"The beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!"

The recent removal of controversial statues, including some to leaders of the pro-slavery rebellion defeated in the US Civil War, has been the latest flashpoint in racial tensions across the country.

Critics say monuments to the Confederacy are racially offensive, but supporters say they are important symbols preserving Southern heritage.

Why Trump thinks he wins on this

Anthony Zurcher, BBC News, Washington

Donald Trump's condemnation of white supremacists on Monday increasingly feels like the guy in the bar who starts his diatribes with "I'm not a racist, but…".

While the president has felt compelled to distance himself from the hate and bigotry that many of the marchers last weekend spewed, he has come down with both feet in support of the cause for which they were supposedly rallying.

This may not be as surprising a strategy as it first seems, however. Recent polls show the American public is generally against removing the statues scattered across states of the old Confederacy.

As Steve Bannon said in his surprisingly blunt interview with the American Prospect magazine on Thursday, drawing liberals into a contentious debate about "race and identity" allows Mr Trump and his supporters to become champions of economic nationalism.

After a tumultuous several weeks, the president is trying to find his footing. While it might seem jarring for the president who boasts that Republicans are "the party of Abraham Lincoln" to speak warmly of "beautiful" statues of Robert E Lee, it wouldn't be the first time intellectual coherence has taken a back seat to political expediency.

• A White House meltdown in the making

Maine's Governor Paul LePage, a Republican, said on Thursday taking down Confederate statues is "just like" removing a monument to the victims of the 9/11 attacks.

But relatives of Stonewall Jackson, a Confederate leader Mr Trump mentioned in his Thursday tweets, wrote an open letter to the mayor of Richmond, Virginia, urging him to remove the statue of their great-great-grandfather and all other Confederate statues in town.

Jack and Warren Christian, Mr Jackson's great-great-sons, said removing the statues would "further difficult conversations about racial justice".

read more:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40965029

In the wake of the deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, images of Confederate monuments being pulled from their platforms have taken off on social media. But no image stands out as strongly as that of the statue of a Confederate solider in Durham, North Carolina, collapsed in a crumpled heap after being torn down by a group of protesters on Monday. Now, days after the monument was ripped from its base, several protesters are facing charges, and local law enforcement says that more arrests could be on the way.

Eight arrests already have been made in connection to the destruction of the 15-foot monument dedicated to “the boys who wore the gray,” which has stood in front of the former Durham Courthouse for some 90 years. Takiyah Thompson, the person who tied a rope around the bronze figure that was then used to pull it down, told Democracy Now the day after her arrest that “the statue is a symbol of white nationalism.” She later added that “anything that emboldens those people and anything that gives those people pride needs to be crushed.”

On Tuesday, Thompson a 22-year-old student at the historically black North Carolina Central University spoke at a press conference led by the Workers World Party, one of the protest organizers and a group dedicated to “fighting for a socialist revolution in the United States and around the world.”

“The statue is where it belongs—it needs to be in the garbage,” Thompson said to those gathered, who demanded that all charges against those who toppled the statue be dropped. “Every Confederate statue and every vestige of white supremacy has to go.” After she spoke, Thompson was arrested by the Durham Sheriff’s Department and released that evening.

read more:

http://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2017/08/eight-people-have-been-...

 

Yep, history never happened...

Trump asked, is George Washington next? Others eye Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton may have nothing to do with the Confederacy or its support for slavery, but some have called to tear down his statue in South Dakota.

“I would like to personally use a sledgehammer on it, with the help of Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones,” Juanita Broaddrick,told the American Mirror. Broaddrick alleges that Clinton raped her in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1978 when he was running for governor.

Paula Jones, who alleges Clinton sexually harassed her, backed up Broaddrick’s call, writing on Facebook: “Yes I am 100% offended… and all WOMEN should be too.”

What is to be done in Seattle? Lenin monument to come down

On Thursday, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray called for Russian communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin’s statue to be removed from public display, saying it represented historic injustice as well as hate and violence.

