No monument is protected while America goes through this Culture clashand no monument should be taken for granted or considered less worthy of protection.
First there were Confederate monuments. Low hanging fruit. But for the iconoclastic left, it was just an appetizer.
At the time of writing, the main course is being served. The crowd demands to devour monuments dedicated to people like Founding Fathers AND Teddy Roosevelt. Even an abolitionist Matthias Baldwin he was not spared the leftist rampage after vandals tagged the monument with paint and graffiti that read “colonizer” and “murderer.”
It would be a mistake to assume that the Saturnalia anti-statue movement was constrained solely to American figures. Indeed, the crazy leftists rampaging across the street are equal opportunity iconoclasts when they talk about their hatred of European culture.
Those of us who admire Spain’s history had much to regret last month.
The monument to the conquistador Juan de Oñate tasted the hatred of the left in mid-June. Known as “The Last Conquistador”, de Oñate served as colonial governor the Spanish province of Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico in the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Under his command, the Spanish were able to settle much of the Southwest and leave a robust cultural legacy that echoes to this day.
Unfortunately, we live in a time when Americans across the country categorically reject the past. Rio Arriba County was removed first Oñate Monument in the city of Alcalde on June 15. That same night, radical leftist activists undertook liberation Albuquerque Oñate’s presence, trying to tear down his statue.
After a violent fight that ended in shooting, several people taking part in the protest were arrested. Soon after, the city removed the statue. The city has not yet determined what it plans to do with the statue, but if current events are any indication, it will likely join the radical fervor and remove the statue for good. This is what 2020 is like for you.
Oñate was not the only Spaniard to see his likeness desecrated. On the evening of June 19 in San Francisco, a stunned crowd went berserk Golden Gate Park they look for monuments on which they can vent their anger. Like good, self-hating leftists, they equally applied their disrespect to dead white men, tearing down statues of national anthem writer Francis Scott Key, Union General Ulysses S. Grant, and Franciscan Junipero Serra. Unlike the first two, Serra was not American. Nevertheless, his Spanish origins were enough to excite these leftist hooligans.
After Serra’s statue was vandalized, the Spanish Embassy in the United States had the decency to call out the vandals and highlight the contribution Serra made to promoting the well-being of the indigenous people and protecting them from the abuses of unscrupulous Spanish administrators.
Javier Úbeda, mayor of the Spanish city of Boadilla del Monte offered to accommodate statues of Serra and the author Miguel de Cervantes (which was also not spared by vandals). The mayor argued that the two Spaniards were “architects who were part of what we proudly call Western civilization today.”
Mayor Úbeda’s comments are a breath of fresh air in today’s consumerist world where the pursuit of instant gratification is encouraged rather than cultivating national self-esteem.
Unfortunately, the historic insolence continues, but now through the mayor’s executive order. The city of Columbus, Ohio decided to start July quietly removing his statue Christopher Columbus.
For Western history buffs, 2020 has been a complex year, to say the least. It seems that mobs and spineless local officials continue to remove the artifacts of our predecessors on a daily basis.
Every self-respecting nation defends its own past and present. Good and bad. There are no perfect nations, but there are certainly cultures that have clearly distanced themselves from the rest. The West is one of them. As heirs of the civilizations built by the Greeks and Romans, it is our duty to defend ourselves against external and internal threats.
This is not a Republican vs. Democrat debate. It’s about the value of Western existence. If we are not ready to defend our culture and our institutions, prepare for expropriation at the hands of the left. The West has the right to exist and not be consumed by this amorphous blur globalism.
