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    Monday
    Jun222020

    On Taking a Knee, Tearing Down Statues, and Selective Moral Indignation

    DateMonday, June 22, 2020 at 02:44AM

    What follows is a letter that I wrote to a friend in response a Facebook conversation which I have posted at the bottom of this entry. 

    Dear Friend, 

    Sorry that this response took so long and will be a little disjointed.  I have scant time to sit down and write thorough pieces nowadays, so I’ve been cobbling this response together intermittently.  Here’s the letter: 

    Over the past few weeks I believe that what has happened is that the meaning of kneeling is changing.  Previously, people would take a knee mainly in symbolic opposition to police brutality.  While this is often still the case, there is a growing group of activists calling for others to kneel in order to sympathize with those who are oppressed.   Protestors have repeatedly demanded that police officers “take a knee” or in some cases prostrate themselves entirely.   Speakers at protests have asked all attendees to kneel before they led followers in a group-chant that has little to do with police brutality and parallels acts of worship one would find in a religion or cult.  There are cases of white people getting on their knees after being asked to do so in order to apologize for their white privilege (the main example below embedded is in part a farce, but it is not the only example).   There are cases of white people being asked to kiss the boots of black people to atone for the crimes of their forefathers (I recognize that these demands are made my black supremacists, often religious fanatics, and do not reflect the views of the overwhelming majority of black people, just like white police who kill minorities don’t reflect the views of the overwhelming majority of white people.)  And there are cases of white people shining the shoes and washing the feet of black people, an act which may or may not have been performed with the understanding of the reference to the historical Christian practice.  I made a hyperbolic jump to this final act in my statement, but I hope you can see what I was getting at.   And while it can be said that for now these instances are few and far between, I see no evidence of a trend reversal.   For the record, I’m not denying that police brutality and white privilege do not exist, but these examples of reconciliation through identity politics will not only fail to resolve disparities and injustice, they will exacerbate such problems by encouraging black people to feel victimized and oppressed, and white people to feel guilty, shameful, and self-loathing.   

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    This is the correct response:

     

    Again, I believe the act of getting on your knees to protest police brutality is now being conflated with the idea of repentance for crimes an individual has not committed.  Increasingly, those kneeling are meant to feel guilty simply for being white (the ‘sins of the father’) or to kneel in recognition for the pain that the black community is suffering at the hands of a white power structure.  Law enforcement officers are also asked to kneel to demonstrate that they too sympathize with the victims of police brutality.  Of course every individual has the right to decide if they want to express their repentance in this way, but I can easily see kneeling transition away from a voluntarily act of solidarity for those who have suffered under police brutality to a forced act of genuflection intended to make those who kneel demonstrate their sympathy for an exclusive group of victims. I understand that my concerns may seem like an overreaction, but I hope you understand that I am coming from a viewpoint that throughout history crazier things have happened than forcible kneeling or being compelled to take a knee out of sympathy for unknown or distant crimes.  It’s not a road I want to see our society go down, because there have been other societies that have taken similar ideologies to their utmost extreme – the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the Cultural Revolution in China come to mind. I can easily see how these movements can be hijacked by extremists seeking to impose their views of the world on others, and in the case of the recent protests, the extreme views that I have observed rising to the top are those of forcible atonement for white privilege, white guilt, and the erasure of artifacts with any perceivable connection to oppression. This, I believe is linked to a greater trend of striving to achieve equitable outcomes (which is different than equal opportunities) at the expense of logic and meritocracy. (Recent examples of this include a UCLA professor getting fired because he did not excuse from class those black students who wanted to go protest, and the head of Reddit stepping down because of her white privilege, the Mrs. Monopoly game giving a leg-up to females, Merriam-Webster changing the definition of racism).  Not to mention the whole cancel culture cascade that has befallen us recently.  There are serious problems in this world – including modern slavery, which I have never seen a protest against –  but Splash Mountain, Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah, Swing Low Sweet Chariot, Gone with the Wind, GitHub’s use of the word ‘master,’ Uncle Ben’s rice, and Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix and syrup and are not among them. 

