In this mailing:
- Giulio Meotti: When Everyone Kneels, Who Will Stand Up for Western History and Culture?
- Amir Taheri: Uses of a Cocktail of Grievances
by Giulio Meotti • June 21, 2020 at 5:00 am
"We are afraid that anything we do is colonial. There's plenty of countries willing to step into that global governance gap: China, Iran, Russia, Turkey". — Bruce Gilley, The Times, May 10, 2018.
British post-colonial guilt is, however, having repercussions far larger than statues. There is, for instance, still total silence about persecuted Christians, according to a UK bishop leading a government review into their suffering.
Western history is seemingly being remade to portray all of Western civilization as just one big apartheid. It is as if we should not only pull down statues but also pull down ourselves. A successful democracy, however, cannot be built on just erasing the past.
"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue 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". — George Orwell, 1984.
What is this macabre ideological game aimed at accomplishing?... It is a power-grab to create a cultural revolution, to prevent anyone from saying that cultures are not all the same; to put Europe's past on trial; to instill perennial remorse into consciences, and to spread intellectual terror to advance multiculturalism.
The statue in London of Winston Churchill -- who stood against the Nazis during the Second World War and saved Europe from barbarism -- was covered up by the city authorities during recent protests. Its visual erasure reminds one of the nude statues in Rome covered up to please Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, or the "disappearance" of portraits in the former Soviet Union. (Photo by Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images)
"Antiracism is no longer the defense of the equal dignity of people, but an ideology, a vision of the world," said the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, son of Holocaust survivors.
"Antiracism has been transformed... At the time of the great migration, it is no longer a question of welcoming newcomers by integrating them into European civilization, but exposing the faults of this civilization".
He referred to "self-racism" as "the most dismaying and grotesque pathology of our time".
Its capital is London.
"Topple the racists" consists of a map with 60 statues in 30 British cities. The removal of the statues is being requested to support a movement born in the United States after a white policeman, Derek Chauvin, killed a black man, George Floyd, by kneeling on his neck.
by Amir Taheri • June 21, 2020 at 4:00 am
[The United States] is something of an exception in being the only major nation-state to have struggled with and, as time went by, against, racism.... The War of Secession, successive civil rights movements, the fight against segregation and methods such as positive discrimination tell the story of a nation seeking to move away from racism.
Slavery was a routine part of human existence from the start, and in some lands still is. Nor were black Africans the only human beings to become slaves.... In Persian and Ottoman Empires, slaves came from the Caucasus, Scandinavia, and what is now Russia. Again, no black Africans were involved.... Slavery was a common disease that affected every community on earth; a shameful secret of the whole human family.
Slavery was a routine part of human existence from the start, and in some lands still is. Nor were black Africans the only human beings to become slaves.... Slavery was a common disease that affected every community on earth; a shameful secret of the whole human family. Pictured: "The way in which Christian prisoners are sold as slaves at the Algiers market," an engraving from 1684 by Jan Luyken. (Image source: Amsterdam Historic Museum/Wikimedia Commons)
As the outrage inspired by the death of George Floyd in a botched arrest operation calms down, it may be time to consider what has been achieved by the anger it unleashed in dozens of cities across the world.
Sadly, I fear, not only that much of that anger was wasted but that it may have contributed to deeper communitarian ressentiments.
There are at least two reasons for this.
To start with Floyd's death was hijacked by merchants of grievances always on the lookout for an excuse to attack Western democracies, especially the United States. They translated Floyd into a "martyr" of American "imperialism" and pretended that the United States, along with other Western democracies, was a bastion of "racism."
Using rhetorical tricks, they dubbed Floyd's death as "murder", ignoring that the word has a precise meaning that can't be applied to the unfortunate incident in Minneapolis.
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