Wednesday, June 17, 2020

Our Forefathers Condemned as Immoral by the Worst Among Us

 

Article by Selwyn Duke in "The American Thinker":

As statues again come down as our culture is further torn up, something goes unsaid and often unnoticed:


Notable Western historical figures are being condemned as immoral — by the most immoral, decadent, depraved people among us.


The cultural revolutionaries attacking statues and what they represent, generally speaking:


  • ·       support prenatal infanticide, which claims one million babies yearly in the U.S. and 40 to 50 million worldwide;
  • ·       are products of our Sexual Devolution, meaning they’re what we used to call people of “easy virtue”; in fact, they’re often downright depraved;
  • ·       are vulgar as can be, violating the biblical injunction to rid themselves “of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips”;
  • ·       support socialism, even though it now can be easily known that it’s a system causing death, destruction and misery.
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Moreover, consider the following list of virtues and ask yourself how many these revolutionaries embody as a group: charity, chastity, courage, diligence, kindness, faith, hope, honesty, fortitude, justice, temperance, prudence, patience, forgiveness, humility, and love. Why, could even one of them define “virtue”?
 

So, I say to these civilization destroyers: Who the heck are you, you two-bit degenerates, to look down your noses morally at Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, Christopher Columbus or, for that matter, the Founding Fathers, whom you’re also attacking? You’re not fit to shine their shoes.

Also generally unasked is this: If everyone associated with slavery is to now be demeaned, discredited and dishonored, who’ll make the cut? With slavery once having been ubiquitous in this world, how many prominent people of ages past were not participants in, enablers of or tolerant with respect to the practice?
 
Famed ancient Greek philosophers Aristotle and Plato, for example, both justified slavery. But historically speaking they weren’t outliers — they were the norm. So, a wise person understands that a prerequisite for insight isn’t infallibility, that throwing out the baby with the bathwater (which perhaps appeals to the abortion-crazed) leaves you with an empty past and unguided present.


After all, what would be the result if we did this vis-à-vis technology, language and everything else and rejected all advancements/innovations birthed by people with checkered or “racist” pasts? We’d be left using sticks and stones while grunting.


So is our cultural revolutionaries’ goal their own “Year Zero,” as the past is completely erased? Not exactly, and this brings us to the real prejudice here.


While the rabble rousers claim to be so deeply offended by slavery, interestingly, they never complain about non-Western figures who embraced the practice. Consider Islam’s Mohammed, for example. He was not only a warlord, mass murderer, caravan raider and employer of torture who married a prepubescent girl, but also a slave owner and trader. Yet we never hear leftists rail against his exaltation or imply that his handiwork, the Koran, should be ignored. On the contrary, they’ve often taught children Islam in schools. And no small number of black Americans have embraced that medieval slave owner’s faith.


This double standard was also evident when cultural revolutionaries complained about Orange County, California’s airport being named after late actor John Wayne, who’d made politically incorrect comments about race in a 1971 Playboy interview. Yet they were mum on Louisville, Kentucky’s airport being renamed, just last year, after an individual who said in a 1975 Playboy interview, “A black man should be killed if he’s messing with a white woman.”


That individual was late boxer Muhammad Ali.

If the leftists truly cared about slavery and prejudice, they’d actually applaud white people. Whites likely weren’t the first to practice slavery, after all.


But they were the first to end it.


Whites also aren’t the only ones who’ve exhibited prejudice, but they were the first to make taming it a priority.


So, what’s really going on here? The most Machiavellian cultural revolutionaries, the puppeteers, aren’t driven by a desire for justice but power. And you attack those whose power you want for yourself. In balkanized Western nations this means characterizing the power structure as white and then attacking it on that basis.


As for the useful-idiot miscreants in the street, they’re not driven by justice but prejudice. Consider that Philadelphia rioters recently defaced the statue of anti-slavery icon Matthias Baldwin, “who dedicated much of his life before, during and after the Civil War to helping black Americans and championing racial equality,” writes the Western Journal.


Of course, the vandals had no idea who Baldwin was and didn’t care. He’s a dead white male. That’s enough.


Oh, by the way, such ignorance reflects the deadly sin of sloth, which includes intellectual laziness; it’s yet another indicator of the cultural revolutionaries’ moral stature.


In truth, though, it’s not uncommon for people to make moral judgments reflecting their time and place — and themselves. This brings us to our leftists’ moral blindness, to their lack of self-awareness, which relates to their unforgiving nature.


There are two yardsticks available for making moral judgments: the eternal and the ephemeral. The problem with moderns today — especially the subspecies called “leftists” — is that being moral relativists blind to Truth’s existence, they make everything relative to themselves.


When we recognize Truth (by definition universal, eternal, transcendent and correlative to God’s existence) and use it as a yardstick for making moral judgments and assessing others, yes, their flaws are revealed. They’ll pale in comparison to Truth.

But so will we. For Truth is perfect, but we can never be.


So when a Truth-(God) oriented person views the world, he sees people down low, morally, who can only strive for those heavens of virtue. But he also sees himself right beside them, a brother in brokenness. This breeds humility and a forgiving attitude.


The blind to Truth cannot, obviously, use it to make moral judgments and thus must use another guide. This often is what’s most real to them, what feels best to them, something whose existence they can’t deny: their own emotion. Hence the modern credo, “If it feels good, do it.”


The issue, however, is that deifying one’s feelings by making them arbiters of “right” amounts to deification of oneself. For once your emotions become the yardstick for “morality” — “your ‘truth’” — you can begin to see yourself as perfect. After all, how can you be out of conformity with yourself?


But others will never conform to your god-self perfectly. This engenders a perspective where you see yourself occupying the heavens, in Truth’s place, looking down on the flawed ants who may dare defy your will and foil your plans. This breeds arrogance and unforgiving wrath (ergo, the cancel cultists).


As G.K. Chesterton put it, “It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.” Our cultural revolutionaries, with their corruption-catalyzed cocksureness, are the ultimate bigots.


Yet in accordance with this, saner citizens must also see not only how they might have gone wrong, but how they actually have. Remember that the cultural revolution couldn’t succeed if the wider society loved our culture as much as the miscreants hate it, if its righteous anger matched the mob’s risible rage. Sadly, though, and reflecting the “demoralization” I wrote about last week, most today just don’t have a strong enough emotional attachment to what once was our common culture.  


And to the purposeful and passionate go the victories. Eloi get subjugated by Morlocks every time.