Vandals. Colorado Civil War Memorial and the Zeitgeist

Before it was toppled, the monument to the men of Colorado who served in the Civil War

It is hard not to write this and not be angry.

This past week vandals, and that's all that they are, toppled the monument to the men from Colorado who died in the Civil War.

I posted on that monument long ago on one of our companion threads.  That post appears here; Some Gave All: Colorado Civil War Memorial, Denver Colorado:.  Now the photos serve themselves as a monument to what the memorial looked like prior to idiots, or perhaps more accurately the historically ignorant invested with self righteousness in their idiocy, forever damaged it.  They've been arrested and should receive jail time, but in the current atmosphere, combined with the fact that Denver Colorado itself is a self unaware mess, they likely won't.  Their actions are a type of monument to the disintegration of the country and what will become the replacement of a culture that's grown too anemic and too focused on itself to survive.

That no doubt sounds harsh, but it's warranted.

The protests started off, as everyone who is following the news would likely know, ostensibly with the death at the hands of Minneapolis police of George Floyd.  But that's no longer what these protests are even about.  Indeed, as Black Entertainment Television founder noted the other day in regard to the attack on monuments, these attacks are instead representative of anarchy and blacks "laugh" (his words, not mine) in what amounts to derision at the co-opting of what started off as protests in their support.  Indeed, at this point, the protesters are overwhelmingly of the WASP demographic, a declining sections of the nation's population even among those who are divided into "white and black", even though genetically and culturally no such divide actually exists.*

What is going on now is not aiming to help African Americans in any real sense, nor is it actually aimed to address their concerns.  Rather, this is an ongoing part of a movement that stretches back to the 1920s and which seeks to reinterpret American history in a propagandized fashion.  A propagandized attack that's every bit as false as the Lost Cause Myth that caused monuments to treasonous Confederate figures to go up in the first half of the 20th Century (and even later, for that matter).  In its most modern form, ironically, it flared up with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, but is origin goes back much longer than that.

It was apparently this panel, which lists Sand Creek as an engagement, which resulted in the claim of virtue on the part of the vandals  It's there, and Sand Creek was a horrific massacre that was completely unjustified, but that's one single item the monument that goes far beyond that.  Indeed, most of the engagements listed are ones that were Civil War battles.

The United States has had a "liberal" or "progressive" set of political ideals that has coexisted with conservative ones since the founding of the nation.  The concepts of the Revolution themselves were radical in nature.  While those howling in the streets point out that the founders of the Republic were flawed men, that doesn't mean that their expressed ideals weren't to be grasped and celebrated.  All of the significant Virginians no doubt were slaveholders or supported the maintenance of slavery in their colony, but that doesn't mean that the idealized it and indeed in some instances their expressions of ideals condemned it.

It's usually the ideals of people that intelligent men and women celebrate, not the actual person's themselves so much.  Indeed, it's pretty hard to find a person, outside of some astounding saints, who are admirable from birth until death, and the truth of the matter there is that most people who rant and rave about the sins of our forefathers run from the examples of saints.  St. Padre Pio, for example, would give us an example of a saintly man who was from birth.  But his sanctity took him right into the Priesthood as soon as he could do it.  He provides an example of a man who took the narrow road.  Most protesters are off the road in their personal conduct and just hoping that action takes them to a secular Heaven.

St. Matt Talbott.  Few who claim virtue are willing to really follow a virtuous example.

Indeed, even the examples of the Saints show us not that men and women of the past lack flaws, but rather that they strove to overcome them.  With some, their overcoming of that internal struggle is what made them saints.  St. Matt Talbot is a saint not because he never drank a drop in his life, but because he was a dedicated alcoholic who even stole to support his addiction until he overcame his addiction and lead what was essentially a monastic life.  St. Augustine of Hippo had lead a fairly worldly life prior to his conversion.  St. Francis of Assisi had to an extent at well.  Maximilian Kolbe took his convictions right into his execution.  Very few of the woke folks running around now who are making blanket acts of ethnic apology, let alone acts of violence, are going to dedicate their lives in that fashion to those they are "apologizing" to.  Indeed, my guess is that none will whatsoever.

Edmund Burke was a liberal English parliamentarian who defended the radical American Revolution in parliament.  He also felt that religion and manners were the underpinnings of a just society and wrote a book on that topic entitled A Vindication of Natural Society: or, a View of the Miseries and Evils arising to Mankind from every Species of Artificial Society.

At any rate, American liberalism mixed in some ways with conservatism and was grounded in the same reality that all men are flawed.  Early conservatives tended to despair of addressing societal flaws and so simply urged accepting them and slow improvement upon them.  Liberals or progressives, as those terms then were used, didn't disagree with human frailty existing, but they sought to take action quickly and where they could to address it.  They tended to find the motivation for their actions outside of themselves and in something greater.  It's no surprise that the abolitionist hymn that went on to become a Union Army battle song, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, was termed that, a hymn.

