A new sculpture honoring the ancient female serpent deity Mami Wata has replaced the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee on the public square in New Orleans. The governing leaders of New Orleans felt that a new direction for the city was necessary, as has been reported:
“Ultimately, the artist felt, as we did, that because the original placement of the Robert E. Lee atop the pedestal was one of power and domination—the statue had loomed over the city, symbolizing the tyranny of white supremacy—that this new work should be closer to the level of the individual…”
(*Originally an African deity, and still worshipped there by various names, Mami Wata worship in the West is primarily found among Voodoo practitioners across the Caribbean).
The Mami Wata sculpture was only a temporary exhibit, to be removed in August. I haven’t yet heard what replaced it.
Portsmouth, Virginia police stood by and watched, making no attempt to interfere as a mixed race mob first defaced the Confederate Monument, erected 1876-1881 and on the National Register of Historic Places, then proceeded to decapitate and then topple the four statues of soldiers and a sailor standing guard around its base.
The monument honored 1,242 men from Portsmouth of whom 199 were killed or died; gave 1,018 from Norfolk county of whom 280 were killed or died; and 1,119 from the city of Norfolk of whom 176 were killed or died in defense of their native state.
Jim Hoft reports a denouement worthy of an M.R. James story.
A far left protester was critically injured on Wednesday when a leftist mob toppled a Confederate statue on top of him.
The young Democrats attempted to destroy a Confederate Monument in Portsmouth, Virginia.
When they knocked over one of the statues it landed on a fellow protester critically injuring the man.
A witness said the protester’s skull was showing and he as convulsing on the ground.
Charlottesville Circuit Judge Richard Moore has ruled that the statues are war monuments, which are protected under state law. That likely means the city doesn’t have the legal right to take them down.
In his nine page ruling, Moore cites the fact that both Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson are depicted in their military uniforms and on horses associated with their time in the Civil War.
“I believe that defendants have confused or conflated 1) what the statues are with 2) the intentions or motivations of some involved in erecting them, or the impact that they might have on some people and how they might make some people feel,†Moore writes. “But that does not change what they are.”
Moore finds the issue to be so clear-cut that “if the matter went to trial on this issue and a jury were to decide that they are not monuments or memorials to veterans of the civil war, I would have to set such verdict aside as unreasonable…”
The lawsuit was filed after Charlottesville City Council voted to remove the statue of Lee in early 2017. City councilors Mike Signer, Kathy Galvin and Wes Bellamy are named individually for their roles in that vote, as are former councilors Bob Fenwick and Kristin Szakos.
While legal analysts have said this ruling could sink the city’s defense, Moore notes that this ruling doesn’t guarantee the plaintiffs will prevail.
He still has several other motions under consideration.
Plaintiffs spokesperson Buddy Weber says plaintiffs are pleased, but also cited the remaining motions as questions that still need to be answered.
In an email, city spokesperson Brian Wheeler says the judge now has to decide whether the city has to pay damages and attorneys fees and whether that question will go to trial in September.
In his ruling, Moore writes that he hopes to rule on remaining motions in the next month.
The Commonwealth of Virginia, where statues of Confederate heroes like Lee and Jackson have recently been removed, is about to erect a monument in downtown Richmond to Nat Turner, the leader of an 1830 slave rebellion.
So now Nat Turner has a monument in Richmond…..a monument to a mass murderer whose band of marauders killed 61 white people, 47 of them women and children. Victims included a 3 year old child who was beheaded by a slave who had previously taken him on horseback rides and who the child trusted. Also included was the murder of the infant son of Nat Turner’s master, whose head was bashed against the fireplace wall. Women, children and old men were forced to watch as they waited their turn while others were beaten or hacked to death. Yeah….great hero, eh? So, yipppeee Richmond! Let’s commemorate”!? Let’s go celebrate a mass murderer while tearing down all those nasty Confederate statues along the way!! Today’s politicians and social justice warriors have nothing on the taliban, which, by the way, does the same kind of thing. Modern day accounts of Turner’s revolt like the one in this article will say that Nat Turner was a brave hero who fought for freedom and was eventually taken down by the superior numbers of a white militia. The truth is more embarrassing for those who would “commemorate” this monster – his revolt was actually stopped by a farmer named Blount, whose farm Turner attacked. Blount, his son, and Blount’s SLAVES actually fought off Turner’s attack. Yeah, Turner’s own people helped snuff out his “revolt.”
