So, the Left wants Southerners to celebrate MLK Jr and recognize Black History Month, the Holocaust, and other events of importance to non-whites and non-Southerners, but in turn they want to take down our flags, monuments, and every other vestige of our cultural inheritance? I don’t much like that deal. Do you, Mr and Mrs Southerner?

– Michael Hill

What it took the entire infernal apparatus of Red Abe Lincoln’s federal government four years to accomplish, and that still very imperfectly, has been done in little more than a fortnight. New Orleans, under the diktats of its grubby mealworm of a mayor Mitch Landrieu and the rest of his corrupt Bolshevik clan, removed in succession the Crescent City’s monuments of Jefferson Davis, P.G.T. Beauregard, and, as a final capstone, Robert E. Lee. Thus was mollified the baying for blood of the professional ‘restitution’ brigade….for an hour or so. Benjamin Butler took a break from eternally rolling his boulder uphill in Hades to laugh manically.

On cue, the alumni of our most tolerant seminaries ran into the fray, boldly going where several men, women, and ‘other’ have gone before and affirming that the litany of levelling oblation directed Dixie’s way was right and pleasing to God. Uriah Heep was a rank amateur in malicious sycophancy when compared to this bunch. Typical was this drivelling manifesto, riddled with spelling errors, posted on the 19th of May in that repository of craft beer photos, geek culture, and Pharisaical musings known as the Reformed Pub group on Facebook:

Rant to fellow believers. The Confederacy was not some pure romantic Antebellum era of God fearing stalwarts like stone wall Jackson. It’s was made of seditious human enslavers. After the war these people; my ancestors, proceeded to intimidate, harass, hate, and demean former slaves for a century. Any connection to the white surpremecy human enslavement movement should be shunned. We should be humiliated about this part of our nation’s history, not proud of it. As brothers and sisters in Christ we should hold ourselves to the standard of Christ. This confederate history is beneath that standard.

But fear not! Jonathan Edwards 2.0 is not lacking in grace! (Particularly since he received some rather minor flak from the three or four people in that group who still retain some lingering vestiges of their Southern heritage.) Hence, he magnanimously provided us with an equally atrociously written caveat:

This statement was very strongly worded and Unfairly vague/ general. The idea behind it is simple. We should not seek to glorify a past that is tainted in sin. We should not complain when defiantly built and placed statues are taken down.

Not all southerners owned slaves. Not all southerns fought bc of slavery.

But not all Nazis killed jews, and not all germans were Nazis. But they don’t have statutes of rommell or Hitler, nor do they reminisce about the glory days of the 3rd Reich

Ah, yes. Such a simple idea – and from a simpleton yet! That makes it extra poetic. Given that the entirety of man’s past is deeply tainted in sin, I suppose that means we should emulate the Anabaptists in declaring all representations of the human form to be ‘graven imagery’ and thus unworthy of tribute. Better safe than sorry, after all. We should also willfully mistake the South’s Christian opposition to the North’s societal rapacity as ‘defiance’, while turning a blind eye to the North’s actual defiance of Christian just war precepts. Is not the phrase ‘the winners write the history books’ scriptural, after all? It probably would also be a good idea if we don’t search for the myriad of Rommel busts available for viewing online – the closest thing to a Rommel statue we’re likely to find, given Germany’s draconian history-eradicating laws.

Of course, when the emissaries of the Church Divergent are in the mood for ‘vain janglings, desiring to be teachers of the law; understanding neither what they say, nor whereof they affirm’ (1 Timothy 1:6-7), it stands to reason Joel McDurmon will be right out front, ringing his bell like a good’un, and he has not disappointed us. Striking while the iron is hot (Red hot, you could say), he submitted for Gary North’s approval a carping missive about the pernicious influence of Lee and how his good name richly deserves a one-way ticket down the memory hole. It contains all the hallmark bullet points we’ve come to expect from this sad middle-aged hipster – Lee was racist/tyrannical/hypocritical, abolitionists were angels of mercy, the South ought to be thoroughly ashamed of itself, blah de blah blah blah – but, as I pointed out in the article’s comments section, it is also remarkable for being very poorly cited. McDurmon’s primary source materials are a Marxist text put out by the University of Georgia and a Lee letter printed secondhand in another Marxist text. Most of his claims regarding Lee consist of unreferenced innuendos and public-school myths. Once again, American Vision displays the symptoms of severe glaucoma. It’s easy enough to say ‘black is beautiful’ when you are physiologically incapable of perceiving that which is white.

