Black Lives Matter: an American Taliban

By Richard Schulman

What is one to make of the latest mania by Black Lives Matter mobs to pull down or deface every unprotected statue or monument they can get at with their ropes and paint buckets? How is their rage different from the Taliban’s detonation of the Buddhas of Bamiyan or the Salafist pulverization of the ancient Islamic tombs and shrines of Timbuktu?

Civilized people try to understand history, both the good and the bad, rather than trying to erase it, as in George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984.

A Democratic Party subsidiary

BLM is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party, This helps explain why the mayors of mob-besieged cities have been largely indifferent to the destruction that BLM’s self-appointed purifiers of the public memory have been carrying out — now that there are no more Confederate statues to be destroyed.

In 2016, the BLM was also boosted by Russian intelligence.

No monument is safe

We now witness BLM activists attacking monuments to:

* Christopher Columbus, who brought the Old World together with the New;

* Miguel de Cervantes, Spain’s greatest writer, badly injured defending Christendom at the Battle of Lepanto;

* Father Junípero Serra, the 18th-century Spanish Franciscan who built mission churches throughout California;

* George Washington, commander of the American armies that won independence, first president of the US, rare Virginian who freed his slaves upon his death;

* Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, which proclaims “that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”;

* Abigail Adams, early advocate of women’s suffrage, wife of American Revolutionary leader John Adams, enemy of slavery and mother and grandmother of leading slavery opponents, John Quincy Adams and Charles Francis Adams;

* Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics to the national anthem;

* Hans Christian Heg, a Wisconsin abolitionist;

* Abraham Lincoln, who presided over the military defeat of the Confederacy and the Emancipation Proclamation;

* Ulysses Grant, whose administration passed the 13th through 15th Amendments, the basis of Reconstruction; and

* Augustus St.-Gaudens’ Boston Commons memorial to Captain Robert Gould Shaw and his African-American infantry unit – the 54th Massachusetts Regiment – that fought and died for the Union cause at Fort Wagner, South Carolina, and is memorialized in the 1989 movie Glory. “This monument is considered one of the nation’s greatest pieces of public art and the greatest piece to come out of the Civil War,” said Liz Vizza, executive director of the Friends of the Public Garden, “It was, amazingly enough, dedicated 123 years ago on May 31st – the day it was defaced.”

The educational background to BLM ignorance

How do we account for such appalling historical ignorance and Taliban-like barbarism?

The blame, clearly, is to be laid at the progressive takeover of US education, from K-12 through the universities and graduate schools. For progressive educators, the history of Western civilization is a pageant of oppression perpetrated by white European males on helpless natives. US history, in the texts of Howard Zinn and the NY Times 1619 series, is the story of the capitalist enslavement of the masses and the slavery and unending repression of African-Americans.

Gramsci’s influence

The progressive capture of our educational institutions is the end product of a strategy hatched by leaders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the early 1960s. Their plan was to carry into effect Antonio Gramsci’s argument in his Prison Notes that Marxist revolution could only conquer in the advanced sector by capturing control of its dominant cultural institutions. This was to be done through a below-the-radar “march through the institutions” rather than following Marx and Engel’s failed vision of proletarian class struggle.

And so it came to be. Our universities and major media are now dominated by radical progressives, the intolerant grandchildren of those early SDS leaders.

Cardinal Dolan’s message

The sophistical claims of BLM’s culture warriors — that the historical icons they attack had serious flaws — is movingly rebutted by Cardinal Timothy Dolan of the NY archdiocese in a recent Wall Street Journal op ed:

Defacing, tearing down and hiding statues and portraits is today’s version of Puritan book-burning. Our children need to know their country’s past, its normative figures and their virtues and vices. That’s how we learn and pass on our story….Beware those who want to purify memories and present a tidy—and inaccurate—history…. Remember when some objected to raising the status of the Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday to a national holiday, citing his self-admitted flaws?…If literature that depicts prejudice, or words or scenes that are today rightly abhorred, is to be banned, I don’t know if even the Bible can survive. If we only honor perfect, saintly people of the past, I guess I’m left with only the cross….As a historian by training, I want to remember the good and the bad, and recall with gratitude how even people who have an undeniable dark side can let light prevail and leave the world better.

WSJ, June 29, 2020