DeSantis Stands Up for Statues — And History

As values change, it is reasonable to expect leading lights of the past to be less respected. But decisons to remove monuments should be made by community consensus, not the hatreds of some minority

Good for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The move to take down Confederate monuments was trying to infect Florida, and there is now a move in the state legislature to put an end to this madness. The governor has had the sense to stand up and say taking down these statues ain’t going to happen on his watch.

As reported in Florida Politics, DeSantis said:

I’m 100 percent against removing the monuments. I think it’s just gone too far…. I have not seen the legislation, but I’ve been very clear ever since I’ve been Governor, I do not support taking down monuments in this state.

Florida Politics reported:

The Governor said calls for the removal of “some Civil War general or whatever” have evolved into other forms of historical erasure, such as “taking down Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt and (Abraham) Lincoln, taking (George) Washington’s name off schools.”

“I think it’s totally appropriate for the Legislature to say we’re going to stop the madness,” DeSantis said.

He then referred to a local activist calling to take down the city’s Andrew Jackson statue downtown.

“What are we going to do: rename the city? I mean, come on, we’ve got to stop doing this and I think that it’s just, it’s not something that’s going to end up working out well for us and especially it’s like, you know, who’s next?” DeSantis said.

“You’re already up to, like, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. I mean, you’re going to go on and on there because … if you’re going to apply some type of hyperwoke 21st century test to pass people, you going to run into turbulence with MLK Jr., you’re going to run into turbulence with a lot of people.”

The governor went on to discuss the recent renaming of U.S. Army military bases, focusing on what is now “Fort Liberty” in North Carolina. It was originally named Fort Bragg, after Civil War Confederate General Braxton Bragg.

Said DeSantis:

Here’s what I said with respect to Fort Bragg is, that’s an iconic base in this country. I didn’t even know it was a Civil War general…. I don’t think most people knew it was a Civil War general. You just know you’ve been to Bragg, right? And they’re changing it for political correctness reasons. And so I don’t believe in doing it for political correctness reasons and that’s just kind of how we’re going to roll on it. And here’s the thing, you know, you learn from history, you don’t erase the history.

Bingo. The governor gets it. The move to take down Confederate statues is, among other things, decidedly about erasing history.

It is a serious fact of history that in the Left’s desire to erase Confederate history they are, not so coincidentally, trying to erase the hard fact that the Democratic Party was founded by slave owners, not to mention the fact that the party was run by die-hard segregationists following the Civil War. Republicans, the Party of Lincoln, were not standing up for slavery and segregation.

The Florida Politics columnist A.G. Gancarski, taking note of DeSantis’ position, added:

He then referred to a local activist calling to take down the city’s Andrew Jackson statue downtown.

“What are we going to do: rename the city? I mean, come on, we’ve got to stop doing this and I think that it’s just, it’s not something that’s going to end up working out well for us and especially it’s like, you know, who’s next?” DeSantis said.

Bingo again.

The idea of renaming Jacksonville, Florida, because it is named for the slave-owning Andrew Jackson raises another, similar question outside of Florida.

History records that New York is named for one James Stuart, the Duke of York who later became King James II. Before taking the throne, the duke was the governor of the Royal Trading Company — and the largest commodity the Royal Trading Company traded was, yes indeed, African slaves. Which is to say, New York is named for a major slave trader.

Thus the obvious question for all those tearing down statues of Confederates. Will they now be demanding that New York — New York City, New York State, and everything else bearing the slave-trading Duke of York’s name — be renamed?

Noticeably, there is silence on this.

In the current case, the statue issue is in Gov. DeSantis’ hands, and he has decidedly stood up for not hiding the facts of history by tearing down statues or renaming a major Florida city. In this case, statues that remind of the ties between slave owners and the creation and running of the Democratic Party.

https://spectator.org/desantis-stands-up-for-statues-and-history/

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Ethnicity and crime

The internet is currently awash with the video of four youths of Somali/Sudanese appearance leaving a car. Police want to talk to them in connection with the alleged murder of a 71-year-old woman in Brisbane. At the time of writing, three of the group have been arrested. While the police and the ABC are making no comment on the ethnicity of the group, keyboard warriors are certain that the four youths should be ‘sent back’ to East Africa. How the police and the press discuss the ethnic identity of criminals is fraught with Woke obstacles.

