by Ilana mercer posted by permission for the Saker Blog
Steve Hilton is a Briton who anchors a current-affairs show on Fox News.
Mr. Hilton made the following feeble, snowflake’s case for the removal of the nation’s historically offensive statues:
It’s offensive to our Africa-American neighbors to maintain statues in public places that cause not only offense, but real distress. And it is disrespectful to our native-American neighbors to glorify a man who they see as having committed genocide against their ancestors. None of this is to erase history. Put it all in a museum. Let’s remember it and learn from it.
“What’s wrong with Camp Ulysses Grant,” Hilton further intoned sanctimoniously. He was, presumably, plumping for the renaming of army installations like Fort Bragg, called after a Confederate major general, Braxton Bragg.
Sons of the South—men and women, young and old—see their forebear as having died “in defense of the soil,” and not for slavery. Most Southerners were not slaveholders. All Southerners were sovereigntists, fighting a War for Southern Independence.
Hilton, it goes without saying, is a follower of the State-run Church of Lincoln. To the average TV dingbat, this means that Southern history comes courtesy of the likes of Doris Kearns Goodwin, a Lincoln idolater and the consummate court historian.
“Doris Kearns Goodwin,” explains professor Thomas J. DiLorenzo, the country’s chief Lincoln slayer, “is a museum-quality specimen of a court historian, a pseudo-intellectual who is devoted to pulling the wool over the public’s eyes by portraying even the most immoral, corrupt and sleazy politicians as great, wise, and altruistic men.”
When Doris does the TV circuit, evangelizing for power, she never mentions, say, the close connection between her great Ulysses Grant and Hilton’s “native-American neighbors.”
Yes, Doris, Steve: who exactly exterminated the Plains Indians?
Indian-Americans will likely be hip to the fact that the Republicans, led by General Sherman himself, supervised the genocide of some 60,000 Plains Indians from 1865 to 1890. The Plains Indians endured land dispossession that culminated “in the late 1880s, with the surviving tribes of the West being herded onto reservations,” writes DiLorenzo, in “The Feds versus The Indians.”
Primary sources notwithstanding, to make his case in this tract alone, DiLorenzo galvanizes sources such as L.A. Marshall’s Crimsoned Prairie: The Indian Wars (1972), John F. Marszalek’s Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order (1993) and Sheridan: The Life and War of General Phil Sheridan (1992), by Roy Morris, Jr.
“We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, Sherman wrote to Ulysses S. Grant (commanding general of the federal army) in 1866, ‘even to their extermination, men, women and children.’ The Sioux must ‘feel the superior power of the Government.’ Sherman vowed to remain in the West ‘till the Indians are all killed or taken to a country where they can be watched.’”
“‘During an assault,’ he instructed his troops, ‘the soldiers cannot pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age.’ He chillingly referred to this policy in an 1867 letter to Grant as ‘the final solution to the Indian problem,’ a phrase Hitler invoked some 70 years later.”
Hilton, who believes in the Republican Party’s moral supremacy, can’t be expected to know that, in “eradicating the Indians of the West,” Sherman was delivering good old “veiled corporate welfare” to “a segment of the railroad industry, which heavily bankrolled the Republican party.”
Some things never change.
More so than The Other Worthies mentioned, “our native-American neighbors” have a tendency to harken back to a once-proud history. If they retain any historic memory, then, America’s First Nations should balk at serving on Camp Ulysses Grant, or at Fort William Tecumseh Sherman.
The folks Hilton dubs “our Africa-American neighbors,” on the other hand, are more vested in breaking and burning stuff to get what they want, which is, invariably, other people’s stuff, sometimes called “reparations.”
It follows that Conservatism Inc. usually uses American Indians as its perennial piñata, while generally acceding to the aggressive demands of African-Americans for permanent victim status. It’s to Hilton’s credit that he even mentioned Native-Americans, who have little political clout and even less of an extractive approach to politics.
Given the state of his knowledge, Steve Hilton can’t be expected to be familiar with Lord Acton’s nuanced thinking on the Confederacy. According to another good, English thing, Encyclopedia Britannica, Acton was “the first great modern philosopher of resistance to the state, whether its form be authoritarian, democratic, or socialist.” And this enlightened British thinker favored the Confederacy.
Lord Acton certainly supported, even admired, Robert E. Lee, and saw secession and states’ rights as a check on the sovereign will.
The general, surmised Lord Acton, was fighting to preserve “the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will”: states’ rights and secession.
Lee’s inspired reply to Lord Acton:
… I believe that the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the states and to the people … are the safeguard to the continuance of a free government … whereas the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it.
“Lee,” argues Clyde Wilson, distinguished professor emeritus of history at the University of South Carolina, “was the product of a pre-ideological society, whereas the ‘treason’ shouters [Lincoln and his accomplices] were [modern statists] products of post-French Revolution nationalism. [To them], the Union meant the machinery of the federal government, under the control of their party, to be used for their agenda.”
“But as the Southern poet Allen Tate put it, the original Union was a gentleman’s agreement, not a group of buildings in Washington from which sacred commandments were issued.”
The acolytes of the French Revolution have carried the day, in their nihilistic Jacobinism. Still, for its radicalism, America circa 2020, makes the philosophical descendants of the original Jacobins look positively clingy about their symbols and statues.
