By John Ruberry
Yesterday, on Messidor Duodi (2), 228, three statues were toppled by a leftist mob at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. One of Junípero Serra, the builder of the first Catholic missions in California, one of Francis Scott Key, the composer of Our National Anthem, and of Ulysses S. Grant.
I don’t want to get into a discussion of which statues of historical figures in this country should stay up and which should go because I believe nearly all of them should. Although I support the decision by the Dearborn Historical Museum to remove the statue of segregationist and virulent racist Orville Hubbard, a long time mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, from their grounds. It formerly stood at the Detroit suburb’s city hall.
Last week I wrote that statues of Abraham Lincoln, even in Illinois may not be safe. As far as I know, no Lincoln statues in the United States have been removed or vandalized. Although two, one in Boston and one in Washington, both with a freed slave, might go. The Great Emancipator’s greatest and best-known general, Grant, of course isn’t so lucky. The 18th president freed the only save he owned, at a time when he was suffering severe financial difficulties, was the commander of all Union forces during the Civil War, which of course saw to the ending of slavery in America. As president he pushed strongly for Reconstruction and he led the successful effort to destroy the first incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan.
Oh, the date yesterday wasn’t really Messidor Duodi (2) 228, unless you follow the French Republican calendar. Among the dementedness that came out of the French Revolution was dropping the seven-day week Gregorian calendar for a ten-day week calendar, think of the metric system only for time. That calendar began in 1792, but to the French revolutionaries it was Year One. Napoleon returned France to the Gregorian calendar in 1805 and except for 18 days during the Paris Commune of 1871, another leftist insurrection, the French have kept it since.
When the Khmer Rouge conquered Cambodia in 1975, the communists declared it Year Zero.
I’m sure you know where I’m heading in this discussion. The far-leftists who are pulling down and defacing statues–they even placed a burning US flag on a George Washington statue after toppling it–don’t want to reinterpret history, they want to destroy it.
Now that Grant can’t be protected–oh, where were the San Francisco police when his statue was removed from its pedestal?–is anyone safe? Franklin D. Roosevelt is a hero to the left. But Roosevelt ordered the internment of over 100,000 people of Japanese descent, many of them US citizens, during World War II.
What about Woodrow Wilson? To be fair, most white men 100 years ago were racist under contemporary definitions, but that makes Wilson an extreme racist. Wilson, another lion of the left, chose the ultra-racist Birth Of a Nation to be the first motion picture to be screened at the White House.
A quote from Wilson appears on a caption in that movie, “‘The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self preservation … until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.’ — Woodrow Wilson.”
Wilson also re-segregated the federal workforce. As for Birth Of A Nation, that movie brought on the second incarnation of the KKK.
Wilson is already under attack. Woodrow Wilson High School in Camden, New Jersey will be renamed. Monmouth College in New Jersey–the Garden State was Wilson’s adopted home state–will remove his name from a building on its campus.
Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower had racist views. What about them?
What about everyone?
What about you?
The far-left wants their Year Zero.
John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.
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