Violent Iconoclasm
I came across an interesting article about the leftist statue smashers and their role in disuniting America. The top-down effort to dismantle America has been underway for 50 years. The current manifestation of leftist Marxist violence marks a notable transition from a country with a shared ethic and shared history to a fragmented country based on identity politics.
It is likely that displaced Whites - who in particular constitute displaced Americans - will not go quietly into the good night.
Iconoclasm And Violence, by Rod Dreher, The American Conservative, August 22, 2017. Excerpts are included below:
That’s often what iconoclasm tries to do: erase cultural memory. The zealotry with which iconoclasts go after their targets has to do with their conviction that the image, and what it stands for, is so offensive that it cannot be tolerated, nor can its defenders be reasoned with. They can only be conquered by force...
Why is Columbus under siege, both in his monuments and in his holiday (e.g., the Oberlin, Ohio, city council just voted to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day)? Why are vandals going after St. Junipero Serra and St. Joan of Arc?
Because they represent European culture and civilization, which entails Christianity. Because, in the minds of the iconoclasts, they represent whiteness...
[Samuel] Huntington, who taught at Harvard, writes that the country has been losing a sense of coherent identity for some time now.* It’s not that Americans were a homogeneous people, but rather that its Anglo-Protestant founding culture was able to assimilate immigrants. This has partly to do with strong belief in the “American Creed,” a commonly held set of assumptions about what the nation stood for: liberty, equality under the law, equality of opportunity (if not of result), individualism, populism, limited government, and free-market economics. These ideas, Huntington said, came out of Protestant England and its reception of the Enlightenment...
Starting in the 1960s, writes Huntington, “deconstructionists” of national identity encouraged “individuals were defined by their group membership, not common nationality.” Pushing identity politics was a time-tested strategy for colonialist regimes, for the sake of dividing and conquering subject peoples. But the governments of nation-states instead focused on uniting their disparate peoples...
Huntington says that this did not start from below, but was imposed from the top, by American political, legal, and cultural elites. He writes, “These efforts by a nation’s leaders to deconstruct the nation they governed were, quite possibly, without precedent in human history.”
By 1992, the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. warned that all this had become “a cult, and today it treatens to become a counter-revolution against the original theory of American as ‘one people,’ a common culture, a single nation.” Huntington continues, talking about how the promises of the Civil Rights movement were turned on their head by racial preferences...
One of the most remarkable things about Huntington’s narrative is how this disuniting of America was led by elites, despite resistance from the population...
The fact that we are seeing iconoclasm emerge, and that it is not only unchallenged, but actually encouraged by liberal elites, is a bad sign for the future...
The disassembling of the American Creed has been a 50-year project of American elites, but we are all going to reap the whirlwind. You cannot destroy symbols of people’s identity without calling forth rage.
* The author references Samuel Huntington's book, Who Are We? The Challenges To America’s National Identity.