Authored by Josiah Lippincott via American Greatness,
This week, the left-wing group Swords into Plowshares started the method of melting down the statue of Robert E. Lee that stood in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The pictures from the ordeal include deep non secular significance. A profound sense of foreboding washed over my coronary heart once I noticed the bronze face of the Southern hero, glowing purple scorching moments earlier than annihilation.
What the Leftists did to the statue of Lee is a imaginative and prescient of what they need to do to the remainder of the nation. The destruction of a nation’s symbols, the elimination of the reminders of its previous, is a key a part of the method of the destruction of a nation and its folks.
The Left is appropriate: symbols have energy. The destruction of an emblem, too, is an act of energy. The statue of Lee that stood outdoors the College of Virginia and have become a cultural conflict flashpoint through the Unite the Proper rally in 2017 was not merely a Southern icon.
The Leftists denouncing America’s Accomplice monuments as legacies of racism and slavery are perpetuating a vicious lie. In actuality, these statues are symbols of nationwide reunification and of the forgiveness that comes with peace. The Accomplice monuments have been a part of the American mythology that sprang out of the Civil Battle. That wrestle had been, within the account of the post-war generations, a bloody tragedy from which the nation emerged, reunited and refined with new objective.
The Southern trigger may need been unjust however the Southern soldier was nonetheless brave. He was, in spite of everything, nonetheless an American, nonetheless a Christian, nonetheless a warrior.
Within the determine of Robert E. Lee, the South discovered the epitome of its energy and a noble image of dignity within the face of profound tragedy. The statue of Lee at Charlottesville was devoted in 1924. Edwin A. Alderman, the President of the College of Virginia, gave the dedication handle. That speech will not be obtainable on-line, however an earlier handle by Alderman, entitled “The Nationwide Spirit” that he gave in 1911 on the event of George Washington’s birthday to the Washington Affiliation of New Jersey, is public. There Alderman articulates the post-war consensus, North and South, relating to the reminiscence of the conflict.
The speech is price studying in full, however I’ll dwell solely on a number of of essentially the most related passages. Alderman begins by honoring the three nice People he sees as symbols of the nation’s greatness: George Washington, Robert E. Lee, and Abraham Lincoln. He argues that these three males give the identical “distinction” to America as Pericles and Leonidas gave to Greece. He explains that “sooner or later” the “entire folks, north and south and east and west” will see them as, “superlatively nice males, nice ethical fires burning on the extent plain of our existence, giving mild and heat to our nationwide conscience and to our nationwide beliefs.”
Alderman honors Washington as an “incarnation of the very genius of integrity,” Lincoln because the “soul of democracy,” and Lee because the epitome of “obligation and unselfish love and stainlessness of life.”
Alderman, a Southerner, reforges the sectional heroes of North and South as heroes of the entire, now re-united, nation. Lee will not be, in Alderman’s account, a traitor and racist who wanted to be punished however a hero of the nation and a patriot. Alderman can reward Lee as a nationwide hero as a result of, for him, the conflict was over. The South had been reintegrated into the Union. A part of that nationwide reunification required the intentional assimilation of the South’s symbols into the nation’s collective consciousness. A brand new and cohesive nationwide mythology was wanted to justify and clarify the nation’s reborn unity.
Alderman explicitly connects his monumental historical past of Lee to this nationwide reunification and peace:
“…on this hour of reunion, reconciliation, of absolute forgetfulness of previous strife, we will all see how, in these 5 quiet years at Lexington, [Lee] symbolized and marked out the longer term for each Southern man because it has come to cross and bade us reside in liberal and lofty style, with hearts unspoiled by hate and eyes clear to see the wants of a brand new and mightier day in a brand new and mightier land.”
Alderman connects peace and the respect given to Lee as a part of the “absolute forgetfulness of previous strife.” It is a essential level: peace requires forgetting. A conflict can solely really finish with amnesty. The phrase “amnesty” shares a root, within the Greek, with “amnesia” or forgetting. To have peace and forgiveness we should actually present an “amnesty” or a “forgetting” to our enemies. The identical linguistic phenomenon in present in Latin. The Latin phrase which means “to pardon”—ignoscere—actually means “to not know.”
Battle unleashes titanic human passions. Left to itself, each conflict by nature is a complete conflict of annihilation.
Each act of violence inside a conflict is itself the supply of latest recriminations and new violence. With no peace treaty and the forgetting that comes with it, each conflict would go on without end or till one aspect utterly annihilated the opposite.
