(Article by Daniel Greenfield republished from DCClothesline.com)
In Madison, Black Lives Matter protesters toppled the Lady Forward statue that allegorically represents the state’s progressive politics. With its American flag, feminine iconography, and Lincoln reference, the Lady Forward statue embodies the old progressive ideas that the Marxist thugs are destroying.
Toppling Lady Forward, like banishing Theodore Roosevelt’s equestrian statue, accompanied by an Indian and a black man to symbolize the former president’s friendship for other races, from the American Museum of Natural History, another icon of progressive symbolism, is no accident.
Confederate statues aren’t very threatening to the leftist cause, but the old progressivism, rooted in the conviction that America was a basically good country that would come to fully embody goodness, is still a competitor for the hearts and minds of the people that BLM and Antifa would like to see join them.
It’s also why the Emancipation Memorial, depicting Lincoln and a freed slave, is a threatening image. The previous assaults on Lincoln, Grant, Union commanders, and even the ‘Glory’ memorial to an African-American Civil War regiment, are not the work of ignorant people, but of radicals who are attacking the symbols of the progressive historical narrative that they hate because it undermines their agenda.
The Union iconography tells a story of the end of slavery. The Black Lives Matter narrative is that slavery never ended, not only in the South, not with the end of Segregation, and not even in the 21st century.
America was born in sin and never stopped being a racist society built on white supremacy.
Many critics of the 1619 Project have missed the most important point, which is that the revisionist history not only falsely accuses America of having been built around slavery, but is a component of a larger argument that slavery still exists today and operates using disguised modern institutions.
The movement to defund the police, like the rest of the criminal justice reform impetus, derives from the conspiracy theory that the justice system is modern slavery, with the police as the slave catchers. Police officers, prosecutors, and even people who call the police, white or black, are the slave catchers, sellers, and informants in a racist system that cannot be redeemed, but must be entirely destroyed.
To radicals who think this way, Lincoln being presented as the man who freed the slaves is a myth that prevents people from seeing the truth. And the entire progressive narrative of history is a racist lie covering up the truth that slavery and Jim Crow did not end and won’t end as long as ‘whiteness’ exists.
The significance of the kneeling black man in the Emancipation Memorial, now targeted for destruction, is not subservience to Lincoln. Instead, it reflects the moment when freed slaves in Richmond knelt before President Lincoln, only to be told to, “kneel only to God and thank Him for your freedom”.
Post-Civil War Republicans attached great significance to this mutual liberation and religious unity, but to the Marxists of Black Lives Matter and Antifa, the religious connotations are meaningless. Much like the biblical verse on the Liberty Bell, the theological convictions that fueled pre-war abolitionism and post-war integration are completely alien to their irreligious radical descendants.
The radicals tearing down statues see religion as enslaving, not liberating. That’s one possible reason so many churches and synagogues were vandalized during the Black Lives Matter riots across America.
Emancipation once meant that slaves were freed from slavery and that the nation was freed from the sin of slavery. That 19th century political theology has long since been discarded to argue that emancipation, for the former slaves or for the nation, is impossible. The conjunction of critical race theory and black nationalism contend that the original sin wasn’t really slavery, but whiteness.
America will be as racist and oppressive as it is white. The only way to advance is through destruction.
The progressives envisioned a modern America. The three Republican presidents so iconic to progressives, Lincoln, Grant, and Theodore Roosevelt, were the pivotal figures in the making of that modern America with a strong central government and an eye on the next century, until Woodrow Wilson and FDR flipped the script and the Republicans became the conservative political party.
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