Confederate Monuments: The Problem With Politically Correct History
  
Confederate monuments are an expression of Southern pride in what Southerners did to preserve their independence.  They represent a view that the North/South war was an unjust war and that Southern resistance was heroic.

Whether or not you agree with that view it is surely a view that Southerners are entitled to express.  It is an instance of free speech.

There is still a substantial body of Southern commentators who deny that the Confederates were defending slavery.  They saw the war as a war for independence.  In his famous letter to Horace Greeley, Lincoln himself admits that independence was the issue and slavery was not.

So the idea that independence was the issue is far from a absurd view.  And, absurd or not, it is entitled to be expressed in various ways.  Tearing down Southern monuments silences that expression

See more on the North/South war here


Malcolm X, as a member of the Nation of Islam, preached anti-Semitism and called the white man “devil.” After the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X dismissed the murder as a case of “the chickens coming home to roost.”

In Spike Lee’s biographical drama, “Malcolm X,” a white teenage girl approaches the angry activist and says: “Excuse me, Mr. X. Hi. I’ve read some of your speeches, and I honestly believe that a lot of what you have to say is true. And I’m a good person, in spite of what my ancestors did, and I just — I wanted to ask you, what can a white person like myself who isn’t prejudiced, what can I do to help you … further your cause?” He stares sternly, and replies, “Nothing.” She leaves in tears.

But Malcolm X changed. He visited Mecca, where he saw people of all colors worshipping together. It changed the way he thought. He repudiated his anger toward whites after discovering that people were more similar than they were different. He renounced the racist ideology of the Nation of Islam, and in doing so knowingly signed his own death warrant. He was assassinated by members of the Nation of Islam.

Alabama Gov. George Wallace, in 1963, proclaimed, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” at his inauguration, and later stood in a doorway at the University of Alabama to bar blacks from entering. Nine years later, Wallace took a would-be assassin’s bullet, leaving him paralyzed. Older, wiser and chastened by the attempt on his life, Wallace changed. Wallace, one day and without invitation, went to a black church where 300 black clergymen were holding a conference. He asked to speak. Wallace asked for forgiveness. He said to the church leaders, “I never had hate in my heart for any person. But I regret my support of segregation and the pain it caused the black people of our state and nation. … I’ve learned what pain is, and I’m sorry if I’ve caused anybody else pain. Segregation was wrong — and I am sorry.”

The voters in Alabama returned the former governor to office, but this time, he received black support and made several black appointments. The damage Wallace did through his actions and rhetoric was profound, and despite the assassination attempt, he lived long enough to undo some of it.

Even a Confederate general can change.

Confederate Gen. William Mahone, one of General Robert E. Lee’s most able commanders, owned slaves before the Civil War. But after the war, he led an interracial political movement. He organized and became the leader of the Readjuster Party, the most successful interracial political alliance in the post-emancipation South. In 1881, Mahone was elected to the U.S. Senate, at the time split 37-37 between Republicans and Democrats. But Mahone aligned with the Republicans, the party founded two decades earlier by Northerners trying to stop the expansion of slavery.

From 1879 through 1883, Mahone’s Readjuster Party dominated Virginia, with a governor in the statehouse, two Readjusters in the U.S. Senate and Readjusters representing six of the state’s 10 congressional districts. Under Mahone’s leadership, his coalition also controlled the state legislature, the courts and many of the state’s coveted federal offices.

The Readjusters established what became Virginia State University, the first state-supported college to train black teachers. Democrats described the hated Readjusters and Republicans as advocates of “black domination.”

What about Lt. Gen. James Longstreet? One of Lee’s favorite generals, Longstreet not only became a Republican after the war and served in Republican administrations but also fought against the racist White League in New Orleans.