McDurmon’s concluding paragraph, however, is worthy of note, as it purports to paint his and his cohorts’ hideous revisionism in a holier-than-thou light:

No Christian, and certainly no Christian movement, can survive the dead weight of idolatry. And the Southern “cult of the dead” is just that. Make no mistake: the North had all its faults too, and many are far too celebrated, or whitewashed, or suppressed, to turn their good into much real progress. But we southerners and Christians need to clean up our own nest before we start damning Yankees all over again. Else, we’ll all drown together. There’s no way you can even begin to pretend to have any moral high ground until you can demolish your own lies and the idols erected upon them. I rejoice that one more has fallen. But the hardest idols to fell still stand, and they are not made of stone.

You see, McDurmon & Co. are still savvy enough to understand that unequal yoking doesn’t play well with the rubes back in Yahooville who are still too grossly unsophisticated to understand the efficacy of ‘big tent’ sociology. Hence, they can’t openly throw in their lot with the Communist vanguard calling for the liquidation of anything even remotely Christian and traditional. Ergo, they clothe themselves in the garb of a Paul visiting Mars Hill, all a-fire to stamp out ‘Baals, Ashteroths, and Molochs’ (McDurmon’s own words) wherever they encounter them. If such grotesque icons of veneration just happen to take the form of dead white racists, well isn’t that just too bad? Bless my sledgehammer, good Reverend sir! There’s wickedness to be ground into powder!!

Just one little problem: these statues aren’t shrines, and they are not there for the purpose of adulation.

What is a monument? Never mind the sanitized generic definition the revised Oxford dictionary online offers – for my money, the truest meaning of the word can be found, surprisingly, on Wikipedia. Nice to know every once in a while a traditionalist’s edit is allowed to stand on that site:

A monument is a type of structure that was explicitly created to commemorate a person or event, or which has become important to a social group as a part of their remembrance of historic times or cultural heritage, or as an example of historic architecture. The term ‘monument’ is often applied to buildings or structures that are considered examples of important architectural and/or cultural heritage.

Our people need our history. To give honor to those who have come before us and to remember the trials and tribulations they overcame in covenant with our God is necessary for our regeneration. ‘Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set’ was once upon a time etched upon our hearts, till we began to pay heed to the unclean parables of Judaic modernity. It’s understandable that those with an alien worldview wouldn’t get this, but what excuse do so-called Christian ‘elders’ have? Do they think we’re Shintoists? Do they believe we worship our ancestors, rather than hold fast to the fifth commandment? Moreover, do they seriously believe the likes of Lee and Jackson would allow themselves to be adulated? Lee was so distraught over the outcome of Gettysburg, and the decimation of Pickett’s brigade in particular, that the guilt he carried from that day forward likely was a significant contributor to his death a mere seven years later. Such turmoil of spirit is hardly to be found within the soul of a megalomaniac.

Why, too, has it only just dawned on them that these statues constitute a second commandment violation within the past couple of months? Were they previously too immersed in fretting that somewhere in the world darts were being played on the Sabbath? Do they think that they alone hold the monopoly on all wisdom, and their own ancestors were in wretched error when they erected likenesses in stone and bronze to their noble men, be they Martel, Charlemagne, Wallace, even Calvin and Knox themselves? Just in case they haven’t noticed, there are far, far more memorials of diverse sorts dedicated to Red Abe than to Lee. Do they save any of their ire for these vile paeans?

The answer to the last question is obvious – and it is equally obvious that not all monuments are equally idolatrous in their eyes. On May 12th, at the height of the controversy in New Orleans, the Jewish Forward hysterically focused on a different incident:

ANNE FRANK MEMORIAL IN IDAHO VANDALIZED!!!!! Boise, Idaho’s Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial was vandalized this week. On memorial Tuesday afternoon, a tour group discovered “racist and anti-Semitic slurs” written on two different marble tablets, the Idaho Statesman reported. Representative Dan Prinzing said he would not repeat the words reading the phrase written “because it was so offensive.” The graffiti was written below the engraved first paragraph of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and on an engraved list of donors to the memorial. “Now what does that do for us? It emboldens us,” Prinzing said, according to the Statesman. “It means our work is not done.” Another swastika was spotted on Wednesday at the grounds, though it was unclear when this was drawn. The Boise Police Department has assigned a detective to investigate the case. The Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial was named for Anne Frank, a Jewish girl forced into hiding in Holland during the Holocaust and who died at the Nazi concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. The memorial was founded in 2002 and is a large educational park with a series of monuments dedicated to human rights.

