Friday, June 06, 2008

Politically Correct Plaque Attack

We read:
"As one might expect in today's virulently aggressive politically correct culture, a movement is afoot to rewrite history, which includes "amending the plaques, statues, and memorials of historical figures to reflect their racist sentiments."

One movement afoot is to footnote a bust of Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney as a racist because he wrote the majority opinion in the Dred Scott case which, to simplify for today's Attention Deficit devotees, was a ruling that a slave entering a non-slave state could not become a non-slave since that would deprive his master of his property.

For another example, some South Carolinians want to tack a plaque on the base of the big bronze likeness of Reconstruction-era Governor and US Senator Ben Tillman who, according to the Charleston City Paper, had a hand in rewriting the state constitution that "disenfranchised blacks and established the segregation laws which stood for 70 years" and, incidentally, advocated lynching Negroes.

And folks in Lee County, Florida, want to rename their county because its namesake is General Robert E. Lee, even though Lee himself once penned, "...slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil."

Unfortunately, as some sane observers warn, rewriting bronze statuary markers "threatens to turn historical interpretation into a politically driven free-for-all." So, to prevent a lefty-righty rewriting culture war, the anti-South history-twisters should consider putting on a show of "diversity" by whacking a plaque on a Northern racist.

That, according to many, would be our nation's sixteenth president. In spite of his copyrighted catchphrase "The Great Emancipator," Abraham Lincoln's famous wartime Emancipation Proclamation failed to free a single slave and didn't even apply to the slaves held by Yankees in Yankee-held holdings. Then there was that business of Lincoln voting to keep all Negroes out of Illinois because, well, they were Negroes....

Lincoln not only supported the Fugitive Slave Act (a law that required escaped slaves to be forcibly repatriated to their masters) but even took the case of one Robert Matson, whose slaves had run away. Fighting for their forcible return in court was Matson's mouthpiece, Abraham Lincoln, Esq....

The whole point being that history-rewriters eager to excoriate Southerners like Taney and Tillman and Lee as racists need to look northward as well if they wish to avoid this plaque flack of their own: "Hypocrite."

Source

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

The Dred Scott decision, as "abhorrent" as it may be to our sensibilities, was actually the correct decision under U.S. Law at the time. Unfortunately liberals, who believe that the law is just a nuisance to their agenda, don't grasp the idea that judges INTERPRET law, not decide "social justice."

To call a man racist because he did his job is not only revisionist, it is dishonest.

Anonymous said...

Yes it was the shame to pull down the statues of Sadam and Lenin cos we don't like them now.

Anonymous said...

It's easy now to look back and say with all certainty that those that came before us were racist & evil etc. But we did not live in those times & within the culture that was prevelant then, so we cannot say what we would have done had we been alive during that time in history. We can think that the people of that era were ignorant, & in truth they probably were, but we have to remember that wikipedia & google were not around then so information & ideas weren't as easy to access. There is no shame in ignorance unless one chooses to remain so. These people undoubtedly felt that they were doing the right thing at the time. If there is no conservatism in society then we are doomed to socialistic order & if no liberalism then fascism will rule the day. So while ths Southern Confederates, as the losers in the War of Northern Aggression, have been vilified, both sides had their faults and their villians.

Anonymous said...

The reasons for the Civil war are constantly being rewritten. We learn in school now that the war was to free the slaves, it truely was far from that noble cause. The war was about economics, pure and simple (well, and states rights)

Anonymous said...

How foolish for anyone to believe the Left cares about truth and facts, as those are the things that unmask them.

And if we had lived back in those days, we would have done the same thing those folks did, obey the law of the day. I'm sure someone will look back at us a hundred years from now and call us fools and much worse. And for the most part, they'll be right!