Why Blue Lives Matter, the Defaced Monuments, and the Missing Apologies
by Norman Berdichevsky (July 2020)
The national “soul-searching” called for from many quarters in the wake of the death of George Floyd’s death will ultimately lead nowhere unless three points are addressed and become topics of a “national conversation”.
Even though the majority of demonstrators-protestors-looters in the recent disturbances have not been charged with more serious acts such as arson, or criminal mischief, and many were local residents taking advantage of the chaos, they did so with the full expectation that the police would give them a free pass or in monopoly terms A free “Get Out of Jail Card.” Indeed, the police acted in the most restrained manner. In fact, there were few arrests and many mayors praised those demonstrators taking part. All the mayors “in charge” have been Democrats who suddenly became oblivious to the widespread violations of the covid-19 pandemic restrictions on large gatherings which they had been urging.
The evidence readily apparent from the damage and further verified by many on line postings from their supporters is that out-of-town members of “Antifa” and “Black Lives Matter” made every effort to turn the demonstrations into violent acts with clear political objectives to intensify racial animosities and foment insurrection (under the guise of “anti-fascism” and “anti-racism”). This calls to mind George Orwell’s description of Big Brother in his prescient novel 1984; War is Peace! Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength!
The woman police chief of Seattle, Carmen Best, is in the upper left-hand corner of the box. She was ordered by the mayor to abandon her precinct headquarters, the downtown area originally called the Capital Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle. Almost tearfully, she explained on video that it was not her decision.
The first topic of this “national conversation” we should be having is that in order to prevent vigilantism and ensure domestic tranquility, the legitimate use of force is invested in the police and the armed services and in fact requires the bearing of arms when deemed necessary by law and constitutional oaths “against all enemies “domestic and foreign.” This is part of the oath that all new legal immigrants to the United States, and members of Congress as well as the president swear. The mayor of Seattle bears responsibility for the situation and must see to it that civil authority is restored before vigilante groups are tempted to take action.
The threat of defunding of the police is now being seriously discussed by Democrat mayors who are already facing mounting opposition from their own police chiefs. The chiefs and the public know that “Blue lives” do matter in order to protect all lives.
The latest such confrontation is occurring in Atlanta (68% black Police force and a black police chief). The lives of many Black, Hispanic, White and Asian policemen must be just as valuable whether you use the slogan Black or Blue. The armed forces and the police have traditionally been the fastest avenues of career advancement and most secure and respected job security for Blacks, Hispanics, Asian and other ethnic minorities. It is they who face the greatest life-threatening risks.
Amidst all of the public wailing, and humiliating groveling pleas for forgiveness and apologies by “woke” whites claiming sympathy in some degree (from qualified to unlimited), most of which is nothing more than a public relations tactic on behalf (conscious or subliminal) of the forces of anarchism, opportunism, and the far left to now “defund the police,” there is one huge embarrassing fact always ignored by the media.
This is the omission of citing the major political party which has lent its moral support (what little is left of it) to endorsing or refusing to condemn the most outrageous violations of what Americans have taken for granted for 200 years as their guaranteed constitutional rights. This is the second topic of a national conversation, given the willful ignorance and dismal education of young people, and much of what calls itself “academia” regarding the roles of the two major parties in the creation and maintenance of racial division in American society.
President Trump may now hold a strong hand by avoiding any bloodshed and practicing restraint, leaving it to the extremists to demonstrate the utter futility and danger of their ideas and actions but the longer the stalemate continues, the more impatience will grow, the greater public opinion will demand a resolution, and the more veteran, dedicated, decent policemen of all races will abandon this career and leave ordinary citizens to rely on their own resources.
Historic Responsibility of the Racial Divide in American Politics and the Big Lie of “White Supremacy”
When will we see the leadership and practically the entire congressional membership of the Democrats kneeling to ask for an apology from the American People for their historic support of policies of division by race, ethnicity, gender, age, class and religion, all fueled by envy? The most deeply entrenched divisions stem from the Democrats’ “4 S” formula of Slavery, Secession, Segregation, to which they have now added galloping (rather than creeping) “Socialism.” The events of the past month in more than a dozen of our largest cities, all under their control (mayor, district attorney, courts, and congressmen) have been the scene of anarchic violence creating a shambles of disorder.
From its foundation through the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Democrats were entirely identified in much of the South and scattered locations elsewhere with the defense of slavery, the promotion of secession, the institutionalization of Jim Crow laws, the “grandfather clauses,” lynching, and racial segregation.