Even before Howe's hymn was published there were a competing strain of liberalism, however, one born not of acknowledgment of something greater but a narcissist one that sought to destroy anything that didn't meet its definition of the prefect.  Indeed, that radical ideology came about only shortly after the radical ideology that gave birth to the United States in the 1770s, and saw its first expression in France in the 1790s.  Where as the first radical liberalism gave birth to the successful (at least so far) American Revolution, the second gave rise to the unsuccessful and malignant French Revolution.

Maximilien Robespierre who was one of the chief architects of the terror, but who saw himself as a champion of democracy.  A victim of the forces he brought about, he was executed in 1794.

The French Revolutionaries saw nothing greater than themselves and imagined themselves to represent all mankind, which was to think exactly like them or suffer teh consequences.  Taking advantage of a desperate urban French population it co-opted what was effectively a series of bread riots, seeking nothing  more than food for the table, into a narcisitic vainglorious spasm that sought to remake the physical and destroy the metaphysical to fit an imagined world of the philospher's mind.  It could not and did not succeed, but like all of its progency it resorted to terror and violence in an effort to make men compliaint to what it wanted men to be like, their nature's nto withstanding.  Coming to an end, as all of its decendants have, in teh rule of a self serving strong man who claimed to rule in the name of the people nad revolutionary ideals, it ultimately collapsed but not before doing so much damage to its own nation that its never really recovered, somethign that has been true of all of its progeny.

Rural French commoners defending a church against French revolutionary forces.  While not well recalled now, the French Revolution was very unpopular in the countryside and there was armed resistance to it.

The mob lead to Napoleon and he lead the country into dictatorship until he fell at the hands of the collection of nations he made war upon.  Not much of an example, seemingly, but one that has been followed by one set of "progressives" ever since.

Alexander Kerensky, the Socialist Minister Chairman of the Provisional Government of Russia who was deposed by the Bolsheviks.

That set gave the world the coup that deposed the elected Russian government that had deposed Czar Nicholas II and which was going down, haltingly, the same path that the American revolutionaries had in 1776 when it declared the revolt against King George III.  The coup in turn gave Russia a titanic civil war costing the lives of millions of people and a government that under successive strong men would kill millions more.  Even as that occured, however, progressives who had in 1912 sought to elect Theodore Roosevelt as President began, in part, to go over to a progressivism that admired the radial red left in Russia.  In the 1920s and 1930s the liberal and progressive wing of American politics expressed both the traditional liberalism that had prospered in the United States and in the United Kingdom (where it had existed even at the time of the Revolution) and the new radical progressivism that sought to remake the world to fit a text of their own origin.  Much smaller, it nonetheless was present, forming a smaller and often theoretical base inside the larger American liberalism that came to power during the Great Depression.

The Depression brought traditional American liberalism to the forefront in a long and lasting way.  It had certainly been in power before, however.  Lincoln was a liberal President.  Theodore Roosevelt was as well.  So, in his highly flawed way, was Woodrow Wilson. And Franklin Roosevelt clearly was.  Indeed, following FDR, Presidents Kennedy and Obama were certainly liberals who were of the traditional American type, although they certainly can be criticized in  numerous ways.

Of note, once again, before we go on, all of these liberal icons, now co-opted to some degree by other movements, had their flaws.  Wilson most of all, as he was heavily racist, for which he cannot be excused.  FDR had at least one long running affair in his background.  Kennedy, lionized today by the left, had legions of affairs and a casual treatment of life and death and meddled in the affairs of other nations.  Obama is subject to the least personal criticism and generally lead and leads an admirable personal life, but much like Wilson he tended to confuse talk with action.

The liberals of the 1960s lead the country into war in 1965 and that caused the radical left to reemerge by 1968.  Following the revelations of the 1940s that Stalin was a butcher on a par with Hitler, real radicalism had gone underground and had in fact conducted a highly successful rear guard action to disguise its complicity with the Soviet Union in the 30s and 40s.  With that behind it, in the 1960s it came back out in force once again and it's never left.  Gaining ground in the turmoil of the 1960s, Richard Nixon's paranoia combined to rise their fortunes further.  Their fortunes reversed, however, with Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, which brought William F. Buckley's conservatism, a new type of conservatism that had emerged since World War Two, into the Oval Office for the first time.

Reagan was absolutely despised by the radical left turing his time in office, and it was during that time that the traditional left began to become weaker and weaker.  Remembered now as the impact of Reagan recruiting "conservative" element of the Democratic Party into the GOP, in reality the ongoing strife in the party contributed much to that.  Traditional liberal Democrats who had supported Kennedy and Johnson in Vietnam found themselves out of favor with the newer left.  And while they were responsible for advancing the cause of civil rights within the Democratic Party, many found themselves out of sink with a party that was more and more going over to a host of "progressive" ideals that they did not support.  Issues like abortion, for example, started to split the party and drive members out.