“In the last few days, Seattleites have expressed concerns and frustration over symbols of hate, racism and violence that exist in our city. Not only do these kinds of symbols represent historic injustices, their existence causes pain among those who themselves or whose family members have been impacted by these atrocities,”Murray said in a statement, MYNorthwest reported.

No brotherly love for Philly’s Frank Rizzo

In Philadelphia, calls came to remove the statue of former mayor and police commissioner Frank Rizzo, who critics say reigned amid police brutality toward African-Americans and members of the LGBT community. On Friday, police arrested a man suspected of spray-painting “black power” on the statue

read more:

https://www.rt.com/usa/400212-monuments-clinton-lenin-confederate/

 

 

From RT

When an academic event was axed by a Canadian university after pressure from left-wing activists who believed it was giving a platform to fascists, one of the sponsors RT spoke to says the label 'Nazi' is being applied to anyone the far-left don't like.

The panel discussion called “The Stifling of Free Speech on University Campuses” was scheduled to take place on August 22 in the Ryerson University of Toronto, Canada.

The event was expected to host a number of speakers, namely Professors Dr. Jordan Peterson, Dr. Gad Saad, psychologist Dr. Oren Amitay and investigative journalist Faith Goldy, known for controversial views on gender theory, Islam and other issues.

A Facebook page, dubbed ‘No Fascists in Our City!’ was established by left-wing activists, calling for a mass protest against the panel.

“We believe that transphobia, Islamophobia, and intolerance in all its form are abhorrent, and refuse to be complicit bystanders in it,” the Facebook page reads.

While the university initially approved the event, it was abruptly cancelled on August 16, after being apparently hit by the fallout of the Charlottesville violence in the United States. The clashes and car rampage in Charlottesville left one person dead and dozens injured.

The safety of our community is a top priority. In light of recent events, Ryerson has made the decision to cancel the Aug 22 event.

— Ryerson University (@RyersonU) August 16, 2017

 

“After a thorough security review, the university has concluded that Ryerson is not equipped to provide the necessary level of public safety for the event to go forward,” the university statement emailed to the National Post newspaper reads, citing the “recent events” as a reason to cancel the panel.

While the views of the speakers might have been deemed controversial by some, they are quite opposite to being “fascist,” psychologist and co-sponsor of the event Oren Amitay told RT.

“Gad Saad had spoken many times that he’s a Lebanese Jew, half of my family, if not more were wiped out by the Nazis in the World War Two, and Dr. Peterson has spoken explicitly against fascism, Hitler, Nazism,” Oren Amitay told RT, adding that the speakers did not quite fit what the protesters “would like us to be.”

Lebanese Jewish professor who fights for freedom of speech = Nazi, anti-semite, and white supremacist. It is truly impossible to fathom. https://t.co/9xMzT5pFxh

— Gad Saad (@GadSaad) August 16, 2017

 

“I would hope that when the temperatures have come down a bit, and they would actually speak to myself and other panel members, they would realize that we’re not promoting hatred, we’re not promoting fascism, bigotry or anything of the sort. We’re actually speaking the exact opposite of these concepts,” he added.

No, no, no. The enemies of truth who shut us down referred to us as Nazis, anti-semites, and white supremacists. https://t.co/TZkNx7SJPn

— Gad Saad (@GadSaad) August 19, 2017

 

The event was aimed at promoting “the right way to have these kinds of discussions” and exchanging opinions, while labeling anything you don’t like “Nazi” is itself an example of “ignorance, simple mindedness, hatred and bigotry,” Amitay said.

https://www.rt.com/op-edge/400448-far-left-brand-everyone-nazi/

 

Could the opposition to this "freedom of speech event" be that it was sponsored by Russia's RT?...

The Orpheum Theater in Memphis, Tennessee said it would cancel its annual showing of the 1939 classic movie 'Gone with the Wind.' Directed by Victor Fleming, the film about love during the Civil War, which grabbed eight Academy Awards, has been accused of being “racist and insensitive” by some people.

The theater remained rather vague about the number of people who disagreed with the showing of the film, saying only they had“numerous comments” from viewers.

Based on Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel, the film is set on a Southern plantation during the Civil War and Reconstruction periods.