In London six years ago, a car ploughed into a group of people outside a museum. One journalist, Katie Hopkins, leapt to the conclusion that the attack was Jihadi terrorism and published a statement to that effect. The police refused to release the name of the driver of the car, and initially declined to provide an opinion as to whether or not it was a terrorist incident. The driver of the car was arrested and subsequently released as the police did not believe the incident was terror-related. The left-wing British press jumped on Ms Hopkins, accusing her of racism.

With characteristic delicacy, Rod Liddle weighed into the controversy, noting that the police had not released the name of the driver. If, Rod argued, the name of the driver ‘turns out to be John Christian Whitechap’ one can accept the police’s interpretation of the cause of the crash. However, if the name of the driver ‘was something more like Muhammed al Kafarkilla’ then Rod would be inclined to accept Ms Hopkins’ interpretation of the incident. He also noted that if the driver does have an Arabic name, and, if the BBC reports the story, ‘they will almost certainly describe the man as “Norwegian” because he spent a few months in Bergen’. Rod argued that ‘the BBC and the filth do not quite tell us the truth and instead feed us soma’. (Blame the grownups for the safe-space tribe.)

More recently Lionel Shriver made a similar claim when discussing the recent riots in Dublin following the refusal of the Garda to release the name and nationality of a man who had stabbed a woman and three children. ‘The Garda Siochana’s refusal to release the nationality of the man who triggered the unrest … has been worse than coy: try contemptuous. Were the culprit a native-born Irishman, his nationality would have been released in a heartbeat.’ (Fatalism is a bad way to run immigration policy.)

The same strange cosy alliance between the Police, ABC, and the left-wing press exists in Australia. Recently the Sydney ‘Snoring’ Herald published an article about human trafficking in Australia by Clare Sibthorpe and Perry Duffin (Human Trafficking on Rise and ‘Hidden in Plain Sight’.)

Clare and Perry claimed that, ‘Child trafficking, sexual servitude, forced labour, and exit trafficking – when a person is forced to leave Australia against their will – all marked significant increases in reporting since 2018-19. Forced marriage is consistently the most common type of human trafficking, making up 90 of the 340 reports of 2022-23.’

They told the story of ‘Ayra’ who ‘was one of an unknown number of mostly young women taken from Australia by their own family to be married off against their will’. We were not told where Ayra was taken nor the ethnicity of her parents. I wrote to the authors to ask why, in an article trying to educate the public about human trafficking, sexual slavery, and forced marriages, they could not mention the details of which countries are involved in this activity. There was no reply.

Apparently an ‘increase in public awareness’ cannot extend to identifying the countries involved in human trafficking and forced marriage. Thus the public has no way of knowing whether we should be watching out for concupiscent Scandinavians trying to abduct innocent Aussie sheilas, or peace-loving Islamic fathers trying to ensure that their daughters don’t marry infidels.

We see the same tendency towards obfuscation when the authorities release data discussing social problems within Aboriginal communities. Recently the ABC published a story stating that ‘Alcohol-related instances of family violence were 49.8 times higher outside metropolitan areas in Western Australia and there were 18.8 times as many calls for police assistance’. (Derby Wiluna top list of WA towns where police want hard-line liquor restrictions to fight alcohol-fuelled violence.) It failed to mention that the violence was mainly in Wiluna’s Aboriginal community.

Wiluna sits on the edge of the Western Deserts which were the home of the Martu people who, in the 1960s, who were among the last Aboriginal groups living a traditional way of life and had never seen a white person. In 1964, travelling in ‘rocks that moved’, white patrol officers began contacting the remnants of Martu people and moving them to settlements in places like Wiluna. The inevitable result was complete societal collapse from which the Martu culture, like all other Aboriginal cultures, will never recover. With the best will in the world Aboriginal social structures, cultural traditions, and beliefs, the initiation ceremonies, and above all, traditional law, cannot survive in the face of the fatal impact of Western Civilisation.

A similar reserve is evident in the ABC’s coverage of criminal activities among the young in rural areas of Queensland and the Northern Territory. We are told there is an epidemic of break and enter, car theft, and vandalism but when reporting these daily events we are never told the ethnicity of the criminals. They are simply referred to as ‘youths’. Should an Aboriginal be a victim of a crime or an assault we can be sure that the headline will be ‘Aboriginal boy/man/girl assaulted/robbed’.