Not out completely, of course, and it can legitimately be said that none of the "progressive" Democrats have been elected to the Presidency while there are certainly Democrats who have been.  Nonetheless, with that demographic making up the real traditional power base in party, that being white Americans of what was once referred to as the WASP demographic, progressive concepts have become more and more entrenched in the party.

This helped create the hard left/right split in politics that's emerged since Reagan, although it certainly isn't singularly responsible for it.  And at the same time, but not addressed in this already overlong post, Buckleyite conservatives had to contend with the rise of radical populist "conservatives" who were first given voice by Newt Gingrich and who have wide gulfs in their views with the Buckleyites.

In spite of that, the lingering success of Buckleyism in the GOP caused the Democrats to much modify their expressed views on things even while the progressives simmered in discontent.  That began to unravel, however, when President Obama was elected in 2008.  When that occurred a section of the GOP went into what might best be expressed as rage.

President Obama was a traditional liberal, not a progressive, and his policies were relatively mild in that context.  As already noted, he was fairly ineffectual in bringing them into fruition, with his confusing medical program being the half hearted signature of his administration.  Only very late in his administration, when it became very clear that conservatives would not give him credit for anything, did a more progressive set of leaning start to emerge, but even there he simply tended to follow trends rather than set them.

Be that as it may, the rage of the Obama years helped bring about the current Trump administration, although only part of that can be attributed to that fact.  More than that, declining economic fortunes in the industrial class, who were well aware that both parties had betrayed them for decades, brought about the Trump victory. But just as the Obama Presidency brought about a populist right wing rage, the election of Trump brought about an even greater progressive rage.

Over the last four years that rage has become so dominant in the Democratic party that its effectively buried traditional Democratic progressivism. While it appears at this point in time that the Democrats are set to elect a traditional liberal to the Oval Office, it's also clear that the aged Joe Biden will have to listen to the progressive wing of the party and there's reason to suspect that, given his advanced age and demeanor, he'll defer in large part to that now younger and much more vigorous wing of the party which has buried the liberal wing.  That likely means that a very "progressive" administration is about to take office.

Of course, you can't be a progressive unless you conceive of yourself as progressing towards something, and that's what really makes progressives distinct.  Lacking the concept of the metaphysical that liberals and Buckleyite conservatives have, they seek a perfect world of their own definition, never seeking to grasp that a person can't really define perfection internally.  Nonetheless, that concept, self defining perfection and then mandating its acceptance, and immediately, is their hallmark.  It has been since the 1790s.

And that is what is now being expressed in the streets.  Having co-opted a more traditional concern, justice for the accused and the rights of all minorities as men, they're condemning everyone in history as not meeting the current definition of perfection.  It's not just people who clearly stood for an evil cause, such as Confederate officers, but everyone who came before us.

All those who came before us failed to meet the progressive ideal of perfection, and being men, none of them were perfect in the first place.  They aren't honored for their imperfections, but for their ideals, but those in the streets would trample on those as well.

And so to the long dead Union veterans of Colorado.  Most of them served in the hopes of preserving the Union and by implication, if  not necessarily universally by expression, they served to free African Americans from slavery.  They also likely did not see European American domination of the Frontier as wrong.  Some of those men, those who served under Chivington at Sand Creek, participated in an atrocity. That doesn't condemn the rest who didn't.

At the end of the day, in this current tear it down zeitgeist moment, it's worth remembering that every single living human being is a descendant of colonist, murderers, and rapists. Every single one. We only imagine ourselves descendant from saints, but it isn't true, and we like to imagine that we can apologize for the misdeeds of our ancestors and it does something, but it doesn't. I'm reminded of this every time I practice law in a certain place populated by a disadvantaged class, which I do on occasion, and it's always the same handful of people working on the same problems from across the state.  I don't see the people tearing down monuments working on the problems of an affiliated underclass there.  I see a lot of workaday lawyers, men and women who represent plaintiffs and defendants, the criminally accused and the class itself there.  They're doing their jobs, but in doing them, they're a lot more "woke", in real terms, than people who attack monuments.  Lots of people express regret, but not too many people invest time in it in any ongoing way or are really willing to get their hands dirty.  Lots of people who do get their hands dirty are just doing their jobs and don't conceive of themselves as champions for anything in particular.

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*This point has been made here before, but the entire concept of "race" is completely artificial.  This is all the more apparent when it the fact is considered that African Americans are one of the country's oldest demographics and are fully part of the American ethnicity, to the extent there is an American ethnicity.

Ethnicities are real, of course, but they're independent of superficialities such as skin color.  The persistence of racism, therefore, particularly in this context, is bizarre.

Related Threads:

Colorado Civil War Memorial, Denver Colorado