Tuesday, July 7, 2015

My Remarks to the Escambia County Commissioners

At the July 7th meeting (the section in red italics was left out so the remarks would fit in the 2-minute time limit.)

Confederates committed treason against the United States and fought to keep and entire race in bondage. This mantra, ubiquitous in the social media age, is the concoction of cultural manipulators designed to be accepted and repeated by their minions without a single neuron firing. It isn't true, because the civil war and its causes were far more complex but there is not enough time to discuss such a complicated subject here and now.

The civil war and reconstruction indelibly marked the South and set it apart in numerous significant ways. As a sub-culture of the United States, the region is home to a very large group of people -- once its major demographic -- descended from soldiers, sailors and civilians of the Confederate States of America.

For a century and a half, they have honored their ancestors with monuments, banners, place names, story and song.

Cultural genocide is the deliberate destruction of the cultural heritage of a people or nation for political, military, religious, ideological, ethnic or racial reasons.

In the wake of a horrific mass murder in Charleston, South Carolina almost three weeks ago, an orchestrated tsunami has swept across the South, targeting anything Confederate, although the shooter's motives had nothing to do with Confederate heritage.

Confederate items have been removed from shelves by retailers, flags lowered, and monuments vandalized. There have been calls to remove or destroy Confederate memorials. There is even a clamoring by the NAACP and others to prohibit Confederate flags and symbols on private property.

If you remove the flags and the Confederate monument in Pensacola, you will aid the cultural genocide of a large group of Southerners for fallacious and faithless reasons, set precedent for obliteration of other items of cultural heritage that might offend someone, from busts of Bernardo de Galvez and Andrew Jackson to the statue of Don Tristan de Luna to The Wall South and whether you intend it or not, you will be painting a multitude of good, decent constituents with a Dylann Roof-colored brush.

13 comments :

  1. Well said.

    "the NAACP"

    People need to know their own history.

    There was a company of FMC in Pensacola (home guards) that served in defense of that place when it was under Confederate control.

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  2. If taking down a flag is genocide, then what was the enslavement of black people?

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    1. I didn't say taking down a flag is genocide. If you want to challenge me, please keep it honest.

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    2. Pat, you should know a lot about the enslavement of black people.
      Wasn't New York City the capital of the slave trade in 1861?
      And they shipped them to Cuba instead of the SE United States...
      ...Right?

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    3. Well, Mr. Young slavery was not genocide. I am surprised you would say something like this being you are a New York lawyer. You sir make a mockery of peoples who have suffered genocide. It is sad that folks like you have to resort to lies to make your argument.

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  3. Yes you did. You said that it is an act that will "aid" genocide. In other words, it is an act of genocide. So what was slavery?

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    1. No I did not. I said "CULTURAL genocide."

      Genocide and cultural genocide are not the same thing.

      And yes, slavery is a form of cultural genocide.

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    2. Jessie, you are right. Slavery is not genocide. Well, maybe in the Caribbean it was, where slaves were worked to death. Genocide means killing people and slavery in the South did not exist to kill people.

      Cultural genocide, as I plainly said in my remarks to the commishes, is the destruction not of lives but of a cultural heritage. The cultural heritage of Africans brought to the western hemisphere wasn't destroyed, but it was for them because they were separated from it.

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    3. Lempkin's definition of genocide included cultural genocide. Cultural genocide is not taking down a flag from a statehouse, it is the destruction of a culture. Here is a fairly common way of looking at cultural genocide:

      "Cultural genocide extends beyond attacks upon the physical and/or biological elements of a group and seeks to eliminate its wider institutions. This is done in a variety of ways, and often includes the abolition of a group’s language, restrictions upon its traditional practices and ways, the destruction of religious institutions and objects, the persecution of clergy members, and attacks on academics and intellectuals. Elements of cultural genocide are manifested when artistic, literary, and cultural activities are restricted or outlawed and when national treasures, libraries, archives, museums, artifacts, and art galleries are destroyed or confiscated. "

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    4. Yes that's what's starting. flags and monuments are just the beginning. Churches who believe homosexuality is a sin will be the next target. There have been calls for replacing Southern whites by way of massive nonwhite immigration.

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    5. When they're done with us, wider america is next

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    6. Connie-
      "There have been calls for replacing Southern whites by way of massive nonwhite immigration."

      It's not a new idea. Thaddeus Stevens is long dead but the spirit that motivated this statement must still be lurking in the darkness. Spirits don't die...

      "...the adoption of the measures I advocated at the outset of the war, the arming of the negroes, the slaves of the rebels, is the only way left on earth in which these rebels can be exterminated. They will find that they must treat those States now outside of the Union as conquered provinces and settle them with new men, and drive the present rebels as exiles from this country....nothing but actual extermination or exile or starvation will ever induce them to surrender to this Government."

      Thaddeus Stevens, U.S. House of Representatives, January 8, 1863

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  4. Fantastic post and comments @oldvirginiablog-

    ropelight:

    "I refuse to grant these persons the title of historians, they're knaves and vandals, the spawn of a poison obsession. They teach hatred for fellow countrymen, fan ancient animosities, and blame today's Southern sons and grandsons for transgressions their own Northern ancestors shared.

    These charlatans sow internal discord, falsify our nation's history, and fan the flames of animosity to serve a contemporary anti-American political agenda."....and more >...

    http://www.oldvirginiablog.blogspot.com/2015/07/will-we-eventually-dig-up-their-corpses.html

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