Should Inconvenient Historical Markers be Destroyed?

Pharaoh Akhenaten, aka Amenophis IV, reigned between 1351 and 1334 BC. He broke with the Ammon Cult, which had been the dominant religion in Egypt, and introduced the Aton Cult. Aton was essentially a sun god. Akhenaten was probably murdered by the Ammon priests and after his death the Ammon Cult was reinstated. The Ammon priests were not content to have regained their former status and power, they also wanted all memory of the inconvenient Akhenaten and his heresy erased. Accordingly, they mutilated most of the Akhenaten reliefs, statues, and inscriptions, destroying much valuable historical evidence. Today, their iconoclastic behavior is judged as a case of deplorable cultural savagery.

It is the same kind of cultural savagery we see at work in the USA today. Statues of the founding fathers are destroyed all over the country because some folks resent the fact that some of the founders of our Republic were children of their historic times and were not immaculate in their private lives. They would have been unable to pass the Marxist litmus test.

Indeed, many great historical personalities would be found wanting if they were measured with the measuring stick of later centuries.

Karl Marx studied philosophy and history and never owned or managed a business. He would have starved if it had not been for his friend Friedrich Engels to support him with “grant” money throughout his life. Marx’s personal hygiene left much to be desired. His wife lived in constant despair and his daughter committed suicide.

Marx was also a horrific racist. Here are two Marx quotes:

“What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. … Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man—and turns them into commodities. … The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange. … The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.”

Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, 1844

“Without slavery, North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe out North America from the map of the world and you will have anarchy— the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. Abolish slavery and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.”

Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847

Marx’s friend Engels owned a weaving factory in Wuppertal, Elberfeld-Barmen, and was known to have treated his own factory workers very badly.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the father of modern pedagogics and founder of unilateral evolutionism, which became the mid-wife of historic materialism, Engel’s contribution to Communism, was a pervert. He could not have an orgasm, unless somebody spanked his behind and his nine children all grew up in public orphanages.

Lenin created the first Communist state and is responsible for the deaths of at least 5 million people. He created the secret police called the Cheka, which would later evolve into the infamous NKVD under Stalin and then into the KGB, for which Putin worked. Stalin with his GULAGS killed millions, and Mao Tse-Tung killed more people than Lenin and Stalin combined.

Genghis Khan, aka Temuchin, killed uncounted millions. Attila the Hun ravaged almost all Western European Nations. Napoleon Buonaparte’s many wars of aggression killed millions of Western Europeans.

And yet, all these “Great Ones” have memorials all over the world and even in the United States.

There is a Marx Memorial on Highgate Cemetery in north London. It has been vandalized twice so far. There are thousands of memorials all over the world for the mental father of class warfare in whose name millions of lives were destroyed.

There are six statues of Lenin in the United States. One in Atlantic City, New Jersey; one in New York City, one in Seattle, Washington state, one in Las Vegas outside the Red Square Restaurant, one in Los Angeles at the corner of La Brea Avenue and 4th Street, one in Hutchinson, Kansas, inside the Soviet wing of the Cosmosphere, and one in Willimantic, Connecticut, hidden in a scrapyard to avoid vandalism. Even if some of them were meant as a joke, like Lenin on front of the Red Square Restaurant, they are probably not in good taste.

There is even a statue of Stalin in Bedford, Virginia. It was erected in 2002 under George W. Bush in the context of a D-Day monument. One wonders what Stalin had to do with the allied invasion of the French Atlantic cost.

At a time when there are politicians and state governments ready and willing to do the bidding of radical hate groups in taking down statues and monuments honoring Confederate personnel and even the founders of our Republic, no one seems interested in taking down statues of two of the most brutal and bloody butchers that have ever haunted this planet.

This brings us to the Confederate Memorial in Columbia, Tyrrell County, North Carolina. The memorial depicts a Confederate Private. It was erected with private donation money in 1902 by the Tyrrell County Monument Association, which no longer exists. In 1902, the end of the Civil War lay just 37 years behind and 32 of its veterans still lived in Tyrrell County.

If the French have a right to honor the French soldiers who died in Napoleon’s wars of aggression, and if the German have a right to mourn the German soldiers who died in two World Wars that were clearly instigated and started by Germany, I fail to see why the people of the former Confederate States should be denied the right to honor and mourn their fallen soldiers, who were their fathers and grandfathers.

What most enrages the opponents of the Columbia Confederate Memorial are the words on the soldier’s back:

“In appreciation of our faithful slaves.”

This sounds as if the slaves were volunteers and somehow enjoyed their role as slaves. There may have been sort of a Stockholm Syndrome at work: if you are helpless in the power of an overwhelming adversary, you may try to make nice with your controlling masters. This psychology may have been why many slaves actually fought for the Southern cause. Also, the slave <> slaveholder antagonism was not necessarily a black <> white antagonism. The largest black slaveholder in the South was John Carruthers Stanly in North Carolina. He owned three turpentine plantations in the Cape Fear region with a total of 163 black slaves. Stanly was known as a harsh, profit-minded taskmaster, and his slaves would constantly run away because they were treated badly.

In 2021, Ms. Karen Simmons-Creef, who resides in Greenville, not in Tyrrell County, demanded in a letter to the Tyrrell County Board of Commissioners that the entire memorial should be removed because “it loudly hurts the citizens of this community”. She claims that she collected over 5000 signatures in favor of removing the statue. Wherever she got those, they sure did not come from the hurt Tyrrell County citizens. According to the US Census, Tyrrell County had only 3,774 inhabitants in 2020, of which 1,280 were black and approx. 500 were children under 18. I assume that she got the bulk of the signatures from BLM supporters, who probably also paid for the big billboard on HWY 64 that postulates the removal of the memorial and who are not residents of Tyrrell County.

I believe that historical monuments are teachable objects. No matter what our government teachers may brainwash our children to believe, the Confederate monument in Columbia will continue to reminds us of the Civil War, of the injustice of slavery, the intense conflict of values and emotions at the time and of the mentality in 1902, when the monument was erected. If we erase historical markers, we delete the memory of our past mistakes. If we delete historic memory, we will likely not learn from it. And if we do not learn from it, we will likely repeat those mistakes. Maybe we should put a plaque next to the memorial explaining its context.

Here are some examples for memorials for personalities far worse than the Confederate soldier in Columbia:

Marxists want to erect a memorial for the man who is responsible for the deaths of over 70 million (70,000,000) people including the 1.5 million who were killed during the Cultural Revolution, but former Confederates should not be allowed to remember their fallen soldiers? Give me a break!