PITTSBURGH, PA—A rowdy gang of angry, riled-up Arminian believers gathered to pull down a statue of Reformer John Calvin standing in front of Calvin Reformed Bible College & Seminary, authorities confirmed Friday.
The band of Wesleyan troublemakers brought a rope, lassoed it around the neck of the stone likeness of Calvin, and yanked it down while yelling rallying cries like “Down with limited atonement!†“You’ll never take our free will!†and “For Servetus!â€
Mob members then stomped on the statue and spray-painted crude Arminian slogans on the downed Reformer, according to police reports.
When the left insists that everyone with white skin is part of white supremacy, that Shakespeare, Beethoven and all of Western civilization embody white supremacy, it’s echoing the actual talking points of white supremacy.
If you tell all Obama critics and Trump supporters that they’re racists often enough, some will decide that maybe they are racists.
If you tell a student who objects to racially segregated areas on campus that she is a white supremacist, she will be more likely to become one.
When you marginalize everyone to the right of you, some of the marginalized will accept the definition.
And when that happens, the left wins, the extremists win, and it becomes harder to maintain any kind of functioning civil society in which we settle conflicts through compromises rather than street violence.
Compromises are uncomfortable.
After the Civil War, the Union was preserved, but Southerners were allowed to honor their cause. It was an uncomfortable compromise, but it helped limit the violence from a conflict that had claimed the lives of 2% of the population. The Taliban campaign by black nationalists to tear down Confederate memorials was a deliberate effort at shattering a compromise that kept civil society working.
And that too led to Charlottesville.
Uncomfortable compromises are how we learn to live with each other. It means that there can be memorials of Robert E. Lee and streets named after Malcolm X. Tolerating people whose views we don’t like is one of the best ways to marginalize domestic extremists. When one set of extremists is empowered to wipe out the other, we end up with a civil war. Just ask Edmund Ruffin and John Brown.
Democrats claim a mandate from the “Right Side of History†to eliminate all the compromises. Catholic nuns must pay for abortions and birth control, Christian bakers and florists must participate in gay weddings, every white person must confess their racism, and every left-wing extremist must get their way.
That’s how you tear a society apart.
The Bill of Rights is an uncomfortable compromise. It says that we have to put up with people we don’t like. The Democrats, under the influence of the left, are rejecting that idea. But that goes both ways too.
You can have a liberal society or an illiberal one. But you can’t have a society that is selectively liberal when it comes to your bigotry, but illiberal of the bigotry of others, that believes you have the right to say anything you please without consequences, but that no one else does, that you can punch, but not be punched. That’s a totalitarian state. And the only way to realize it is through violence.
Democrats need to take an honest look at the street violence in Seattle, in Portland, in Berkeley and Charlottesville, and decide if this is what they really want. If they don’t, it’s time for them to stop normalizing left-wing extremism. If they do, then they are to blame for the next Dallas or Charlottesville.
Those impassive, silent guardians – will their gaze no longer shame you?
Have they been forever banished? Are you sure?
Can you finally stroll in comfort streets bereft of all reminders?
Is their valor gone, as if it never were?
Spiteful children! Did it gall you that someone so loved, respected these,
Enough to raise their monuments on high—
And you know you’ve never earned any respect, and never will,
And your blog will be deleted when you die?
