What began as justifiable outrage over the videotaped murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis cops — a crime no rational person would downplay or excuse — has become a war on Western civilization. (See today’s Perspective interview)
Charlene Couch, an African American writing in the Baltimore Sun, witnessed uprisings in her city and said of the protesters: “more than 90% were white and most were under 30.”
Surveys confirm a heavy majority of protesters are white. On TV, they destroy minority neighborhoods and black-owned businesses before they travel home to safe white neighborhoods.
Locally, the movement culminated Thursday and Friday in the removal of Christopher Columbus and Kit Carson statues in Denver, where parts of downtown look like a boarded-up war zone.
Vandals tagged the statue of slavery abolitionist and Colorado Springs founder Gen. William Jackson Palmer. With the removal of Carson’s statue, expect an imminent crusade for the renaming of Fort Carson just outside Colorado Springs.
A 19th-century explorer and Army officer, Carson played a key role in the expansion of Western civilization. In doing so, he forced Navajo Indians into a reservation established by the federal government. It is a sad chapter in history, and the reason city workers removed his statue as activists planned to destroy it.
Though past wars are tragic, all nations conquered and displaced previous occupants. Nearly all used slaves and many still do. Native Americans fought and killed in tribal wars that determined who controlled territory and resources. Some tribes had slaves.
Conquests and slavery are not uniquely American sins, despite the propagandist lies published by the New York Times and taught in colleges and schools. The riotous burning of buildings and the occupation of city blocks represents an ironic attempt to transfer control by force. One can barely distinguish the goals of this movement from the historic conflicts that repulse these very same activists.
History is marred by human tragedy precisely because nations are founded by force. If we forget horrific historic events, such as the Civil War and the conflicts that caused it, we are bound to repeat them. If we hold historic figures to today’s moral standards, not one of them survives — not even honest Abe Lincoln, the abolitionist who outlawed slavery but opposed interracial marriage, voting rights for “negroes,” and social and political equality among Blacks and whites.
The social justice witch hunt does not need old presidents and wars to find villains. Recent history casts living figures into aspersion. Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden doesn’t pass a multicultural woke test if we judge his past and present congressional tenure. He fought for school segregation, opposed desegregationist busing, called Barack Obama the first “articulate and bright and clean” black man, and said poor kids are just as bright as white kids.
Hypocrisy undermines every move of the left-wing cancel culture’s war on history. They attack Lincoln and Carson while leaving unabashed racists unscathed if leaders in the Democratic establishment admires them. Consider Margaret Sanger, founder of the left’s heralded Planned Parenthood. A head-and-shoulders statue and misleading bio adulate her at the federally funded Smithsonian Museum’s National Portrait Gallery.
The exhibition summary describes her as “a visiting nurse among New York City’s Immigrants in the early 1900s.” It acknowledges her “association with eugenics,” including forced sterilizations of the “mentally unfit.”
The museum declines to tell us how Sanger founded The Negro Project to stop African Americans from reproducing. She pitched her agenda at a Ku Klux Klan rally.
“Planned Parenthood continues to suppress the growth of minority populations by locating 70% of its abortion facilities within or near black and Latino communities,” wrote a consortium of black ministers in a 2015 letter asking the Smithsonian to remove Sanger’s statue.
Sanger explained her fear of “negroes” discovering her racial cleansing agenda in a 1939 letter to Dr. C.J. Gamble — founder of the Human Betterment League, a business that forcibly sterilized Blacks.
“We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members,” Sanger wrote to Gamble.
We honor contemporary racists — even ethnic-cleansing eugenicists — whose legacies institutionalize racism today. Sadly, the destructive revolutionaries don’t seem to care about that. Instead, they target people who lived centuries ago and established a country that people of all ethnicities, races, religions, and nationalities migrate to in a quest for equal opportunity.
Our society must be bound by forgiveness and common aspirations, such as liberty and justice for all. If sustainable nationhood requires a perfect and sinless past, our future is doomed.
Don’t be fooled. The violent, mostly white rioters are not about social justice. They are left-wing revolutionaries — destroying art and ravaging minority communities — in a quest for power, control and other people’s property.
The Gazette Editorial Board
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