After the Civil War, Longstreet moved to New Orleans, where he urged Southerners to support the Republican Party and endorsed their candidate, Ulysses S. Grant, for president in 1868. He commanded blacks in the New Orleans Metropolitan Police Force against the anti-Reconstruction White League (a paramilitary arm of the Democratic Party) at the Battle of Liberty Place in 1874. He was shot and held captive for several days. He accepted political appointments from Republicans, and even dared criticize Gen. Lee. For this “betrayal,” white Southerners pronounced Longstreet a “scalawag” and “leper of the community.”

Where does this viewing of history through the prism of modern-day feelings end? Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once gave advice to a gay young man that today would be heresy. King suggested he battle his feelings, strongly implying that the young man needed therapy and sexual reorientation. Today, that kind of advice gets one branded a Neanderthal. President John F. Kennedy, frustrated with a high-profile Democrat who hadn’t supported his election, threatened to banish him by giving him an obscure ambassadorship to one of the, as Kennedy put it, “boogie republics” in Africa. Tell that to Black Lives Matter.

History is complicated. And history requires perspective and understanding, something sadly lacking in those who seek to erase history by imposing today’s standards of right and wrong.

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Forget face masks and fear - let's relax and accept the risk

By PETER HITCHENS

Every day I still see unhappy, frightened people cringing from human contact. They have been terrified almost out of their minds by foolish government propaganda, and the most basic trust, the very heart of civilisation, has been destroyed.

This is another side of savage, unforgivably cruel rules which have prevented grandparents from touching their grandchildren, or forbidden people to visit close relatives, even spouses, in their dying weeks.

Millions of us know this is all the most appalling rubbish, based on wild, wrong guesses and twisted figures, and one day soon I hope an icy public inquiry will condemn those responsible for the grave, incompetents they are.

But in the meantime what are those of us who have not been cowed into submission to do?

I suggest that we are allowed to register as ‘relaxed’. We will sign declarations that we will not sue anyone or claim on anyone’s insurance if we catch Covid-19. We regard it as a minor risk of life, to be coped with.

In return, employers, shops, pubs, restaurants, churches, swimming pools and transport operators should (if they wish) ask staff if they too are prepared to declare themselves ‘relaxed’. Or they could recruit new staff who are.

Where this happens, all the footling palaver of visors, muzzles, plastic screens, incessant obsessive use of hand-sanitiser and ‘social distancing’ will be abandoned.

Trains can have special ‘relaxed’ carriages where refreshments are served and baleful, doom-laden announcements are turned off. The upper decks of buses will be ‘relaxed’, or perhaps one entire bus in three (till we see what the take-up is). Airlines can offer entire ‘relaxed’ flights.

Everyone else can carry on, shrouded in gowns like the staff of a mortuary, muzzled in face-nappies, hiding from each other on footpaths and in doorways.

If this appeals to you as a way of life, if you think it is a proportionate reaction to the Covid-19 virus, please carry on behaving in this fashion. I have no desire to stop you or interfere with your strange habits.

And then we will see what happens. My guess is that the people who register as relaxed will be healthier, as well as far happier, than those who don’t.

Since the only other way for this madness to end is for Mr Johnson to admit he made a terrible mistake, which is hardly likely, I offer this as a serious, if slow, route out of our dangerous and damaging national madness.

In return for it, even I am prepared to submit to tracking and tracing while the experiment lasts.

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How woke warriors cancelled common sense: Stars such as Jodie Comer, Halle Berry and Florence Pugh are deemed to have transgressed the moral code of a self-appointed, self-righteous mob but it's not too late to fight back

During most wars, there comes a point when the seemingly invincible attacking army faces a setback. It doesn’t mean the war is over. Often quite the opposite.

They may have become used to a string of victories on the battlefield and taken the end result for granted. They underestimate their enemy. That’s when the defending army seizes back the initiative. Which is where we are in Britain today.

But hold on, you will protest, you are not even aware of this war. True, we are in deadly combat with a very nasty virus, but so is every country on the planet. So what exactly is at risk in this new war?

It is, quite simply, something that is fundamental to every democracy that has ever existed. Something without which we cannot sleep easy in our beds at night. It is free speech.