We know that there are massive problems within Aboriginal communities due to the complete destruction of traditional culture. I happen to believe that there are no solutions at the present time. For the foreseeable future drunken Aboriginal men will continue to beat up their wives and put them in hospital. Aboriginal kids will continue to steal cars and anything else they can get their hands on. Above all, alcohol will continue to create chaos and ensure the continuance of poverty within Aboriginal communities.

And, also for the foreseeable future, the ABC will continue to present a hopelessly shallow, dishonest account of the causes and consequences of the destruction of Aboriginal culture. Presenting such inadequate accounts of problems in minority communities helps no one.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/ethnicity-and-crime

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Woke ideology and totalitarianism

We all know by now that society’s Adventures in Wokeland are never-ending. Thankfully, these sagas have become so annoying that their abusive tsunami of evil has caused many ordinary people to wake up and resist.

Examples of Wokeism and reactions to it are legion. Drag queen story time for toddlers has become a common activity, fiercely defended. Note the lengthy and laborious legal battles involving those public figures who have raised objections. It is a nightmare for them, even when they win. More recently, the ABC has advertised at least one drag show in a library for kids aged 3-5. Thankfully, it was cancelled after a huge outcry from a concerned public.

Deflowering the innocence of very young children via these sorts of events is bad, of course, but some would argue it is not as bad as real acts of tyranny and despotism.

Yes… But both are under-girded by ideology.

The Leninist with his rifle and the sexual militants with their costumes are driven by the same ideology: the urge to remake the world in their image – no matter how much it must be razed to the ground along the way.

Ideology is the root, while the usual isms – communism, Nazism, and Wokeism – are all its fruit. We must recall what the great minds have said about this type of ideology. Consider the famous lines of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, from his The Gulag Archipelago:

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.

Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory that helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honours.

Thanks to ideology, the 20th Century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.

Many others have helped us to see this ideology for what it is. One incredibly inspiring person who long battled the totalitarian temptation, whatever its latest label and current appellation, was the late Sir Roger Scruton (1944-2020). He was fighting Woke totalitarianism well before the term was being used, and he fought it on both sides of the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall.

Think of his work in Prague in 1979 with members of Charter 77, including Vaclav Havel, and his ongoing work with Eastern European dissidents in the 1980s for example. After the Wall came down, he was still taking on the totalitarians, this time at home.

He discussed all this quite often, including in his 2019 article, Battling the same Thought Police behind the Iron Curtain and in today’s Britain. Many of his books could be appealed to here. Given that I recently revisited his 2006 volume, A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism, let me offer a few choice quotes to show how fully aware he was of where things were heading in the West – now so heavily submerged in Woke ideology.

Chapter 8 of the book looks closely at ideology, especially the Marxist variety. He asked how Marx and his heirs could so well corral the power of ideology, arguing that Nietzsche’s idea of resentment explains much. He is worth quoting at length:

Totalitarian ideologies are adopted because they rationalise resentment, and also unite the resentful around a common cause. Totalitarian systems arise when the resentful, having seized power, proceed to abolish the institutions that have conferred power on others: institutions like law, property, and religion which create hierarchies, authorities, and privileges, and which enable individuals to assert sovereignty over their own lives. To the resentful these institutions are the cause of inequality and therefore of their own humiliations and failures. In fact, they are the channels through which resentment is drained away. Once institutions of law, property, and religion are destroyed – and their destruction is the normal result of totalitarian government – resentment takes up its place immovably, as the ruling principle of the state.

For the resentful, there is no such thing as authority or legitimate power. There is only pure power, exercised by one person over another, and diagnosed through Lenin’s famous questions: ‘Who? Whom?’ Once in power, therefore, the resentful are inclined to dispense with mediating institutions, and erect a system of pure power relations, in which individual sovereignty is extinguished by central control. They may do this in the name of equality, meaning thereby to dispossess the rich and the privileged. Or they may do it in the name of racial purity, meaning thereby to dispossess the aliens who have stolen their birthright. One thing is certain, however, which is that there will be target groups. Resentment, in the form of it that I am considering, is not directed against specific individuals, in response to specific injuries. It is directed against groups, conceived as collectively offensive and bearing a collective guilt.

