… but is Trump the right person to blame?
A warning from George Orwell on the ‘monument wars’
In the new Civil War, I’m with George — as in George Washington. It’s one thing to start dismantling monuments of Civil War generals. It would be another to go after the most famous founding father.
Washington’s name was raised Tuesday by President Trump. He wheeled on reporters and tried — yet again — to suggest an equivalence between the alt-right and alt-left at Charlottesville.
Trump was getting his head handed to him when he noted that there were people there “to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue.”
The president was referring to Robert E. Lee, hero of the Confederacy. Charlottesville had long since made its decision to remove its statue of Lee. It acted through its city council, the democratic way.
On Monday, though, protesters in Durham, NC, took matters into their own hands. They slung a rope around the neck of a statue of a Confederate soldier and pulled it down.
“So will George Washington now lose his status?” the president asked Tuesday. “Are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson?”
It’s a good question — no doubt the question for many Americans. It’s not that the alt-left has already got its noose around statues of Washington, but the leftist-outrage industry does move fast.
Even in New York.
Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted Wednesday, “New York City will conduct a 90-day review of all symbols of hate on city property.”
Protesters have already swarmed the statue of Teddy Roosevelt at the Museum of Natural History. They reckon it’s a symbol of white supremacy.
Assemblyman Dov Hikind wants to remove two concrete markers honoring French World War I heroes who ended up collaborating with the Nazis in World War II. De Blasio agreed. One of those, in the name of Philippe Pétain, “will be one of the first we remove,” said the mayor.
It’s not my intention here to defend Trump’s floundering on Charlottesville. He clearly should have, as I noted in the New York Sun over the weekend, singled out David Duke and the other racists and anti-Semites at the center of the riot.
Neither, though, should the president be blamed for keeping a weather eye out for the good name of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
It’s hard, after all, to imagine that the hard-core left has any noble purposes in this violence. The first figure arrested in Durham was picked up after a press conference of the World Workers Party, a Marxist melange that stuck with the Soviets through Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Lately they’ve been on the barricades defending — wait for it — North Korea.
It takes a lot of Communist commitment to believe Trump is worse than Kim Jong Un. There’s no reason to imagine that the left is going to settle for a few statues of Lee.
The left wants to attack the very legitimacy of America, of which Washington is the real symbol. And going after statues and other cultural icons is part of the Marxist playbook.
It was written about by George Orwell in his dystopian novel “1984,” a quote from which is making the rounds this week.
In it, one of Orwell’s characters warns of how “every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered.”
“And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute,” adds Orwell’s character. “History has stopped.”
Is that what we want?
Orwell’s wisdom suggests Trump was smart to raise the question of where all this is going. And to say: “You are changing history, you’re changing culture.”
Trump did so, it happens, as the federal government itself is getting ready to reopen, after some work, its memorial to Robert E. Lee. Known as Arlington House, the mansion was the Lees’ home for 30 years. It overlooks Arlington Cemetery and the Capitol.
“It exists,” the National Park Service says, “as a place of study and contemplation of the meaning of some of the most difficult aspects of American History: military service; sacrifice; citizenship; duty; loyalty; slavery and freedom.”
The nation that George Washington fathered could use some of that.