I hear your protests. This is not, for instance, North Korea. We can say pretty much anything we like about our own Dear Leader.

If we think he is a thorough-going rogue who should not be trusted with the nanny, let alone the country, we are perfectly entitled to say so.

It may mean we won’t be getting an invitation to Downing Street for cocktails and canapes once the lockdown is fully lifted. We’ll almost certainly be ‘cancelled’ — a loaded word, more of which later. But neither will we hear the hammering on the door at 4am that means we are about to be hauled off to the gulag.

No, it’s more insidious than that. And it is entirely possible that you and your loved ones have nothing to fear.

But free speech is not something you hand out in little parcels to those who have earned it. Every single citizen is affected by it one way or another.

The victims in this war are those who are deemed by the attacking forces to be insufficiently ‘woke’. That, dear reader, may very well include you.

‘Woke’ did not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary in its new guise until three years ago. The definition applied to it was ‘alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice’.

So it’s good to be ‘woke’, eh? It hardly needs stating that we should all be ‘alert’ to those offences. But language is an infinitely complex concept. Words are constantly changing their meanings, or sometimes being added to our vocabulary or dropped.

The Elizabethans had no need for ‘television’. There’s not much call these days for ‘codpiece’.

The problem with this new word is who decides whether you or I are ‘woke’ enough, and what are the motives of those who pass judgment on us?

This is where I get worried. I really don’t know who ‘they’ are. What I do know is that they are out there and they are causing real harm to our precious right of free speech. And I am not alone.

On these pages you will see pictures of some of the victims in this war. One of them is the Oscar-winning film star Halle Berry. She had accepted a role in which she would play a transgender man, but in this new ‘woke’ world that is no longer allowed.

She was attacked by the transgender lobby and has now withdrawn. Her ‘apology’ this week contained some scary language.

It was redolent of the sort of thing you might hear from a prisoner convicted of making critical comments about the leader of a totalitarian regime:

‘As a cisgender woman, I now understand that I should not have considered this role . . . I am grateful for the guidance and critical conversation over the past few days and I will continue to listen.’

Here is an intelligent, experienced actor who has played many different roles in her career abasing herself before the court of political correctness. Or ‘wokeness’.

The court ruled that only if she were herself transgender could she play the part and she meekly accepted that ruling.

You may remember Eddie Redmayne winning many plaudits when he played a transgender woman in the film The Danish Girl five years ago. It is unimaginable that any casting director would risk such a casting decision today.

Or Benedict Cumberbatch playing Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician regarded as the father of modern computing. He was credited with shortening World War II by two years for helping crack Germany’s secret Enigma code.

Turing was, of course, a gay man. Cumberbatch is not. Could he have played Turing in today’s climate? I doubt it.

Dustin Hoffman was a passionate believer in method acting and he enjoyed recalling an exchange he had with the legendary Laurence Olivier.

Hoffman told him he was exhausted because he’d had to film a scene in which his character was supposed to have been up for three days with no sleep.

‘So what did you do?’ Olivier asked. ‘Well,’ said Hoffman, ‘I stayed up for three days and three nights.’

Olivier: ‘Why didn’t you just try acting?’

Very funny, but Olivier was making an important point.Great actors are great because they make us suspend our disbelief. For the hours they are on stage or screen they become the character they are playing.

But perhaps I should have used the past tense in that sentence, now that we find ourselves in this new ‘woke’ world? As I write I can hear the tumbril sent to drag me off to the court of politically correct thinking.

So let me make the point that I am not defending some of the hideous practices of the past: refusing to use disabled actors, for instance, even when they were perfect for the part, or ‘blacking up’ white men to play black men.

They have, mercifully, been abandoned. And it has happened because we collectively decided that sort of prejudice had no place in a modern, liberal society.

Sometimes it took longer than it should have, but we got there in the end.

What’s happening today is different. There is a small group of self-righteous individuals who see themselves as the new guardians of our morality. Nothing wrong with that in and of itself.