A peace treaty bounds the phobia and horror of conflict. The amnesty that comes with it, nevertheless, can not carry true justice. In peculiar human life, each assassin should face judgment. Not so in a conflict bracketed by a peace treaty. To have peace, the victor chooses to not search out each enemy soldier and convey him to justice for killing the victor’s personal troops.
If the victor have been to decide on the trail of supposedly excellent justice then the peace treaty could be meaningless: the conflict and violence would proceed till each final enemy soldier had been killed or punished. There may be little incentive for the enemy to give up in a complete conflict; subsequently, the battle can not finish earlier than extermination.
To ensure that there to be peace with out annihilation, human beings should abandon a dedication to excellent justice. They have to settle for the tragic dimension to life. On this world we can not have full satisfaction. Whether or not we prefer it or not, we’re beings bounded by mortality and by our personal elementary neediness.
The political utopian, nevertheless, refuses to just accept actuality. He can not reconcile himself to the tragic dimension of life. An ideal world is potential if solely we will rid ourselves of the manifestations of True Evil that maintain again the springing forth of True Righteousness and Goodness.
Liberalism and communism, the dual revolutionary Leftist ideologies of the twentieth century, are examples of this sort of political utopianism.
The destruction of the Lee monument reveals these actions’ insane moralism.
For the Leftist, communist and liberal alike, the symbols of our nationwide reconciliation after the Civil Battle have to be destroyed and our nationwide reconciliation have to be undone as a result of the grounds of that peace have been racist. The conclusion of the Civil Battle was not completely simply. The South was nonetheless a bastion of intolerance and hatred. The Leftist condemns the North, too, for its willingness to reunite with vicious white supremacist demons.
The Civil Battle will not be a tragedy within the liberal account however a morality play in regards to the Oppressed combating again in opposition to the Oppressors. The battle is wealthy in theological significance for the liberal. In July of 2021, Nikuyah Walker, the primary Black feminine mayor of Charlottesville argued that, “Taking down [the Lee] statue is one small step nearer to the purpose of serving to Charlottesville, Virginia, and America, grapple with the sin of being prepared to destroy Black folks for financial achieve.”
Liberals right now will not be relativists—removed from it! They’re the truth is ethical extremists prepared to impose their beliefs by violence and cultural genocide if needed. Of their view, America is a land that has not but grappled with its “sin” of racism. The revolutionary Left is right here to result in that ethical reckoning.
There isn’t any promise of forgiveness or mercy for the liberal, both. Reconstruction was not sufficient for the South simply as de-Nazification was not sufficient for Germany. It might by no means be sufficient. The one solution to cope with racists, Nazis, and deplorables, ultimately, is to wipe them out.
Because of this the Left, each time it comes into energy in a rustic—be it the Soviets in Russia, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, or the Purple Guard in China—units out on a marketing campaign of exterminationist violence. Within the Leftist thoughts, dedication to true justice requires the willingness to annihilate its enemies. Within the communist account of the world, as within the liberal, there’s an enemy (the capitalist/racist colonizer) who oppresses the downtrodden (the proletariat/non-Whites).
The answer to the issue is all the time the identical: eliminate the oppressor.
By destroying the symbols of our nationwide reconciliation the Left is symbolizing its willingness to restart the Civil Battle; it’s throwing out the older peace and rejecting the forgetting that made it potential. I predict that, until some nice act of human prudence or fortune intervenes, the Left will perpetrate within the twenty first century acts of violence and repression in America on the identical scale because it carried them out in Europe and Asia within the twentieth.
These previous few years have already witnessed an try to show the entire planet into an open-air jail camp within the identify of medical science and “well being.” That was not the tip of the ideological madness in our time however the starting. The twenty first century planetary Leftist consensus will discover new retailers for its life-hating resentment. We could be positive of that. As our leaders turn out to be extra delusional and ideological we will count on their urge for food for violence and punishment to extend.
The forces of barbarism and a return to the crushing tyranny of the bottom frequent denominator of human life are rising in energy. We can not ignore this actuality. The time might quickly be coming when the defenders of the West should beat their plowshares again into swords.
We might pray that it’s going to not come to this, however the revolutionaries have already ripped up the previous foundations of peace and promise a brand new beginning of conflict. The darkened eyes of the bronze hero stare at us from throughout the void, symbolizing the closing of the previous order and foretelling a brand new disaster.
Don’t look away.
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