Canceling the showing after 34 consecutive years of being featured at The Orpheum fired up social media. Some tweets were accompanied with the hashtag#HattieMcDaniel after the actress, who played the house maid Mammy. For her role in the film, McDaniel became the first African American to win an Academy Award.

The film's producer, Daniel O. Selznick, reportedly collaborated closely with the black community to avoid any accusations of racism.

The first movie in which a black actor won an academy award is now racist because 'feelings'.

Let that sink in.https://t.co/DRe1GI0Ybs

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) August 27, 2017

 

RT talked to the writer and comedian Jeffrey Mark Klein who suggest that, from monuments to award-winning movies, the country's left-wing is trying to rewrite American history.

read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-edge/401159-gone-with-wind-slavery-protests/

City contractors in Dallas, Texas removed a statue of Robert E. Lee from the city park named for the Confederate general, as heavily armed police provided security in the early morning hours.

A crane removed the 14-foot, 6-ton statue, which featured the Civil War commander astride his horse Traveller and accompanied by a young soldier, at 4 am local time on Thursday, according to AP.

read more:

https://www.rt.com/usa/403492-dallas-removes-confederate-statue/

In a penetrating essay in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, the distinguished Columbia professor, Eric Foner, weighed in on the Robert E. Lee question. The question, of course, is whether the many statues of Lee throughout the South should be ripped down and destroyed or perhaps consigned to a few out-of-the-way museums. That was the question that led to violent protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, a few weeks ago and which surely will agitate American politics in coming months and years.

Foner gives the South’s greatest Civil War general his due in terms of character and personal rectitude. He reports that the young Lee, at West Point, never got any disciplinary demerits, “an almost impossible feat.” The general, writes Foner, “always prided himself on following the strict moral code of a gentleman.” He notes that Lee biographer Douglas Southall Freeman warned against looking for ambiguity or complexity in the Lee persona, for his virtue was simply too simple.

But of course Lee held views on race and slavery that today are considered anathema to most Americans. And so, writes Foner, the Lee “legend” should be retired—“whatever the fate of his statues and memorials.”

But what should be the fate of those statues and memorials? Foner doesn’t exactly say. He merely predicts that future historians won’t likely return Lee to his pedestal, “metaphorically speaking.”

Thus does Foner seemingly seek to separate history’s “metaphorical” judgment from the real-world effort to remove or destroy statues of men once considered figures of greatness but now considered villainous by modern standards. But in reality, no such separation can work. Just the other day, a famous Thomas Jefferson statue at the University of Virginia, which Jefferson founded, was shrouded in black, with the words “racist” and “rapist” spread across it. While Foner may wish to separate himself from such activities, his Times essay certainly gives encouragement to those bent on going beyond mere metaphorical expression on such matters.

That’s because it’s all about power. As Foner wrote in another Times piece in August, “Historical monuments are, among other things, an expression of power—an indication of who has the power to choose how history is remembered in public places.” True, but how history is remembered in the history books can have great impact on the battles over history in the public square. A compelling example is Eric Foner himself.

read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/eric-foner-artful-finess...

 

...

Yet this self-described yellow-dog Democrat (“I no longer vote for the man, I vote the party”) and fan of Bill Clinton’s told me, “I’m for the Confederate flag flying anywhere anybody wants to fly it at any time. If they have a referendum in a state that says ‘Take the flag down off the state capitol,’ I think they ought to take the flag down. But the flag to me represents many noble things.”

“There seems to be no understanding,” he continued, “that the Civil War was really an argument between one form of society and another form of society. There’s no way I can get people to see that the soldiers were not much concerned about slavery on either side.”

He spoke sympathetically of a good friend, a black attorney in Memphis, who felt “real pain” when passing the statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, “this ex-slave trader” and leader of the Ku Klux Klan. (Which Forrest later repudiated.)

Foote explained to his friend the qualities in this “military genius” that have recommended Forrest as a subject to thoughtful Southern writers from Andrew Lytle to Madison Smartt Bell. His efforts were in vain.