Emmeline Pankhurst is a shining example of a woman who helped right a terrible wrong. She and her fellow suffragettes spoke for a vast number of women (and many men) who put themselves in the front line.

What is deeply disturbing about today’s self-appointed guardians of our morality is that so many of them often operate in the shadows, hiding behind the anonymity of social media. Others flaunt their virtue-signalling.

And instead of fighting back or ignoring them when they are at their most hysterical and absurd, one institution after another rolls onto its back and begs forgiveness.

No less a figure than Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer fell foul of the woke warriors when he appeared on a radio programme last week and offered some mild criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement.

He suggested that their message might be getting ‘tangled up’. He pointed to their calls to ‘defund’ the police. It was nonsense, he said. Who could argue with that?

Well, they could. And they did. They announced that he ‘had no right to tell us what our demands should be’.

Starmer’s response was to announce that the Labour Party was introducing ‘unconscious bias training’ for everyone and he would be leading by example.

You might wish to form your own judgment on that by logging on to one of the websites offering such training. There are a lot of them.

Many of the woke warriors are undoubtedly the same people who did their damndest to stifle debate when they were at university — those who ‘no-platformed’ speakers who took a different view from them, forgetting that the essence of a university education is to be faced with different views.

They even targeted Germaine Greer, the bravest of fighters in the great battle to win equal rights for women.

 Sadly, most university leaders caved in to their demands. No student need worry that they might ever be confronted by material that could offend their sensibilities.

They must, at all costs, be protected. If an historical fact is uncomfortable or causes them even the slightest distress, then let us erase it from history.

And their power stretches beyond the ability to censor. It includes the damage the ‘warriors of wokeness’ can do to the reputations and careers of their victims.

So now let me return to that other word that they have traduced — one which most of us had hought we understood perfectly well. Cancel.

If someone is deemed to have broken the rules set by the court of political correctness, the individuals may find themselves ‘cancelled’. I

It’s a form of cultural boycott. It sends a warning signal to any hapless producer or editor that the individual is somehow tainted and should be given a wide berth.

It happened in January to the actor Laurence Fox after he appeared on Question Time. He’d made the point that the way Meghan Markle had been criticised by the media was not rooted in racism.

Not unreasonable, you might think, given that her engagement to Harry had been received rapturously when it was announced.

But the woke warriors went for Fox and his work dried up.

It also happened to my old friend Alastair Stewart after he’d sent a text to a black political adviser that included the words ‘angry ape’.

It had been in a quotation he’d used from Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure and there was no suggestion that he’d used it as an insult. But judgment was passed and Alastair was forced to resign from ITN.

It’s even happened to Jodie Comer, the brilliant actor who plays Villanelle in the hit BBC TV series Killing Eve.

She’s been cancelled this week not because she is a sadistic multi murderer like her character but, far worse, because she is dating an American lacrosse player who happens to be a supporter of the Republican Party.

Not that Comer was the first actor to fall foul of the witch-hunt. Only last month, Florence Pugh, of Little Women fame, apologised for her so-called ‘white privilege’ after a picture surfaced of her with cornrows, a type of hairstyle favoured in the Caribbean.

And, of course, it happened to the biggest-selling author in Britain, J. K. Rowling. Her offence was to take issue with an article that referred to ‘people who menstruate’.

She argued that biological sex is real. That, according to the Twitter mob who tore her apart, made her ‘transphobic’. Even Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson, who’d never been heard of until Rowling created Harry Potter, joined in the inquisition.

One of the most frightening aspects of this whole process is that powerful people and institutions you might have expected to stand up to the mob seem too scared even to challenge them. It is the posture of the pre-emptive cringe.

But there is some hope, as I suggested earlier, that the defenders of free speech are marshalling their forces at last.

J. K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood and psychologist Steven Pinker are among 150 leading authors, academics and thinkers who signed a letter this week condemning what they call ‘cancel culture’ for stifling freedom of expression in higher education, journalism, philanthropy and the arts.

