Some years back I wrote a post on why we don’t have busts and statues of Hitler to remind us of the Holocaust

Here’s the piece:

In Arlington National Cemetery a coalition of white businessmen from various southern states just put up a statue of Adolf Hitler on D-Day to commemorate his work in helping to create so many of the hallowed dead being honored there.  Some have objected to this controversial decision, but the businessmen have waved aside the complaints by saying that it was certainly not their intention to honor Hitler with the statue, merely to remind people that he too played an an important role in the history of the American military.

Oh!  Wait!  It wasn’t a statue of Hitler at all!  And it wasn’t in Arlington National Cemetery!  It was a statue of Joseph Stalin and it was unveiled at the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, VA.  The brain-dead geniuses who decided to do this explained that the bust wasn’t meant to honor Stalin, merely to point out the fact that this very bad man was leader of the Soviet Union in the struggle against Germany.

Okay.  So why no bust of Adolf Hitler too?  He was, after all, even more involved in D-Day than Stalin was.

I’ll tell you why.  Because the grammar of statuary says “A bust connotes that very great honor is being paid to the subject of the bust.”  And that’s the problem with honoring a monster who killed more people than Hitler and then trying to pretend you aren’t honoring him.  It’s like putting Osama bin Laden on the dollar bill and then saying, “We’re doing it to remind people of the terrible crime he committed.”  The medium is the message.

The real reason our Chattering Classes do this sort of stuff with Soviet statuary and not with Nazi statuary is because our local American politics has a tortured history with respect to racial bloodshed, but not so much with class warfare bloodshed.  In my home town of Seattle, we have for years honored the architect of Soviet Communism, Lenin, with a statue that our wise city fathers purchased from Russia at great cost.  It’s funny, doncha see?  Local color.  Part of our wacky free-spirited Fremont neighborhood counter-culture. Har de har har.  The guy who set up the system of blood and iron that created a Himalaya range of corpses compared to Hitler’s Appalachians is pretty much a local joke here in Seattle because he was, you see, an intellectual, not a racist.  Sure he and the Soviets went a bit overboard.  But they meant well and, above all, they were intellectual lefties, like your average Seattleite.

Prescinding from the fact that Joseph Goebbels had a Ph.D, what is really going on is simply this:  We Americans fought our most devastating war (that would be the Civil War, not World War II) over the question of race and it has tortured our political soul ever since.  So we are extremely sensitive to the victims of Hitler’s monstrous racial theories.  But we Americans (and Seattleites in particular) don’t have this hypersensitivity to people slaughtered in the name of class conflict.  Indeed, if anything, America’s experience of class conflict from the Haymarket Riots through the Great Depression and beyond left millions of Americans (and Seattleites in particular) rather in sympathy with Lefty Labor Leaders who stood up to the Capitalist Boss.  So we have never had the visceral reaction to Stalin (who was, in terms of sheer body counts, way ahead of Hitler).  Sure he was brutal.  But he was trying to salvage his nation from the ruins of Capitalism and so, golly, he had to break some eggs to make that omelette.  Our Chattering Classes, who feel nothing but respect for those who (very rightly) worried about the German-American Bund and other fascist sympathizers in American life during the murderous reign of Hitler, heap nothing but contempt on those who (very rightly) worried about Communist spies and subversives in American life during the vastly more murderous reign of Stalin.

And so we now live in a world where brain-dead members of America’s chattering classes honor Communist mass murderers with busts from coast to coast, while people who are only now digging out from under the rubble of the murderous regime created by Lenin and Stalin are busy pulling them down.

Want to memorialize Stalin without honoring him?  Try an image like this, in honor of the Poles slain at Katyn. (It was, after all, in defense of Poland that World War II began, though it sure and bloody certain didn’t end that way):

Inscription: Dedicated in Honor and Memory
“Golgotha Of the East”
Dedicated to The Martyrdom of the Poles, Who gave their lives For The Fatherland – Hostages of the War Slain in 1940 by the Soviet NKVD: Officers of The Polish Army, Spiritual Leaders, Intelligensia, Police Officers, Soldiers and Border Patrol Shot in Katyn and Mednoje, Charkow, Minsk-Kuropaty, Kijow – Bykownia…. Tortured and Murdered in Kazakh, Siberia and other areas of the inhumane Soviet Territory.

Oh, but that would blaspheme against the sacred Chattering Class value of separation of Church and Everything, a far greater evil than a wacky Lenin statue in Seattle or a grotesque placement of a bust of Stalin at a D-Day Memorial.

So here’s the thing: some places around the South are starting to tear down statues of various Civil War figures.  New Orleans, for instance, is tearing down statues of Jeff Davis (Confederate President), Robert E. Lee, Commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, PTG Beauregard (who fired the shots on Fort Sumter that ignited the Civil War), and a statue in the ironically named “Liberty Place” that is a full-on memorial to some guys who killed cops in order to establish the glories of White Supremacy in Louisiana.  No.  Really:

The Right Wing Noise Machine is, of course, calling this “controversial” and moaning about “Southern culture” and “Southern heritage” falling prey to “political correctness”.  A sample of this can be seen in the comboxes at Breitbart.

No.  It’s national honor being purged of the evil these statues have existed to celebrate for a century and a half too long.  The South fought to preserve the power to own human beings.  That’s what the war was about for the South.  “States rights” was proclaimed as the reason for the war, but the specific right that galvanized the states in rebellion was the “right” to own slaves.

The North, to be sure, did not fight primarily to abolish slavery.  As Lincoln succinctly put it:

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.

Abolition of slavery was, in part, a tactic of war and, in part, a moral concern that grew on the North in a fit of conscience. But once the war was over, the fit of conscience soon waned and the Feds left the newly freed Black population of the South increasingly to its fate at the hands of embittered whites who, having lost to Yankees, now took out their rage on those weaker than themselves. And so the system of Jim Crow and a whole host of cultural markers like these statues were erected to remind the subject Helots of their place. These statues were made and exist to this day to honor the men who fought for one principal object: to protect the right of whites to own blacks. The lie that this system of honor should continue lest “Southern heritage and culture” be forgotten is exactly like the lie that swastikas and statues of Hitler should have been left all over Germany, or that a statue honoring the butcher Lenin somehow does anything but bring disgrace to Seattle.

Somehow or other, the world manages to remember Hitler without busts and statues glorifying him. Somehow, we manage to remember the horrors of Bolshevism without busts and statues of Lenin and Stalin littering the landscape. And somehow what is actually good about Southern culture and heritage will survive without statues and busts honoring traitors who killed thousands of good men in defense of the power to own human beings.

Tear it all down. And fly the only Confederate flag worth honoring:

Defense of this stain on the honor of the human race is nothing Catholics should waste their time with.