In the current hysteria, with Robert E. Lee a goner and Thomas Jefferson on deck, the Shelby Footes are in short supply.

But if the proper response to speech you find objectionable is not censorship butmore speech, isn’t the proper response to monuments whose subjects one disesteems the emplacement of more statues? Besides, a sculpture is a work of fine art, and the destruction thereof is akin to the burning of a book.

A statue of our native son General Emory Upton, postbellum military reformer, directs traffic in the center of my hometown. Upton had one outstanding quality: He was ours. On the debit side, historians tell us that he was a humorless precisian, an admirer of Prussian militarism, and a withering critic of civilian control of the military. (David J. Fitzpatrick’s new Emory Upton: Misunderstood Reformerpowerfully challenges this received wisdom.) I’m sure Upton grimaced when my peasant Irish Catholic forebears came to town. Yet whatever his sins, I would never petition for the removal of Upton’s statue, let alone attack it with a sledgehammer.

I’d rather put up markers, real and figurative, to the forgotten men and women whose labors and love built our communities.

The Marxist historian Eugene Genovese, author of the extraordinary Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, said that you should never ask a man to spit on the graves of his ancestors. Anyone who would accede to such a request is beneath contempt, and as for those who make the request, Jack Kerouac’s words, in another context, are apt: “Woe unto those who spit on the Beat Generation, the wind’ll blow it back.”

Bill Kauffman is the author of eleven books, among them Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette and Ain’t my America. He also wrote the screenplay for the feature film Copperhead.

 

Read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/we-could-use-a-shelby-foote-today/

 

What is less well-known in the history of the US Civil War is that many leaders of the "South" had been educated at West Point, NY. Hence the ferocious aspect of some battles...

On January 25, the Washington Post ran an article by the author of a new book related to Thomas Jefferson with the headline “How Did We Lose a President’s Daughter?”

In the first sentence, the author writes: “Many people know that Thomas Jefferson had a long-standing relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings. But fewer know that they had four children, three boys and a girl, who survived to adulthood.”

None of this can be verified. No one knows whether Thomas Jefferson fathered even one child by Sally Hemings.

The confusion originated in part with 1998 DNA tests intended to settle the questions surrounding Jefferson and Hemings. Their findings were announced in the British journal Nature in an article with an erroneous headline that read: “Jefferson Fathered Slave’s Last Child.”

The author of that article, pathologist Eugene Foster, apologized in an issue of Nature two months later, writing: “The title assigned to our study was misleading in that it represented only the simplest explanation of our molecular findings: namely, that Thomas Jefferson, rather than one of the Carr brothers, was likely to have been the father of Eston Hemings Jefferson.”

But even this is not right.

The DNA tests only showed that “a Jefferson male” was the father of one of Sally Hemings’ children, Eston Hemings. There were at least eight male Jeffersons in the area at the time that Eston was conceived, and Jefferson was probably the least likely to have been the father.

Consider: there is no record of Sally Hemings ever telling anyone that Thomas Jefferson was the father of any of her children. There is no record of anyone having seen anything, even the subtlest glance, pass between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.

There is almost no evidence that Sally Hemings existed at all. In his thousands of letters and farm books where Jefferson kept accounts, there are only a handful of references to Hemings, all of them perfunctory—food distribution lists and the like.

Consider, too, that at the time Eston was conceived, Thomas Jefferson was 64 years of age and halfway through his second term as president of the United States. Ponder as well that his bedroom, on the main floor of the home at Monticello, opened to the center rooms of the house, which had as many as 50 overnight visitors at a time when Jefferson was president and spending time there. That meant Jefferson’s daughters, their husbands, and his grandchildren were usually staying at Monticello.

In an 1858 letter to her husband, Jefferson’s granddaughter, Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge, wrote of the near-physical impossibility of any relations between her grandfather and Sally Hemings, saying, “His apartment had no private entrance not perfectly accessible and visible to all the household. No female domestic ever entered his chambers except at hours when he was known not to be there and none could have entered without being exposed to the public gaze.”