President Emmanuel Macron evinced the resolve the Anglo-American surrender monkeys are too feeble to feel, much less display:
Said Macron, “The [French] republic will not erase any trace, or any name, from its history … it will not take down any statue.”
Bravo, Monsieur Macron.
**
Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She’s the author of Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011) & The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016). She’s on Twitter, Facebook & Gab. New on YouTube
Macron indeed! Reminds me of hearing John Lennon singing “nothing’s going to change my world” and even at age 14, that any could and probably would change his world. And F Macron anyway. So much right wing BS on here these days but there were many pithy grains of stuff, including some truth, in it that, well, thanks anyway but no cigar.
Macron has bowed down to the rapefugees….so what’s to say he’s going to stop them from completely trashing out France seeing as how they’ve done a real bang up job of trashing out Paris????? He blew past delusional a long time ago…
No country worth its salt puts up statues in public squares to honor traitors that committed open treason and waged war against said country in a civil war. If someone wants to preserve history: put the statues in a museum and display the full sordid record of these Confederate collaborators of the British Empire.
Again, the frustration and impotence of those snowflakes offendded by the destruction of these statues and defending honoring Confederate traitors to the United States is thoroughly satisfying.
The war was a war about the South’s RIGHT to secede …. They were not traitors, they were exercising their RIGHT to secede.
The “Civil war” was about TAXATION and onerous policies of the industrial North against the agricultural South. Any complaints about slavery should be filed with the Heirs of the JEWISH Owners of the slave ships and the YANKEE sailing Captains who engaged in it. Also your Black “BROTHERS” back in Africa (Obama https://youtu.be/yWAH7Sb2kAA ) who SOLD YOU to the Slavers. NOT to the 99% who had nothing to do with it.
There’s a saying that those who failed to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and those who failed to learn the correct lessons from history, are simply doomed.
But what of those, who actively try to forget and erase their own history? I guess they’re already dead.
The first time I saw the term, “surrender monkey” was on the zionazi-gay guardian talkboard website, “the talk”. It was propaganda spam from a zionazi-gay professional web spammer promoting israel’s war agaisnst Iraq. Times have changed, but the israelis have not.
I first saw the term “surrender monkeys” used at the now fortunately defunkt guardian talk website by zionazi-gay webtrolls spamming Islamophobic psywar and promoting the israeli originating Afghan and Iraq war crimes. That was 17-20 years ago. Those critters have not changed much over the intervening years.
We did not drag you out of the bush …….
2019–Congo rebels are eating pygmies, UN says. The UN had sent six officials to investigate the accusation as well as other human rights abuses, he said. Other UN officials in the capital, Kinshasa, and the eastern city of Goma said that widespread cannibalism had already been established.
Hutus & Tutsis slaughter each other in Rawanda — 500,000 dead from machettes & clubs.
BUSH MEAT ………
KONDA The Konda were among the most proficient and brutal of slavers. Description of a Konda sword — Form specifically used for the capture of slaves for their human consumption (cannibalism) market. The Konda provided slaves for the Arab market as well as for domestic consumption, which was described by Glave in 1890. This weapon served in the confined quarters where captives were subdued and gathered. It served to control, disable and kill the victims while preserving the marketable corpse.
NGOMBE/POTO — The Ngombe melded with the Poto who themselves were displaced and assimilated into the Bantu culture. As with all Congolese slavers, their weapons were designed for effective use in close quarters and later, used for dismemberment of slaves slaughtered for human consumption.
MANDINGO — the period of the transatlantic slave trade of which Gambia and the Mandingo were pivotal elements. Since contact with the Portuguese in the 18th century and subsequently the British, the Mandingo supplied a steady stream of slaves for the North American and South American markets. It was the Mandingo from which Alex Haley drew his main character for now largely discredited “Roots” .
TETELA — the late slave trade period which supplied the markets for the Arab world and South America. In this period, there were just two commodities produced in Africa, ivory and slaves, of whom millions were exported. The Tetela were slavers who used a variety of weapons depending on the situation. Shorter weapons served battle at close quarters as in the hut or kral with spears and sword used on the battle field. Once subdued, the adversaries were sorted for usefulness and saleablilty with fit men and women sent to market, and young men sometimes introduced into the ranks of the slavers. The old, infirm and wounded were executed. The Tetela were considered the most vicious and most feared of Congolese slavers. They were savage in their attacks which included tribal war for the purpose of slave captures. During the second half of the 19th century, tribal wars were specifically for the capture of slaves and not territorial.
YAKA (Congo) —- The Yaka were ferocious warriors. They were slavers and likewise preyed on by their neighbors.
ASHANTI — Slave raiding was all hand to hand combat often within confines of the hut or kral. The weapons needed were necessarily short. The Ashanti traded slaves and ivory with the English and Portuguese.
AZANDE — Azande, whose name literally means “owners of much land,” entered the 19th century with a history of conquest and expansion. The descendants of great warriors faced economic and demographic changes which turned them to the industry which harvested humans for export to the Arab world, slavery. The trade was curtailed by the Anglo-French convention of 1899, before which it was the major occupation of Azande warriors.