In every totalitarian experiment, therefore, you will find that the first act of the centralised power is to single out certain groups for punishment. The Jacobins targeted the aristocracy, later expanded to the ubiquitous ‘emigrés’, whose invisible presence licensed the most arbitrary murders and exterminations. The Nazis singled out the Jews, on account of their material success and because their apartness was both real and hidden. The Russian communists began with the bourgeoisie, but were fortunate in having to hand another and more artificial class of victim: the kulaks, a class created by the state, which could therefore easily be destroyed by the state. One function of the ideology is to tell an elaborate story about the target group, showing it to be less than human, unjustly successful, and intrinsically worthy of punishment. Nothing is more comforting to the resentful than the thought that those who possess what they envy possess it unjustly. In the worldview of the resentful success is not a proof of virtue but, on the contrary, a call to retribution.

That explains why totalitarian ideologies invariably divide human beings into innocent and guilty groups…

All this so nicely describes where we are now with the current plague of Wokeism, progressivism, identity politics, and victimhood narratives. In messianic fashion, these activists and militants have perfected the art of finding recalcitrants and naming and shaming enemies – real or perceived. And as so many of us have long known, it is done with full religious fervour and fashion. Says Scruton:

Now it is my contention that totalitarian ideologies always have that character. They legitimise the resentments of an elite, while recruiting the resentments of those needed to support the elite in its pursuit of hitherto inaccessible advantages. The elite derives its identity from repudiating the old order. And it casts itself in a pastoral role, as leader and teacher of the people. Its theories and visions have the status of revelations, conferring authority on the priestly caste. But they also identify a collective enemy, and in the destruction of this enemy the people can cheerfully join. The elite justifies its seizure of power by referring to its solidarity with those who have been unjustly excluded. Henceforth they will still be excluded, but justly – since they will be excluded in the name of the people, and therefore in the name of themselves.

Whether it is the ubiquitous drag queen story times, the pulling down of statues (as we just again witnessed in Melbourne, or something even darker and bloodier, the ideology of the Woke mob is the ideology that we can trace back at least to 1789. It really is the ideology of the guillotine.

Which is why we must continue to resist it.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/woke-ideology-and-totalitarianism/

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Australia: Cross-party MPs back Jewish community push to outlaw doxxing

A cross-party group of federal MPs is backing a push from the Jewish community to criminalise doxxing – the publication of people’s identifying information to shame, harass or intimidate them – in response to the mass outing of Jewish writers, artists and academics who belonged to a private chat group.

Liberal MP Julian Leeser and independent Allegra Spender, who have previously condemned the targeting of Jewish people and businesses since Hamas’ October 7 atrocities and Israel’s war in Gaza, gave their support to the idea of anti-doxxing laws, while Labor MP Josh Burns declared social media the “new frontier” for antisemitism.

The support came as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese condemned last week’s co-ordinated doxxing of 600 members of the J.E.W.I.S.H Australian creatives and academics WhatsApp group by pro-Palestinian activists.

“The targeting of people because they happen to be Jewish is just completely unacceptable,” Albanese said. “It has got to stop. It must stop.”

The push for anti-doxxing law reform is being led by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and the Anti-Defamation Commission. Under a proposal from the council, a provision explicitly prohibiting the practice would be added to the section of the federal Criminal Code which covers telecommunication offences.

Leeser, a Liberal MP who relinquished his position on the opposition frontbench to campaign for an Indigenous voice to parliament, urged Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus to move quickly to ban doxxing.

“Whilst this attack is aimed at Jewish Australians, the tactic of doxxing can hurt anyone perceived to be involved in Australian public life, from the home addresses of public servants and police to local branch members of a political party, or the details of family members of a public official,” he said.

Spender, whose Sydney electorate of Wentworth takes in one of Australia’s largest Jewish populations, said she supported an ongoing Victoria Police investigation into last week’s doxxing and consideration of whether further legal protections were necessary.

“We are all deeply concerned by the tragic and horrifying events in Israel and Gaza, but recklessly publishing details of fellow Australians to provoke division will not have any positive impact on peace in the Middle East,” she said. “It simply tears at our social fabric and brings enormous distress to fellow Australians.”