We have fallen so far down the rabbit hole that all of this may be hard for the interested reader to believe. I didn’t believe it myself until I began to review the evidence, and was stunned to find that what I’d assumed had been a settled matter was anything but.

Read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-washington-post-slan...

 

Read from top. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton...

There is a fierce debate in Britain. It is not about the Brexit nor the monarchy, but something infinitely more serious: the opportunity or not to take down the statues of Winston Churchill and Lord Nelson. With the ingenuity of those who live in the extreme periphery of the empire, we thought that the conservative politician was responsible for the terrifying bombardments on German cities, Dresden and Hamburg on all. To the admiral of Trafalgar the active participation of a brilliant military commander to the British colonialism. It is not so. Churchill seems to be a "white supremacist": this is how a frowning Scottish deputy describes him. The statue of Nelson in the London square named after his most prestigious victory is in danger for the same reason: Lord Horatio was a racist. It is not demanded by a handful of screwballs, but by austere progressive voices hosted by the prestigious The Guardian.

by Roberto Pecchioli

The wind, you know, comes from the Atlantic and, in fact, the idea of ​​tearing down stanes and monuments does not spare Cristoforo Colombo in the US. The news is that you will not pay homage to even two heroines of nineteenth-century feminism, suffragettes Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cody Stanton. Their sculptured figures will not adorn New York: feminists yes, proud fights for the vote to women, but, alas, racist too. A critic asks: once established the principle of ending it with every character of the past whose vision of the world does not coincide with ours, where will we end up? Wise question, with a very simple answer in its drama: we will end up in the void, in the pneumatic vacuum of a civilization arrived at the terminal phase.

It is more serious to ask ourselves why we have reached this point, since only from the answer can the hope of reversing the course arise. We start from the worst of the bad teachers, Sigmund Freud, and the most acute critic of American liberalism, Aléxis de Tocqueville. Totem and Taboos is Freud's work in which psychoanalysis and anthropology meet at the height of the controversy with Jung. "The word taboo expresses two opposite meanings: in one sense it means sacred, consecrated, in the other sinister, dangerous, forbidden, impure, and represents a kind of horror endowed with hidden demonic force that triggers an objectified fear, an interdiction of nature almost sacral." The taboo does not differ, in its psychological nature, from the Kantian categorical imperative, since it acts in a coactive form excluding any really conscious motivation.

The conclusion is the obsessional neurosis as a normal condition of liberal (neo) liberals. The taboo is also a totem, the concrete or hypostatized object endowed with a profound symbolic meaning that unites a particular community or social group. The figurative definition of totems is interesting in the dictionary published by Repubblica, central to liberal libertarian progressivism: an object of superstition to which a reverential cult is attributed. Our conclusion is that the denial of the idea of race, hence the inextinguishable hatred of any form of ethnic differentiation, is the totem of our time. Taboo becomes any idea, act, person or people that dares to deny the value of the totem, universalized because universal, in the aspiration of the anthropology it represents.

Not by chance, even another intangible symbol of contemporaneity, feminism, is put aside if the suspicion of racism invests or just laps people like the mentioned American suffragettes. The drift of a civilization that is characterized in a negative sense, anti, against something that, for more, avoids to define it to make fall in it any behavior unwelcome to those who control and guard the totem. In our opinion, the anti-racist totem-taboo conceals another, which allows and reinforces the former. It is about equality, an ancient idea that modernity has drawn from the French revolution but also from the American one. This is confirmed by Tocqueville, the French thinker of the post-revolutionary era, whose capital work is The Democracy in America, the fruit of a long stay in the United States.

He first understood the inexorable tendency towards the absolutization of equality, destined to translate into conformity, social massification, since the most serious pathology of democracy is not to accept the difference. The vision of Tocqueville is even more interesting for the observation that within democracy, alongside the tension to equality, there is also the passion for possession, the egomania of having, an inclination destined to never satisfy, which explains the bizarre coexistence of the totem of equality and its radical negation in the economy and in the real organization of society.

