“Every
record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has
been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date
has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by
minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which
the Party is always right.”
George
Orwell, 1984
I had it explained to me earlier
this week that the current movement in this country to remove or destroy statues
and historical artifacts is in fact “good”, “necessary” and “fair.” It’s rather
like a coast-to-coast fire sale. From a
statue of Christopher Columbus in Philly to Confederate generals on the side of
Stone Mountain, Georgia to the old Spanish mission bells in California…”Everything
must go!” Streets, bridges, buildings and army bases must be re-named. Our
culture must be purged of past symbols of slavery, racism, and oppression.
Regardless how good the original
intentions, it seems to me to be a very slippery slope indeed when we say that
some history is “bad” and needs to be removed. Who decides and defines what is
“bad” and what is “good” history? Who is the final arbitrator who decrees what
can stay and what must go? What if our current rather chaotic and somewhat
random standards of “good” and “bad” are viewed differently in the future? What
if the history thus sanitized becomes unavailable to future historians,
researchers, groups, or individuals? Where does it all end? Or does it? Will we
tear down our entire past over the fear that someone will be “offended”?
I have a Lakota friend who knows
first-hand that as recently as the 1970’s the teachers at his government-run Tribal
school would whack the backs of their students’ hands with a long wooden ruler
for the crime of simply speaking the language of their people. When he told me
about this in 1992, I was shocked and horrified that it had gone on for so long
and not a little pissed off that I had never learned of it in all my own years
of schooling. At that time that it occurred, though, people in positions of
authority in the government agencies administering these schools had decided the
Lakota tongue was “bad” history and must be done away with. Do we leave the
definition of good and bad history to unelected officials of some government
bureaucracy?
From 1910 to 1945, the Empire of
Japan occupied and ruled Korea as a vassal state whose people and resources
were to be exploited for Japanese benefit. During this time only the Japanese language
could be spoken or written in schools, courts, and public venues, some 200,000 irreplaceable
ancient Korean texts, documents, and works of art and literature were burned,
and the Korean people were forced to worship only in Japanese Shinto shrines.
In Seoul, the 500-year-old Joseon Dynasty palace was deems a reminder of a more
glorious Korean past, so the Japanese systematically demolished a large portion
of the buildings and grounds to make room for them to build a massive and
imposing new General Government Building to remind the people who now ruled. The
Korean language, history and culture had been deemed “bad” history by the
ruling power, which made strenuous efforts to eradicate it all. The emperor,
the government, and apparently a considerable majority of the Japanese people
approved of all this. By their era and standards, it was “good” and “necessary”.
"Yes to decency and morality in family and state!"
10 May 1933: German “Student Groups”,
actually puppets of the new Nazi Regime, marched in torchlight parades through
the streets of 34 German university cities. With much fanfare, they gathered in
the town squares to burn more than 25,000 plundered books that had been deemed “un-German”
in order to “purify” or “cleanse by fire” the German language and its literature.
A crowd of 40,000 people gathered for
Berlin’s book-burning, where Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels personally
opened the festivities, shouting, “No to decadence and moral corruption! Yes to
decency and morality in family and state! I consign to the flames the writings
of Henrich Mann, Ernst Glaser, Eric Kastner!” Later, Nazi officials openly
raided libraries, book stores, and publishers to confiscate and destroy “un-German”
tomes. Naturally, a majority of the books destroyed were by Jewish authors, but
the Nazis also sought to suppress such “corrupting foreign influences” as
American writers Ernest Hemingway, Jack London and Helen Keller. Perhaps the
most painfully ironic work burned was eighteenth-century Jewish poet Heinrich
Heine’s play Almansor, which contained the eerily prophetic lines, “Where
they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.”
In Afghanistan’s Bamyan Valley two
giant stone statues of Buddhas Vairocana and Sakyamuni, the largest one some
174 feet tall, had weathered in their cliffside alcoves all that the harsh
weather of the mountains could dish out for centuries. They may have been as much
as 1,700 years old. In March of 2001, Taliban leaders occupying the area
decided to entirely destroy the giant Buddhas. After days of pummeling with
artillery, anti-aircraft guns, and RPG rockets failed to obliterate them, the
Taliban eventually lowered men on ropes to drill holes into the statues to
insert dynamite charges to completely demolish them. Afterwards, they openly
defended and justified their actions. Mullah
Mohammed Omar said, "Muslims should be proud of smashing idols. It has
given praise to Allah that we have destroyed them.” Afghan Foreign Minister
Wakil Ahmad Mutawekel told the international press, “We are destroying the
statues in accordance with Islamic law and it is purely a religious issue.”
Yes, admittedly these are rather extreme
examples of what can happen when people seek to sanitize “bad” history. They
do, however, show what can and has happened more than once in the past and just
how fast a people can accelerate downhill once they step out onto the slippery
slope. Today, viewed through the prism of our current standards, we naturally
condemn these heinous examples.
Thus, it is worth considering how
future generations might someday view our own current “righteous”, “good” and “fair”
jihad against statues and symbols of generations past.
“War
is peace.
Freedom
is Slavery.
Ignorance
is Strength.”
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