Ploughshares into Swords

Trump must order General Lee’s statue to be recast

“He who controls the past controls the future,” said videogame villain Kane, in Command and Conquer: Red Alert. If you prefer your quotations from a more rarified source, I think George Orwell said something very similar too.

This is a principle the left has understood from its very beginning: rewrite the past, write the future. The past must be shaped to fit the demands of the present in service of the dreamed-of utopia.

The founders of Marxism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, conjured up a primitive matriarchy at the dawn of human history—a society where women ruled the roost, families didn’t exist, and there was no such thing as class or male domination—to justify their claims about the Dialectic and the terminus of History: a classless society without the bourgeois nuclear family and where all barriers between the sexes are broken down. Despite the claims made by Marx and Engels about the existence of primitive matriarchy, there is no evidence such a society ever existed or perhaps even could. Classicists, historians and anthropologists have all looked—and found nothing. No matter.

Today, the heirs of Marx and Engels continue their attempts to falsify history, towards the same goal. They seek to undermine the confidence of ordinary people in the present regime by turning them against their ancestors and their ideals, making them question their very identity.

This is cultural revolution leading to social revolution. It’s often referred to as “cultural Marxism,” to distinguish it from the strictly economistic doctrine that once prevailed. After class revolution failed to prove contagious beyond Russia, it became clear that special measures would be needed to overturn the prosperous, self-confident nations of the West, and most of all America. These special measures have been going on now for the better part of a century.

The new Trump administration has, rightly, made the falsification of American history a target in its first months. America can hardly be made great again if it hates itself and its ideals, can it?

Last week, President Trump signed an Executive Order calling, among other things, for a federal review of monuments that have been removed in the interests of political correctness, especially by the Biden regime in the wake of the death of George Floyd.

According to the order, which deserves quoting at length:

Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth. This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light. Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed. Rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.

The President has ordered “improper ideology” to be removed from all Smithsonian facilities and instructed the Department of the Interior to determine “whether public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties” in its jurisdiction have been removed or changed “to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history.” This will serve, it seems, as a prelude to the restoration of monuments, statues etc. that have been removed or changed. Most, but not all, are associated with the Confederacy and its prominent leaders and men, such as General Robert E. Lee.

Trump has long opposed the removal of Confederate monuments, and received more than his fair share of criticism for doing so. His intervention in 2017, over the proposed removal of a statue of Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, produced one of the most shameful media manipulations of his political career, of which there are many. Trump was said to have praised “neo-Nazis” as “good people,” when he did nothing of the sort.