During Reconstruction, 1865-77, the term “Black Republicans” was used with even great vehemence by many white Southerners at the spectacle of liberated slaves serving as Republican Congressmen in Washington. All the early black congressmen and senators elected during Reconstruction were members of the Republican Party and worked towards policies of promoting black voting rights and racial harmony. The Democrats objected to many of the newly elected black officials and managed to unseat several of them who had been elected in 1870. Thirteen of the twenty-two blacks elected to Congress during Reconstruction were ex-slaves and all were self-taught.
From 1878 until the advent of the Depression, the entire South was a total monopoly of the Democrats and Blacks effectively barred from voting in congressional elections. For the next 90 years, only a single one was elected in the South after withdrawal of Federal troops (Charles White, in North Carolina, 1891) and the first one elected in a Northern state (Oscar De Priest, Illinois, 1929) and he remained the only black in the House of Representatives for the next 12 years. Both of these men were of course, Republicans, and there should be statues erected in their cherished memory as monuments to the vision they held of racial equality and harmony to replace the ones torn down in rage by BLM or Antifa.
Additionally, For the greater part of a century from 1860 to 1960, the Democrat Party was generally hostile to immigration throughout much of the country except in the large metropolitan areas of the Northeast where large Catholic and Jewish populations were less attracted to such core issues the Democrats endorsed such as prohibition, Sunday “blue laws,” and under President Wilson (a Democrat), a rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan as a mass organization, and total segregation of public facilities in Washington, D.C.
The modern day rioters who claim to be so upset about racism are thoroughly ignorant about what was the worst deprivation of civil rights and racism in February 1942 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which allowed local military commanders to designate “military areas” as “exclusion zones,” from which “any or all persons may be excluded.”
This was used to declare that all people of Japanese ancestry including those who were American citizens be expelled from the entire Pacific coast, including all of California and much of Oregon, Washington and Arizona. This measure taken against citizens and resident of the United States ‘enemy aliens’ did not affect Americans of other Asian origin but was a harsh and unjust measure undertaken in haste and panic. Genetically, the Japanese are not racially distinct, so strictly speaking the ordinance was not based on race but on suspected pro-Japanese national and religious sentiments and loyalty to their ancestors’ original homeland.
The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the exclusion orders. The United States Census Bureau assisted the internment efforts by providing confidential neighborhood information on Japanese-Americans. A special Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians to investigate the relocation camps found little evidence of Japanese disloyalty at the time and recommended the government pay reparations to the survivors.
In 1988, President Ronald Reagan (a Republican), signed into law legislation that apologized for the internment on behalf of the U.S. government citing “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” The U.S. government eventually disbursed more than $1.6 billion in reparations to those who had been interned and their heirs.
Civil Rights Issues
Few, if any of the young people who took part in the demonstrations/riots to support “Black Lives Matter” are aware that among the Black and mixed race representatives elected to Congress after the Civil War (1865-1877), all were Republicans (as was Martin Luther King and his father). When confronted with this fact, they will often stammer”—“That’s ancient history” yet the most dramatic change in civil rights legislation took place in their parents’ lifetime—the months long filibuster entirely engineered by the leading Southern Democrats in Congress, designed to postpone a vote to approve the epic making Civil Rights Act of 1964, banning segregation in public schools and public service accommodations throughout the country.
The legislation was finally approved by the in the House by Republicans voting 138-34 (80%) in favor compared to Democrats 152-96 (61%) and in the Senate by Republicans 27-6 (82%) compared to Democrats 46-21 (69%).
For the past three and a half years, the Democrats have used every tactic backed up the mainstream media—the Mueller investigation, charges of Russian collusion, the hastily concocted impeachment trial and now the urban chaos against our criminal justice system amidst the Coronoa virus crisis and the newly voiced attempt to “defund the police” while many cities are in chaos. Their Trump Derangement Syndrome has become a fatal disease outweighing all other considerations.
The rioters in our cities have begun to carve out their own sheltered territories such as in downtown Seattle with the Democrats’ acquiescence amounting to follow Lenin’s advice to “sell rope to the capitalists by which we will hang them”’ How did they manage this? By another tried and tested strategy. Make them forget history and the lessons of the past!
The Defaced and Destroyed Statues and Monuments
The third point of the “national discussion” should be the essential need to preserve, protect and understand our history. Among the statues destroyed or defaced in the mayhem and destruction of rioters which Democratic members of Congress ignore, are images of those leaders who have been venerated for generations, most notably Lincoln and Churchill or that celebrate a multiracial society with equality before the law or honor the historic sacrifices made by all citizens to achieve victory in war. It is no coincidence that among the graffiti defacing these historic markers are the hammer and sickle emblem of the former Soviet Union, the BLM initials and Antifa slogans. As if the George Floyd case justifies this.