Another signatory is Sir Salman Rushdie. If any author knows what it is to face threats from those who are offended by your writing it surely is him.

They write about ‘a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments’ that weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favour of ideological conformity.

The writers acknowledge that the ‘forces of illiberalism’ are gaining strength throughout the world.

But what makes this letter so powerful coming, as it does, from such a wide range of thinkers, is the acceptance that there is only one way to defend real democracy. And that is to speak out against those who threaten it.

That may seem so obvious it’s scarcely worth saying. But we have only to look at what has been happening in this country over the past few years to see that the great and the good have cowered in the face of intimidation by the ‘woke warriors’.

If we do not fight back, the threat to our democracy is real. As Rowling and the other signatories put it, ‘the free exchange of information and ideas’ is the lifeblood of a liberal society.

And it is becoming more and more restricted with every passing day.

SOURCE 






The violence of intolerance is damaging our children

“You have to show that you are with Black Lives Matter, otherwise your mates will reject you and label you a white racist,” a 15-year-old schoolboy informs me. His friend, 16-year-old Lucy, struggles to express her feelings when she tries to explain her reaction to the pressure to fall in line. She supports BLM but has decided not to go to any of the protests.

When her friends discovered her absence, they let rip and attacked her behaviour. “I really resent being shamed and forced to apologise for not going on the demo,” she says, before adding: “Maybe I was wrong not to show that I care.”

Sadly, the global protest movement following the brutal death of George Floyd is proving to be no more tolerant than its target. I knew everyone from business leaders to celebrities had come under intense pressure to demonstrate they were on the right side of the angels, as far as the BLM protests were concerned. But I was not aware of the peer pressure faced by children to fall into line as well. A group of mothers told me their children appeared to be involved in a competition to demonstrate they were “more aware than their peers”.

Last week I talked to a mother who described how her 11-year-old daughter was at a loss to know how to respond to the pressure she faced from her peers and others on Instagram to include a BLM hashtag on her posts. “Can I just post a cake that I baked on Instagram?” she asks. Suddenly the normal form of peer pressure has become politicised to the point that some children experience it as an ultimatum to toe the party line. When young children are faced with the demand to conform or else, it becomes evident that cultural and political polarisation has acquired an unprecedented dimension.

The peer pressure to conform is not only politicised, it is also institutionalised. There are now organised groups of teenage vigilantes in the US who are devoted to the mission of exposing and punishing other children whose online posts they perceive as racist or insensitive. Anonymous Instagram accounts devoted to exposing supposedly racist comments made by fellow students have emerged in the US. Within a few hours one such account, launched at San Marcos High School in California, attracted about 900 new followers.

That children are under pressure to conform is not surprising given the speed with which so many prominent adults appear to have experienced an overnight conversion to the BLM cause. One of the most significant outcomes of the BLM protests is the rapidity with which its message became endorsed by virtually every powerful cultural institution in the Anglo-American world. Especially on social media, the failure to demonstrate solidarity with BLM is often regarded as akin to religious heresy.

Almost overnight, celebrities and cultural institutions — and ­especially the media — have declared to atone for the sin of racism by literally getting on one knee and begging for forgiveness.

I have stopped counting the number of films and television shows that have been cancelled since global media company HBO decided to pull Gone With the Wind temporarily from its HBO Max streaming service. This announcement was swiftly followed by the removal of TV comedy Little Britain because of the use of blackface by its main characters. Then UKTV declared it would ­remove an episode of Fawlty Towers. After a public outcry against this silly decision, UKTV decided to back-pedal and allow the episode to be shown.

The so-far bloodless cultural revolution is not just directed at censoring scenes that could be interpreted as racist, it is also hostile to productions that portray the police in a positive light. That is why Paramount Network announced the popular program Cops is no longer on its network. It also indicated that it did not have “any current or future plans for it to return”. It seems the main ­problem with Cops is that ­instead of depicting the police as a ­collection of brutal thugs, they were portrayed as people doing a difficult job.

