Arise Awoke

Abraham Lincoln once predicted that in the USA ....

The 'Great Emancipator' .... Is He Under Threat?

... "We cannot escape our history."

He of course was right, we can't escape our history (nor should we want to) .... but apparently we can reinterpret it to suit current fashionable views. I don't mean the facts of it, but the presentation and praising of it. So now it has been reported that such is the rise of wokeness in the USA, on the coat tails of the election of a Democratic President, Joe Biden .... that the very founding history of the USA is being challenged.

 

Statue Of Washington Daubed 'Slave Owner'

So under the aegis of 'Presentism' (the false notion that figures from the past can legitimately be judged by contemporary mores and values), the pilgrim fathers are now being described in some quarters as genocidal, religious fanatics. The founding fathers (Washington, Jefferson, Arnold et al), are all being downplayed, because (as this blog in 2017, and later Donald Trump predicted), they were nearly all slave owners. So across the land, or rather, where Democrats hold political power, these white men are being whitewashed, or perhaps blackwashed from the public sphere and possibly from history.

For example a San Francisco education board recently voted to rename 44 of its schools, including those honouring George Washington and Abraham Lincoln .... Lincoln's crime by the way was that although he emancipated the slaves, he didn't necessarily believe in racial equality, and in fact at the time of of his assassination, he was wrestling with what to do with the 3 to 4 million or so freed black slaves. His preferred option was repatriating them to Africa, or possibly creating a black state in the south, but he never had time to decide any action.

While elsewhere, a committee advising the mayor of the District of Columbia, recommended the renaming of dozens of parks, buildings and schools, stripping them of the names of seven presidents, including Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. They are now all seen as slave holders and 'white oppressors', rather than heroes of the revolution and architects of the nation.

Obviously on the right, the Republicans are outraged, and its not hard to imagine that if they regain control, some of these name changes will be reversed, perhaps several times over the next few decades. In the meantime the Republicans are espousing historical 'Originalism': the idea that you can only make sense of America's founders and the document they produced, if you understand the intentions of its authors and the context of the times in which it was written.

So where does this leave the US and its history? Well historical revisionism is a ridiculous creed and will leave the US with a lot of Presidents whose names cannot be spoken:

1. George Washington had around 317 slaves.
2. Thomas Jefferson had around 200 slaves.
3. James Madison had 100+ slaves.
4. James Monroe had around 75 slaves.
5. Andrew Jackson had around 200 ish slaves.
6. Martin Van Buren had 1 slave.
7. William Henry Harrison had 11 slaves.
8. John Tyler had 70 slaves.
9. James K. Polk had 25 slaves.
10. Zachary Taylor had around 150 slaves.
11. Andrew Johnson had 8 slaves.
12. Ulysses S. Grant had 5 slaves.

Of course revisionism can be applied anywhere, any time, by any pressure group, and just rewrites history in some mythical manner to suit that group, until someone else comes along and reinterprets it again. For example what about the very name of the capital? Should the name Washington be expunged from the map?

Lincoln Memorial Still Standing, But For How Long?

Then there is the Lincoln Memorial .... will that be toppled, as so many Confederate generals statues have been in the last year? ..... revolutions soon start devouring their own children, and although a Republican (under the National Union Party guise), he was formerly a hero to the Democrats as well as the Republicans.