8/18/2017 - Pat Buchanan Townhall.com
"They
had found a leader, Robert E. Lee -- and what a leader! ... No military leader
since Napoleon has aroused such enthusiastic devotion among troops as did Lee
when he reviewed them on his horse Traveller."
So wrote
Samuel Eliot Morison in his magisterial "The Oxford History of the
American People" in 1965.
First in
his class at West Point, hero of the Mexican War, Lee was the man to whom
President Lincoln turned to lead his army. But when Virginia seceded, Lee would
not lift up his sword against his own people, and chose to defend his home
state rather than wage war upon her.
This
veneration of Lee, wrote Richard Weaver, "appears in the saying attributed
to a Confederate soldier, 'The rest of us may have ... descended from monkeys,
but it took a God to make Marse Robert.'"
Growing up
after World War II, this was accepted history.
Yet, on the
militant left today, the name Lee evokes raw hatred and howls of "racist
and traitor." A clamor has arisen to have all statues of him and all
Confederate soldiers and statesmen pulled down from their pedestals and put in
museums or tossed onto trash piles.
What has changed
since 1965?
It is not
history. There have been no great new discoveries about Lee.
What has
changed is America herself. She is not the same country. We have passed through
a great social, cultural and moral revolution that has left us irretrievably
divided on separate shores.
And the
politicians are in panic.
Two years
ago, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe called the giant statues of Lee and
"Stonewall" Jackson on Richmond's Monument Avenue "parts of our
heritage." After Charlottesville, New York-born-and-bred McAuliffe,
entertaining higher ambitions, went full scalawag, demanding the statues be
pulled down as "flashpoints for hatred, division, and violence."
Who hates
the statues, Terry? Who's going to cause the violence? Answer: The Democratic
left whom Terry must now appease.
McAuliffe
is echoed by Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, the Democratic candidate in November to
succeed McAuliffe. GOP nominee Ed Gillespie wants Monument Avenue left alone.
The
election is the place to decide this, but the left will not wait.
In Durham,
North Carolina, our Taliban smashed the statue of a Confederate soldier. Near
the entrance of Duke University Chapel, a statue of Lee has been defaced, the
nose broken off.
Wednesday
at dawn, Baltimore carried out a cultural cleansing by taking down statues of
Lee and Maryland Chief Justice Roger Taney who wrote the Dred Scott decision
and opposed Lincoln's suspension of the right of habeas corpus.
Like ISIS,
which smashed the storied ruins of Palmyra, and the al-Qaida rebels who ravaged
the fabled Saharan city of Timbuktu, the new barbarism has come to America.
This is going to become a blazing issue, not only between but within the
parties.
There are
10 Confederates in Statuary Hall in the Capitol, among them Lee, Georgia's
Alexander Stephens, vice president to Jefferson Davis, and Davis himself. The
Black Caucus wants them gone.
Mount
Rushmore-sized carvings of Lee, Jackson and Davis are on Stone Mountain,
Georgia. Are they to be blasted off?
There are
countless universities, colleges and high schools like Washington & Lee
named for Confederate statesmen and soldiers. Across the Potomac from D.C. are
Jefferson Davis Highway and Leesburg Pike to Leesburg itself, 25 miles north.
Are all highways, streets, towns and counties named for Confederates to be
renamed? What about Fort Bragg?
On every
Civil War battlefield, there are monuments to the Southern fallen. Gettysburg
has hundreds of memorials, statues and markers. But if, as the left insists we
accept, the Confederates were traitors trying to tear America apart to preserve
an evil system, upon what ground do Democrats stand to resist the radical
left's demands?
What do we
do with those battlefields where Confederates were victorious: Bull Run,
Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville?
"Where
does this all end?" President Trump asked.
It doesn't.
Not until America's histories and biographies are burned and new texts written
to Nazify Lee, Jackson, Davis and all the rest, will a newly indoctrinated
generation of Americans accede to this demand to tear down and destroy what
their fathers cherished.
And once
all the Confederates are gone, one must begin with the explorers, and then the
slave owners like Presidents Washington, Jefferson and Madison, who seceded
from slave-free Britain. White supremacists all.
Andrew
Jackson, Henry Clay of Kentucky and John Calhoun must swiftly follow.
Then there
are all those segregationists. From 1865 to 1965, virtually all of the great
Southern senators were white supremacists.
In the
first half of the 20th century, Woodrow Wilson and FDR carried all 11 states of
a rigidly segregationist South all six times they ran, and FDR rewarded Dixie
by putting a Klansman on the Supreme Court.
While easy
for Republicans to wash their hands of such odious elements as Nazis in Charlottesville,
will they take up the defense of the monuments and statues that have defined
our history, or capitulate to the icon-smashers?
In this
Second American Civil War, whose side are you on?
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