     

    This brings me to the statues.  Over the 


    This brings me to the statues.  Over the past few weeks we have not only seen Confederate statues torn down and removed, we have seen a broad array of historical figures removed, torn down, or vandalized.  Obviously, a distinction needs to be made by those that have been removed by decree of elected officials and those that been torn down by mobs.  Either way, I would qualify both such methods as forms of selective moral indignation, where a criminal or crime is cherry-picked and deemed so offensive that it must go, while crimes of equal or greater significance are allowed to persist.  The rioters are champions of this, and other than Trump, exhibit the finest extents of ignorance, arrogance, and hypocrisy I’ve seen in my life (Chaz is turning out to be a perfect example).  In my view, people should just leave the statues there. Yes, their existence is unfortunate, and there are statues (many which should have never been put up in the first place) of some disgraceful individuals who have wreaked havoc and misery upon countless people, but if we begin removing statues of historical figures in a retroactive kangaroo courts/drive-bys where we’ve deemed their crimes so reprehensible that their images must be erased, there will be no end to this practice.   It may seem like I’m oversimplifying this, but where are we supposed to stop with the desecration of these statues and monuments?  There are statues to ruthless and murderous warlords, genocidal dictators, and tyrannical Emperors the world over.  Ones that come to mind include Julius Cesar, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Attila the Hun, Alexander the Great. How many statues are there of Ottoman and Barbary Coast leaders who enslaved millions of Europeans (apparently many less Africans were enslaved in America comparatively) throughout the 15thand 19th centuries?  There are images of bygone heinous criminals bedecking objects ubiquitously; there are structures erected by slaves at the behest of kings and rulers all over the Earth. Should we tear down the Washington Monument, the Roman Coliseum, the Pyramids of Giza, Teotihuacan, then burn every sculpture, painting, and artifact that was ever commissioned by those in positions of power?  There will be no end to this insane demolition of statues and revision of history because there will always be a group whose sensibilities are offended.  After all, the radical leftists inclined to support the removal of monuments have in the past taken political correctness to a whole new level altogether:

     

    Tearing down statues is easy, but erecting them can prove difficult:

     

     

    At this point, we’re witnessing an irreversible trend of razing statues of any historical American who had any association to owning slaves or apparent predilection toward racism.  Teddy Roosevelt today, Benjamin Franklin tomorrow (Franklin owned two slaves and a newspaper which ran ads for the selling of slaves).  Many statues of abolitionists have been torn town. Because no one is stopping theses mobs who are so displeased with the statues of people like Ulysses S. Grant, Cervantes, Abraham Lincoln (all of who stood against slavery, and in the case of Cervantes was a slave himself), Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, or religious icons like Junipero Serra (yes, I get it, he was a bad guy) – I predict that in a year from there will be the shattered remnants of hundreds of sculptures and statues scattered across the grounds of America.   But if you think it’s going to stop there, just at statues, then I’m sorry to say that you are gravely mistaken.  What about other religious symbols and objects, what about the Constitution, what about human beings?  While they represented a minority of society, the fanatics carrying out these acts in a demented fury have a highly myopic and destructive mindset, they appear to be borderline philistines and are mostly ignorant of history and I would argue the state of affairs in the world.  In my opinion, with their iPhones containing cobalt mined in the Congo and sweatshop-made apparel and silence on issues of war and imperialism, they are spoiled brats and hypocrites who are absolutely dripping in slavery. (How many of them, for instance, are aware of or care about the slave markets that were thriving in Libya as recently as last year as a result of the dissolution of that country following the Obama-Hillary war to remove Gadhafi?  How many of them spoke up against that war or against Obama’s war on Syria, against the six other countries that he bombed, or his support for the ignoble Saudi war against Yemen?)  We have entered a very, very slippery slope, and even the people who support these actions now will not like where this ends.  Again, if you take this to the utmost extreme, you get the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamyan by the Taliban in Afghanistan, or the destruction of Palmyra by ISIS in Syria.  This is why, as reprehensible as they are, it would be wiser to keep the statues and educate our children about the sins of our fathers, instead of trying to sweep them under the rug.  I do not think that moving them into museums or parks would work, because there is no limit to the insanity and stupidity of a mob.  But, like most lessons that people truly learn in life, we’re going to have to learn the hard way.   I hope you can see where I’m coming from.  In closing, here’s an excerpt from George Orwell’s 1984:

    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. 

     

     

     

     

    AuthorAaron | CommentPost a Comment |

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