed, has at least made an effort to express disapproval, arguing that the takedowns were not collective nor democratic decisions, and the cost of cleanup burdens the city. The San Francisco archbishop also made a decent protest.

Yet that may be because outrages didn't stop there.

The professional scum also attacked the statue of U.S. Grant, victorious union general who defeated the Confederacy, at a cost of more than 600,000 lives, 350,000 on the Union side, based on his brutal sacrifices of his own men, earning him the angry monicker 'the butcher.'

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Rioters In California Tear Down Statue Of Ulysses S. Grant. He Defeated The Confederacy, Devastated KKK.<a href="https://t.co/2zH7znCRYQ">https://t.co/2zH7znCRYQ</a><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/CancelCulture?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#CancelCulture</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/RevengeCulture?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#RevengeCulture</a></p>&mdash; Larry Elder (@larryelder) <a href="https://twitter.com/larryelder/status/1274507765290012673?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 21, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

The Confederacy, remember, was determined, and its early victories and military talent suggested it might just win. President Lincoln went through general after general before he stopped with the unprepossessing Grant, arguing that he was a fighter. When Grant's deriders argued he was a drunk, Lincoln replied that he needed to know the name of Grant's whiskey so he could send a bottle to all of his generals. He defeated and destroyed the Confederacy -- and then showed mercy and respect to his defeated enemy at the surrender to open the door to national healing. The rabid left argued that he was a slaveholder - which is nonsense - he hated slavery and only ended up with one as a gift from his southern father in law. He was out of money and could have sold the slave to get some - but refused - he freed the man within a year. Grant became a Republican president after Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson finished the assassinated Lincoln's second term and enforced equality and inclusion to the newly freed black slaves through the Reconstruction, and many black notable figures emerged - think Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver among innovators and many important black businessmen. And while he was president, he sent the military after the Klan, crushing them with military force. The reforms Grant instituted in fact were only negated by Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who reinstituted segregation. Nobody's toppling Wilson's statues despite this record.

To attack Grant is to attack one of the real liberators of slaves and defenders of black Americans. Grant by the way, was also a literary man, his memoirs, co-authored with Mark Twain, are considered a literary masterpiece. The Indian press notes approvingly that Grant loved to see places that weren't like him, and paid a visit to India after his presidency.

These attacks are showing no signs of abating. Nobody's in the dock, nobody's paying, the press is giving the terrorists the gleeful coverage they crave and America is becoming a more barren, weaker society, with fewer ties to the past. That past includes not just the people whose images were attacked and vandalized by these leftists, but also the people who erected these statues. In that regard, they amount to attacks on civil society, something every tyranny has none of, but as Alexis deTocqueville noted, America was exceptional because of. 

Not since the Red Guards, Lenin's Bolshevik commissars, Marat's sans-culottes, or the Taliban have we seen such wholesale destruction of the civic face of America in the centers of its living spaces. Along with the leftist move toward ending the civic practice of voting in person, where a society gathers together it amounts to a terrifying atomization of society. At some point, it's got to stop. But when it stops, will it be too late to recover? Yes, it was easy to attack the hated Confederates. But what that opened the gate to is strikingly ugly.

Image credit: Twitter screen shot

 

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