There must be a small army of censors working out which song or film is likely to offend the sensibility of protesters. Changing words and getting rid of films is one way of communicating to the world that you too are metaphorically taking the knee. In this indecent haste to whitewash society, some will find just about anything offensive and little can be taken for granted.

The new Inquisition

Censorship by powerful cultural organisations is just one symptom of what is fast becoming an institutionalisation of intolerance. Although the different groups associated with BLM represent themselves as a movement for diversity, they appear to be zealously hostile to the expression of a diversity of viewpoints. As far as many supporters of BLM are concerned, there is only one version of events. The statements of prominent individuals and personalities are carefully vetted, and those who express a sentiment that is not in line with the BLM world view face becoming ostracised, fired from their jobs or shut down.

It only took a complaint made by Sasha Exeter, a black influencer, against Jessica Mulroney, who hosts a show on Canadian TV, for Mulroney to be sacked. Her crime was to tell Exeter she did not want her platform to be used to support BLM. After a series of angry exchanges, Exeter stated that as a result “she was paralysed by fear”. The TV network bosses responded by showing Mulroney the door. Not even the fact she is a close friend of ­Meghan Markle saved her.

In recent weeks, journalists who were not on message have come under fire from colleagues who are keen to demonstrate they have re-educated themselves and have become active allies against white privilege. The New York Times led the way, forcing its opinion page editor, James Bennet, to resign over allowing an opinion piece written by a pro-Trump ­senator to be published. Many of Bennet’s colleagues have adopted the view that the paper’s opinion pages should be confined only to writers who share their view.

The crusade to cleanse media outlets of heretics has enveloped other outlets. In many instances, groups of reporters and editors have demanded colleagues be fired or reprimanded for their complicity in “problematic” editorial or social media decisions.

The forced resignation of Stan Wischnowski, the executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, illustrates the febrile atmosphere of a witch-hunt that prevails in sections of the media. He was forced out after approving the headline “Buildings matter, too”. In recent weeks, media outlets Variety, the Intercept and Vox faced mini revolts.

Sadly, the targets of this inquisition often resemble the victims of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in that they roll over and apologise for their sin. So when Variety editor-in-chief Claudia Eller was placed on leave after a Twitter exchange about minority hiring, she issued a ­humiliating apology: “I have tried to diversify our newsroom over the past seven years, but I HAVE NOT DONE ENOUGH.”

The institutionalisation of groupthink within sections of the media and its promotion within wider culture have become most stridently vocal in its cultivation of white deference. The cultivation of deference — which is captured by the demand to acknowledge your privilege — is underpinned by the presumption that whiteness is a form of original sin.

According to the authors of this notion, all white people are racist. This point is forcefully argued in Robin DiAngelo’s influential bestseller White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism. As far as DiAngelo is concerned, the real problem is not white people who are hardcore racists, the real threat is posed by those “colourblind” whites who are convinced they are not racists. That is why forcing colourblind whites to confess to their racism has become transformed into a ­ritual of self-abasement.

The demand for white deference coexists with the assumption that the only constructive contribution white people can make to the debate is to acknowledge their guilt and re-educate themselves.

In the discussions surrounding the global protests there has been very little discussion on the significance and impact of an increasingly culturally sanctioned narrative of white guilt. Yet the influence of this narrative is entirely insidious. It represents a fatalistic acceptance of racism as an eternal condition of existence. If indeed people are born racists, there is little that can be done to eradicate it. Worse still is its impact on young people.

Children and young people are easy targets for the guilt-tripping moral entrepreneurs. Even at the best of times, when faced with pressure to fall in line to the latest fashionable narrative, young ­people can often succumb and conform.

Today, matters are made worse by the fact the cultural institutions and celebrities that ­influence their lives incite the young to feel guilty. The really important battles at present are not between protesters and the police but the war for the hearts and minds of our children.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 
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