Burns, whose electorate of Macnamara includes the Melbourne suburbs of Balaclava, Caulfield and Elsternwick, which have large Jewish communities, said the doxxing of Jews had led to death threats and vilification and, in extreme cases, forced people into hiding.

“Social media is the new frontier for antisemitism and attacking Jewish people,” he said.

“I completely understand that people are distressed about the conflict in the Middle East, but this is no excuse to target Jewish Australians at home. This activism is misdirected and dangerous.”

There is already a provision within the Criminal Code which makes it a criminal offence, with penalties of up to five years’ jail, for someone who uses a carriage service to menace, harass or cause offence.

The proposed anti-doxxing provision would take the law one step further and make it possible to prosecute not just those who harass people online, but those who facilitate and encourage the harassment by disseminating the names, workplaces, contact details and social media accounts of those being targeted.

Doxxing emerged in the 1990s as a form of online attack by computer hackers, where documents or “docs” containing people’s private information were uploaded and disseminated. It became a potent weapon within the anti-fascist movement, which has used doxxing to expose the identities of neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists.

‘The deliberate online targeting and harassment of Australian Jews, akin to digital terrorism, has now reached fever pitch.’

In the US, the state of Washington last year passed an anti-doxxing law with bipartisan support. However, that law makes it a civil offence, rather than a criminal one. Washington is the most recent of a dozen US states to prohibit doxxing to varying degrees, but there are no federal laws in place.

Executive Council of Australian Jewry president Daniel Aghion, KC, said that since Israel’s war against Hamas began, Jewish people living in Australia have felt unprecedented levels of fear and anxiety about their physical safety and livelihoods.

“In the last few days this has been caused by the publication of lists containing the names, faces and other personal information of hundreds of individuals, whose only common trait is that they are Jewish,” Aghion said.

“This has been done with co-ordination and with malice, in many cases resulting in harassment, death threats directed to named individuals and their children, professional and financial loss, vandalism of premises, and extensive psychological harm.”

Anti-Defamation Commission chair Dvir Abramovich said pro-Palestinian activists had declared “open season on our community” in publishing a “hit list” identifying all members of the WhatsApp group. “We know that people are often inspired to do crazy things when they are radicalised online and this doxxing is dangerous and will have real-world consequences,” he said.

“The deliberate online targeting and harassment of Australian Jews, akin to digital terrorism, has now reached fever pitch.”

Australia Palestine Advocacy Network president Nasser Mashni said that rather than worry about doxxing, the Australian government should respond to the escalating crisis in Rafah, in southern Gaza, where the Israeli government has issued its latest evacuation order.

“We implore the Australian government to immediately end its ‘friendship’ with genocidal Israel, cut ties with the regime and to do all it can to stop the slaughter,” Mashni said.

This masthead last week reported that pro-Palestinian activists had published links to a spreadsheet containing the names, occupations and social media accounts of hundreds of members of the J.E.W.I.S.H WhatsApp group and separate documents containing their images and a leaked transcript of their group chat.

The transcript revealed that some members of the WhatsApp group wrote letters to broadcasters, media companies and publishing houses raising concerns about pro-Palestinian writers, journalists and presenters.

One of the presenters targeted by the group, Antoinette Lattouf, was stood down by the ABC for breaching the broadcaster’s social media policy after she shared a Human Rights Watch post on the Gaza conflict. She is suing the national broadcaster for unlawful dismissal.

Victoria Police confirmed it was examining whether charges could be brought against people who had doxxed Jewish people and businesses in Melbourne.

“Police are investigating following reports that a number of people who belong to a private social media chat group appear to have been released online,” a spokesperson said.

The mass doxxing prompted Liberal senator David Sharma, a former Australian ambassador to Israel, to write to Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus urging him to request a federal police investigation.

“We would not accept such silencing or intimidation of any other group of Australians, and nor should we accept or condone it for Jewish Australians, no matter how strongly people may differ in their political opinions over this conflict,” Sharma wrote in his letter.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton last week called for greater leadership from the federal government to tackle antisemitism and said he would support any changes needed to “beef up” the current laws.

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/cross-party-mps-back-jewish-community-push-to-outlaw-doxxing-20240211-p5f3za.html

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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