Did we see a rearguard flurry of blogosphere pique from McDurmon when this story broke, lauding the just desecration of this Ashteroth and calling for its immediate removal? Of course not! Why in the world would he, given that that would have been fully in accordance with biblical law? For make no mistake about it: this chunk of dead rock constitutes a heathen altar. If a true monument is meant to preserve a people’s ‘historic times or cultural heritage’, why else is the Judaic interlocutor (and ballpoint pen pioneer) Anne Frank being memorialized in the heart of Idaho – just a wee little bit removed from her base of operations? Why else are calls for outright destruction of the Confederate monuments by hip-hop artistes looked upon as reasonably impassioned discourse, while a little graffiti on the Frank memorial is considered the equivalent of a burnt offering of swine? Why else does the article make mention of ‘two different marble tablets’, a clear (and blasphemous) reference to the Decalogue? Why else was it erected only as late as 2002, in a post-9/11 environment of ‘fundamental change’ – especially in the realms of Christian orthodoxy and national sovereignty? And what are we to make of the sacerdotal character of Dr. Prinzing, whose LinkedIn profile lists his Ph.D, as well as his position of ‘Executive Director at the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights’ in Boise? Neo-Levites, consecrated to promulgate the faith of pan-global humanism with a decidedly kosher undertone, are purified via a doctoral degree from a public university in one of the less demanding fields on the liberal arts spectrum.

It isn’t just Frank that is to be revered, naturally. Just as Israel had her strange altars atop every high place, so too does the polytheism of internationalism demand a sentinel in stone within eyeshot of every impressionable mind – which is just about all of them these days. Thus, we have the shabbily crafted (by Chinese hands, yet) Martin Luther King memorial in Washington DC, glowering balefully like an insane Roman emperor forever represented in marble upon anyone who dares fail to pay obeisance to his revolutionary ardor. The District of Cthulhu is also home to the one Confederate statue unlikely to be taken down any time soon – the Albert Pike monument, dedicated to the carpetbagging Massachusetts Satanist who made it his life’s mission to ensure the Scottish rite of Freemasonry would forevermore permeate Richmond with Rosicrucianism. (He also served as the Confederacy’s Indian Commissioner and commanded a brigade of Cherokees and the other ‘civilized’ tribes during the War, thus earning the everlasting gratitude of rainbow Confederates who had another straw to grasp onto to prove that the South wasn’t racist.) Lest Ms. Frank feels a touch alienated being the only foreign Semitic deity to be honored in the New World, bold lawmakers are lobbying for her fellow Khazaric liar Elie Wiesel to be granted his own memorial within the US Capitol itself. Upon entering their place of work for the first time, freshman Congressmen will thus be graphically reminded under whose theonomy they are to craft their Noahide laws. Let us also not overlook the untold number of soul-killing impressionistic works of crap such as the LOVE sculpture or Atlantic City’s headache-inducing abomination of a Holocaust memorial, funded straight from the public teat to celebrate the chaos wrought by the post-Christian world order.

A faith that cannot conquer the world is no faith at all. Even the Soviet Union recognized this – hence, their propensity to pay homage to Bolsheviks from around the world in everything from postage stamps to interment of their bodies in the Kremlin. The War of the Monuments is merely another front in the broader War of the Worldviews, and just as the judeo-revolutionaries could not allow the history of Tsarist Russia to stand intact, neither can they allow the most principled and effective resistance against Marxist encroachment on the North American continent its due respect, either. Their only solution is eradication, and if it can be wrought via the most heavy-handed means at hand, so much the better. Shock and awe is an effective agent of paralysis. The visuals of the Lee statue lying prostrate on a truck, now etched permanently into the memory of resentful Southrons, are perhaps meant to suggest the toppling and subsequent shattering of the Philistine idol Dagon by the hand of God as a manifestation of His protection towards His ark (1 Samuel 5:1-5). If so, the purveyors of this demonic analogy have misread the symbolism. We warrant the rebuke God visits upon us for our great transgressions, but how much more sorely will He punish those who go about His correction with untoward ebullience? May He smite them with emerods, or worse, as He will.

As a coda, it would well behoove the haters of tradition metastasizing the West into Sheol to heed the words of a friend of mine, recently returned from a trip to Eastern Europe, who had this to say about what he observed over there:

Even in Hungary, the old Soviet statues still stand. When I spoke to a resident there about the various monuments, he told me ‘Some people want to take them down. I want them to stay to remind my grandchildren.’ Don’t destroy your history.

A people serious enough about their past to wish to retain memories of their oppressors as well as their heroes is a people worthy of emulation. Where are the Viktor Orbans on this side of the ocean?