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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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Take 2.

I posted and deleted this because I don't want to get banned, but if I can't talk about the things I want to talk about then I don't see much point in caring about the account, anyway. Still, I'll try to be subdued.

The Robert E Lee statue from Charlottesville has been destroyed. Liquidated, actually, and slated to be replaced with some statue for black people, which is striking symbolism of how Americans are being liquidated to be replaced by foreigners.

I'm posting the reactions on twitter, because there are dozens of two-sentence sentiments that I share. I'll quote a couple, for posterity, and you can get the gist of the other side from the WP article.

Columbia Bugle

Disgusting. Why not give the Lee statue to a museum? Because people might enjoy visiting it, or one day decide to restore it. This is a reminder that the Left wont stop after displacing historic American heroes. They want to deface, destroy and replace them with their own ridiculous idols.

Jack Posobiec

Columbus is next. Followed by Teddy. Then Jefferson. Then George Washington

Jack again

Glenn Youngkin let them do this. His AG too

Never forget it. These squishes aren't built for this fight

Maarblek

people with no heroes and no accomplishments doing the only thing they know: crying to the courts to allow them to turn beautiful things that other people made into garbage

BlueandGray1864

"We'll put them in museums", it was always a lie. The destruction of historical artifacts has begun. Shame on anyone who supports this.

God Bless Robert E. Lee

Spencer Klavan

“How delightful it was to smash to pieces those arrogant faces, to raise our swords against them, to cut them ferociously with our axes, as if blood and pain would follow our blows”

Pliny on the destruction of Domitian's statues. The relish and vindictiveness in this process isn't an accident: it's a symbol and an effigy, an expression of violent hatred.

That last one is really quite striking, given this line from the WP article:

It was a grim act of justice and a celebration all in one.

Really, you should read the article, too. In it, I saw the genocide of my race, and it scares the hell out of me. I suppose this must be how the Jews feel.

So, is it justice? Is it vengeance? Should it be celebrated? Should it be destroyed?

And does the symbolism of liquidating the statue of a white man apply to the declining white population in America? Is the deliberate melting down of this statue a parallel to the deliberate replacement of the American race?

ETA: One more tweet from this morning, just a few hours ago:

GigaThaad

Literally my ancestor. We carry the Lee name as a first/middle in my family

While I didn't need a directly insulting gesture to tell me that my kind is hated and many seek our extinction (the implicit cues were strong enough) I appreciate this image making it absolutely clear.

Elon Musk

They absolutely want your extinction

Musk, as a white man born in South Africa, should know what it looks like when your native country changes and now wants you and yours dead and gone.

The Robert E Lee statue from Charlottesville has been destroyed. Liquidated, actually, and slated to be replaced with some statue for black people, which is striking symbolism of how Americans are being liquidated to be replaced by foreigners.

Black Americans are, well, American. It's not a symbol of Americans being replaced by foreigners, at all.

Look, there are legitimate criticisms of this- it'll probably get replaced with something incredibly stupid that's supposedly a tribute to black people, negrolatry is seemingly now a legitimate actual thing, anti-White ideologies like to use anti-confederacy(and as sympathetic as I am to the south, the confederacy is factually very easy to criticize) as a motte, etc, etc. But African Americans are not foreigners. You don't have to like blacks(and while I try to treat them well, on a personal level I don't) to acknowledge that their families have been here longer than the median White American's.

Black Americans are, well, American. It's not a symbol of Americans being replaced by foreigners, at all.

Kind of. They are Black Americans, with a society and culture distinct and separate. A kind of parallel society, and one that seems antagonistic to the other Americans. Similar to South Africa, really.

This. This comment right here.

People on the Motte make a lot of fun, often correctly, of the newest crop of social historians and academics and a lot of the crap they produce. But this comment demonstrates in my eyes quite convincingly that they have something of value buried there.

It’s a classic example of “othering”. American is literally by definition not something you can split up. It refers to nationality, not any sort of subgroup. It refers to a broad group political construct of humans. And deliberately sectioning it off for no good reason only plays into the hands of bad actors. And historically, it’s downright ignorant. America does have a large history of immigration that is literally inseparable from its current makeup.

American is literally by definition not something you can split up. It refers to nationality, not any sort of subgroup. It refers to a broad group political construct of humans.

Source? I disagree, "American" is at least as much cultural as it is political. It's why grinding down immigrant (and native) enclaves was seen as a worthwhile project, why public schools were so massively popular, and why Hollywood was so inmportant both domestically and abroad in shaping what America is. Baseball, Coca-Cola, and apple pie are not political projects, and I absolutely reject any attempt to define them out of any importance to the concept of "America." I'd like to believe that only ivory tower academics could be so disconnected from society that they believe that the only thing American about America is writings on dusty papers.