“Ingrate, vandal, ignoramus,
Meddler, coward, bully, foolâ€â€”
Those are titles your pedestal might bear,
Were your legacy preserved, beyond the web and your own minds –
But I doubt it will last too long even there.
The Guardian reported last Fall that they were already protesting in New York to get rid of Teddy Roosevelt (and to rename Columbus Day).
Hundreds of activists gathered at the American Museum of Natural History on Monday to take down the “racist†statue of Theodore Roosevelt and an urgent call to rename Columbus Day.
More than 200 people cheered outside the museum as activists covered the statue of Roosevelt on horseback flanked by an African American and Native American on either side and demanded it be ultimately removed.
“A stark embodiment of the white supremacy that Roosevelt himself espoused and promoted,†the group explained in a statement. “The statue is seen as an affront to all who pass it on entering the museum, but especially to African and Native Americans.â€
Activists from the groups NYC Stands with Standing Rock and Decolonize This Place organized the protest to draw attention to the museum’s encouragement of racist tropes, and implored New York City to rename Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day.
Why would anyone want to attack the political choices and public careers of people who lived a century and a half ago? The Civil War is over. The cause of Southern Independence was defeated. Slavery was extinguished. The actual Northern soldiers who fought the Confederates on the field met with them amicably at reunions years later and shook hands. There is a video of a Gettysburg Reunion that shows elderly Yankees atop Cemetery Ridge cheering old white-haired Confederate veterans re-enacting Pickett’s Charge. A national consensus emerged after the war, that recognized that Southerners had their own honestly-held, honorable point of view in the conflict, and that their bravery and sacrifices deserved the respect of their opponents. Recently, the rancid radical Left has decided to try to overturn that consensus, as a grand masturbatory exercise in historical self-righteousness and to flatter the amour propre and fan the grievances of its dependent black clientele. This is a shoddy and divisive game, dishonorable and violative of our shared American history.
No police intervention occurred even when black ANTIFA counter-demonstrators used aerosol flame-throwers.
My various left-wing correspondents are all energized by the violence in Charlottesville, and are demanding that those of us on the Right take the blame, apologize, and get busy denouncing all those racists and White Supremacists.
It’s sad to see left-right violence, including pepper spray and baseball bats, on American streets, reminding us all a bit of Weimar Germany. But it was obviously not the Conservative Movement, not even the Alt-Right, that brought about these kinds of poisonous national divisions, that fostered all the chauvinistic identity politics, and that provoked the violence.
Our friends on the Left are demanding that we denounce all the demonstrators protesting the removal of the Lee Statue and that we agree to identify all of them as “White Supremacists” and dismiss their motivations as “racism.” There were clearly some fringe group crazies participating in the demonstrations and some unsavory people were present, but that doesn’t make everyone who demonstrated a Nazi, a Klan member, or a White Supremacist.
I don’t recall any time I have ever heard our friends on the Left denouncing the most extreme communist radicals responsible for violence. Actually, they offer excuses, blame the anger of their radical extremists on America and the rest of us, and when their bomb-building murderers get out of jail, they give them teaching positions at universities.
So, sorry, I have no intention of identifying the generality of demonstrators as White Supremacists. I think they were mostly normal people defending their regional and cultural identity, who had been at last pushed too far, who were finally fed up with being insulted and marginalized.
I don’t think most people there had any connection at all to the crazy person from Ohio who drove his car into the counter-demonstrators or to the zanies carrying Swastika flags. And it seems obvious to me that left-wing local and state government took a partisan role, instructing state and city police to stand aside and let ANTIFA thugs intimidate and rough up the demonstrators trying to defend the monument.
The Left, today, is playing its usual propaganda games, trying to stigmatize and shame the opposition, but I think they fail to understand that they’ve been using the same tactics and techniques too long. The Alt-Right is reading Saul Alinsky, too. Their pet media has lost credibility with much of the country, and a lot of us are just completely tired of having the Left play the Race Card.