Christopher Columbus, a hero to all Italian-Americans and whose birthday became a national holiday in 1934 under President Roosevelt in order to answer criticisms that no ethnic Americans of immigrant stock had been memorialized by a national holiday. A generation later, political pressure from the Left to which Democrats now are susceptible forced many of them to go along with cancelling “Columbus Day” to satisfy American Indian groups angry at the “Spanish” discovery and conquest of the Americas as an act of “racial genocide.”
Who would have believed that among the first casualties of this hatred of the past among the shockingly defaced targets with the epithet of RACIST by the rioters have been Winston Churchill, recognized in every past survey as the “Greatest Briton” ever whom the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan ordered “bordered up?” Statues of Washington, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt (who became the first American President to invite a Black man to dinner in the White House (George Washington Carver) have been defaced, torn down or protected from vandalism. Clearly, this huge amount of the violence has not been done by opportunistic looters. It has a clear political motive—to make white Americans and Brits disown their heritage as proud members of their nations (and not as “Whites”).
Even more unbelievably in this list of defaced memorials is the iconic monument in Boston to the 54th Massachusetts regiment of Black volunteers, including former slaves, who, together with their white officers were promised immediate execution if captured by the Confederates in battle.
The motion picture “Glory” was created to memorialize the abolition of slavery to ensure the promises in the Declaration of Independence and vouchsafed by President Lincoln in the Gettysburg address that “these brave men should not have died in vain,” i.e. Blacks who demanded to fight as equals with whites in the same Union army against the Confederates.
It is also ratified by the participation in the war by tens of thousands of white Southerners with no sympathy for slavery and loyal to the Union who left their birthplaces to join the Union Army and serve the “honored flag.” In the words of the song “Marching through Georgia” memorializing them . . .
Yes and there were Union men who wept with joyful tears,
When they saw the honored flag they had not seen for years;
Hardly could they be restrained from breaking forth in cheers,
While we were marching through Georgia.
East Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia were home to the largest populations of whites with unionist sympathies in the South. Pro-union and anti-secessionist sentiment were strong in Appalachian areas included North Alabama, North Georgia, Western North Carolina, the Texas Hill Country, northern Loudon County (Virginia), North Texas, and the Arkansas Ozarks. These areas provided thousands of volunteers for Union military service accounting for at least 40% of the native white male population born in these areas. West Virginians eventually formed a new Union state in 1861, officially admitted in 1863.
Almost 120,000 Unionists from the South served in the Union Army during the Civil War and Unionist regiments were raised from every Confederate state except South Carolina. These men were often in complete disagreement with the wealthy eastern planters. There were similar groups elsewhere in the border and upland South for whom “white privilege” was not their shared heritage with the despised wealthy slave owners who had forced civil war upon the country.
Flag of 7th West Virginia Infantry Regiment of the Union army (Southern white men
who fought and died to preserve the Union and abolish slavery)
These white men saw secession as dangerous, illegitimate, and contrary to the intentions of the Founding Fathers, and believed that the Confederacy could not improve on the United States government. The treasured Southern ideals of honor, family, and duty were just as important to them as pro-secession neighbors. The overwhelming majority owned no slaves at all. They were honor bound however, and ware that by rebelling against the United States, which many of their ancestors had fought for in 1776 and 1812, was an unmanly and dishonorable act. Is it any wonder why when real history does not conform to the rigid idea of racial separatism and “white supremacy” that Antifa and BLM believe have characterized American history, the evidence must be destroyed?
The motives for the destruction of historical monuments obscure any sense of continuity or meaning in our national history. They reveal the planned objectives of those who have a political goal that transcends the opportunism of the looters.
The great British writer, George Orwell understood the importance of eliminating history and destroying the evidence to ensure there is only one accepted version. In his novel “1984”, he imagined a totalitarian regime utilizing a simplified form of English, “Newspeak” to prevent the use of any sophisticated language capable of encouraging people to think for themselves. He wrote why the totalitarians have a desire to destroy and sabotage historic monuments as the rioters have been doing. He wrote…
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture repainted, every state and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
Orwell, a volunteer for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War saw first-hand how the Communists in Barcelona effectively aided Franco’s Fascist forces by attacking and destroying their erstwhile anarchist and socialist allies in order to ensure a Stalinist take over. Antifa knows if you are ignorant of history nothing becomes implausible. We all should have learned by now that evil only requires that good men do nothing in order to triumph.
Antifa’s robes, hidden faces, and bigotry are the same as the Ku Klux Klan’s; only the color is different.
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