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Politically
Correct Plaque Attack
by
Garry Reed
As
one might expect in today's virulently aggressive politically correct
culture, a movement is afoot to rewrite history, which includes "amending
the plaques, statues, and memorials of historical figures to reflect their
racist sentiments." (Christian
Science Monitor)
One
movement afoot is to footnote a bust of Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney as a racist
because he wrote the majority
opinion in the Dred Scott case which, to simplify for today's Attention
Deficit devotees, was a ruling that a slave entering a non-slave state
could not become a non-slave since that would deprive his master of his
property.
For
another example, some South Carolinians want to tack a plaque on the base
of the big bronze likeness of Reconstruction-era Governor and US Senator Ben
Tillman who, according to the Charleston City Paper, had a hand in
rewriting the state constitution that "disenfranchised blacks and
established the segregation laws which stood for 70 years" and,
incidentally, advocated lynching Negroes.
And
folks in Lee County, Florida, want to rename their county because its
namesake is General Robert E. Lee, even though Lee
himself once penned, "...slavery as an institution is a moral
and political evil."
On
its surface, historical revisionism isn't a bad idea. What passes for
"history" in government propaganda mills (typically called
"public schools") is a whitewashed sanitized politically
dogmatic spin of what the ruling classes want their peons to believe.
What
today's politically correct plaque-rewriters propose to do, of course, is
to foist their own whitewashed sanitized politically dogmatic spin of
history on the rest of us.
Unfortunately,
as some sane observers warn, rewriting bronze statuary markers "threatens
to turn historical interpretation into a politically driven
free-for-all."
So,
to prevent a lefty-righty rewriting culture war, the anti-South
history-twisters should consider putting on a show of
"diversity" by whacking a plaque on a Northern racist.
That,
according to many, would be our nation's sixteenth president.
In
spite of his copyrighted catchphrase "The Great Emancipator,"
Abraham Lincoln's famous wartime Emancipation Proclamation failed to free
a single slave and didn't even apply to the slaves held by Yankees in
Yankee-held holdings.
Then
there was that business of Lincoln voting to keep all Negroes out of
Illinois because, well, they were Negroes.
And
of course he was greatly in favor of "colonization," that being
the act of forcibly removing people from the United States who had
previously been forcibly removed from Africa and forcibly removing them
back to Africa, or to Central America, or to anywhere else that wasn't the
United States.
Lincoln
not only supported the Fugitive Slave Act (a law that required escaped
slaves to be forcibly repatriated to their masters) but even took the case
of one Robert Matson, whose slaves had run away. Fighting for their
forcible return in court was Matson's mouthpiece, Abraham Lincoln, Esq.
Or
one could selectively lift a quote from the Honest Emancipator's epistle
to Horace Greeley (a mainstream media mogul back in the day) and chisel it
into the base of the Lincoln Memorial: "If I could save the Union
without freeing any slave, I would do it."
In
short, it illustrates the idiocy of making pin-ups of politicians.
None
of this Lincoln lore is generally known to the general public, yet it's
all easily uncovered with a few minutes of Googling or Yahooing or
DogPiling.
Note
too that Lincoln revisionism is less a sectarian North/South battle than
an intellectual authoritarian/libertarian tussle.
Honest
historians know full well that the Northern states were loaded with racist
sentiment. Numerous Northerners wanted to secede. They may have been
anti-slavery but they still didn't want bands of black folks frolicking in
their own backyards.
The
whole point being that history-rewriters eager to excoriate Southerners
like Taney and Tillman and Lee as racists need to look northward as well
if they wish to avoid this plaque flack of their own:
"Hypocrite."
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