This is what Tocqueville said: "I do not know a country where the independence of spirit and authentic freedom of discussion reigns less than in America. The master no longer tells you: think like me or you will die; but he says: you are free not to think like me; your life, your goods, everything will remain, but from this moment you are a stranger among us." Chilling in its accuracy is the prediction of which we see every detail come true: "If I try to imagine modern despotism, I see a huge crowd of similar and equal beings hovering over themselves to obtain small and petty pleasures that feed their souls. Above this crowd, I see an immense protecting power rise up, which alone takes care of assuring its subjects well-being and watching over their fate. It is absolute, meticulous, methodical, providential, and even gentle. It would resemble the paternal power, if it had the purpose, like that, of preparing men for virility. But, on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them in a perpetual childhood. (...) Would not it also take away from them the power to live and think?".

Equality subtracted from its economic-social consequences is the totem superordinate to each other. The differences must be fiercely denied as non-existent, a joke of nature that society has the right duty to correct. In recent decades, the most powerful weapon has become political correctness, meaning the change of meaning of words to change the vision of reality. The goal is always to zero, prohibit, demonize the difference, excluding that of income. In New York they are approving the ban on unfavorably commenting on the color population's hair, with very high fines. These days is the attack against sexual difference in the world of sport. A former world soccer [Italian] champion, Fulvio Collovati, has been suspended by RAI [Italian Broadcasting Corporation - State owned] for criticizing the wife of football player Icardi. His crime is sexism, a neologism that condemns the idea of ​​inequality between the sexes.

On the altar of the principle of equality, the most obvious difference, the ethnic one, is denied and pursued as capital sin, utmost and unforgivable horror. An icon of tolerance and peace like Gandhi does not escape from postmodern censorship. The Mahatma runs the risk of being driven out of the moral pedestal that he occupies. In London they would like to take down - two for the price of one - his statue, placed in the same square as Churchill. The accusation is the same: even the venerable Indian chief was a racist. He would support apartheid against the Africans when he lived in South Africa and advised against the civilized Hindus to mingle in public with the African "aborigines". In Ghana, a country that should have more concrete concerns, one of his monuments has already been eliminated.

The game of the massacre would not spare Tocqueville, guilty of lese Islamism, since he wrote that he considered "few religions as deadly for the man as Muhammad's". At the Muslims' fatwa, the condemnation of blasphemy corresponds the Western interdict in the name of politically correct. Jesus himself has little hope. In a Welsh university the Bible has already been withdrawn, but what about his attacks on the Pharisees, about the absurd claim of being "way, truth and life"?

The totem and the taboo have another surprising feature: they act on all ages at every level. In fact, they overcome another pillar of modern ideology, relativism, through the generalized equivalence, presupposition of the theory of the identical. The obligation not to draw up rankings or classifications is absolutized by denying any temporal or cultural contextualization. Shakespeare is marginalized in some American universities. He is naturally blamed for racism, Shylock, the Moor of Venice, scorn for the disabled (Caliban in the Tempest, Richard III), but is not sheltered even by accusations of sexism (The Taming of the Shrew, the character of Lady Macbeth). As for Dante, he was homophobic, so that the sodomites are in Hell, but also racist (men be, and not sheep, so that the Jew among you does not laugh about you). Saint Paul is outlaw for the letter to the Corinthians. In England, some preachers have already been reported for having spread the Pauline pieces against homosexuality.

The apostle James is racist: Santiago the Matamoros. It is no better to Cervantes, whose description of the poor maid Maritornes, short, fat and with crooked eyes, is a distillation of sexism and aesthetic racism dating back to Homer. His Tersite, deformed antihero, trembling and pacifist is the opposite of the Greek ideal of beauty combined with goodness and courage (kalòs kài agathòs). Totalitarianism joins sectarian ignorance as it is forbidden to contextualize, that is, to insert facts, ideas and people in the time and place where they have matured. Impossible, the new ideas are better, definitive, indisputable, universal. Overthrowing Saint Bernard of Chiaravalle, we are giants forced to hold up the dwarfs of the past. The germ is in the Illuminism, which enthroned the Reason as the sole criterion of a humanity finally released from a millennial childhood. The universals of the past are not only rejected, but ridiculed, simple stammering of children.

The most evident inequality among human beings is that of the external appearance, the color of the skin, the distinct physical and biological characteristics. It must be denied without exception as its collapse would yield and ruin the entire building to the ground. The identical does not allow exclusions because the goal is to build one-dimensional human, one color, one sex. Series products, economies of scale to apply the criteria of industry and zootechnics. Therefore the past and every idea received must be rejected at the root; man is first deconstructed - the operation, in the West, is almost complete - then re-generated in a different form. The new and indistinct man becomes a product, an assemblage of pieces until the next goal, the transhuman, the man who is no longer such, but a detached piece, a prosthesis among others. If it proves incapable of adapting, it must be modified until the creation of the cyberanthropist, the final junction of the man-machine thought by Descartes, theorized by the sensitist La Mettrie, gear of the megamachine universe.

The deeply iconoclastic character of the terminal West must never be forgotten. Its main task is to shave to the ground memory, ideas and old values, to erase their vestiges through the oblivion of great personalities. The burning of Nazi libraries is replicated in a politically correct form, the invitation, which degenerates into an intolerant obligation, to hide texts that are not "aligned". The damnatio memoriae recalls the anti-cultural dystopia of Fahrenheit 451, while anyone suspected of deviation from the anti-racist and egalitarian totem-taboo is the object of the ostracism that Leo Strauss called reductio ad Hitlerum. At least once a day, we are all Hitler, when we give a judgment, we express a preference or, God forbid, we affirm an idiosyncrasy, we admit an antipathy.

The only admitted prejudice is that which denies judgment, or distinction, critical thinking. Criticism means precisely judgment, whose prohibition leads to mental closure, the prodrome of aphasia. Francis Fukuyama interpreted it, partly unaware, in his theorizing of the end of history. In other aspects, we could say the opposite: with the postmodernity the legend ends, the mythography, and finally History can be affirmed with the initial capital, the adventure of post-humanity liberated from the old supertitions in the race to overcome itself. Races and ethnicities do not exist, differences are an error of creation, beginning with the distinction of the sexes, those who disagree are destined to the same end as the statues of the heroes of yesterday, scoundrels of today.

The British press informs about vegan attacks in supermarkets shouting anti carnivorous slogans with physical threats to butchers' customers. The writer speculates that soon breeding, killing and eating animals will be considered hateful as today insulting someone for his race or sexual orientation. Nothing strange, the so-called "specism", i.e. the attribution of a higher ontological and moral status to human beings than the other living, is another post-modern frontier in progress of demolition. We draw from the web site animal-ethics.org the following definition: "speciesism is a form of discrimination towards those who do not belong to a certain species. In most modern human societies it is considered normal to discriminate animals of other species". Difference, in short, does not exist, has no justification and should be expelled with fury from every aspect of reality. Equality crosses the equivalence of species, Leonardo, beetles and hedges have the same value and equal dignity, i.e. no dignity.

We are estranging from ourselves, we leave the human believing by faith to unpublished dogmas. Different totems are erected, ancient taboos are demolished to raise new ones. The point of fracture of Western civilization is the loss of the sense of limitation combined with the negation of transcendence. An animal regression called civilization in the name of anti-racism, fanatical equality, ontological negation: animals of other species... For the Greeks, the absolute evil was the hybris, the arrogance of going beyond the limits provoking the wrath of the gods. God takes away the mind from those he want to ruin; the demolished statues, the denied ideas, generate debris, leave dust where there was, well or badly, a civilization. The new world is binary, open / closed, like the computer language made of infinite sequences of zero and one. The zero, we fear, is Western man.

************************

Original column by Roberto Pecchioli:

https://www.maurizioblondet.it/totem-e-tabu-delloccidente-terminale/

 

Translation by Costantino Ceoldo - Pravda freelance

See more at http://www.pravdareport.com/world/142273-terminal_west/

 

I thought this was interesting... especially dealing with religious views and postmodernism... see:

 

 

of postmodernism, religious delusions, scientific poking and darwinist socialism...

 

Read from top.