This is how it was when Hitler burned books.
Some few frenzied zealots did the burning, and the good people sat home, nervous, anxious, apprehensive, the way a mouse is in the moments before a cat sinks its fangs into it.
This is America today.
Where they pull down statues of George Washington and Ulysses Grant and anybody who held office in the Confederacy. Where anything or anyone involved in the slavery of 150 years ago – except the Democratic Party – is condemned and purged.
Where politicians and poets of earlier days are denounced and desecrated by roving mobs easily traceable by TV news cameras by unfindable by hamstrung police departments. Where people rage online about exactly how dark Jesus’s Middle Eastern skin would have been.
Where the caustic racial, cultural and political battles of today are overlaid on the people, events and monuments of the past. It is an Inquisition, as hate driven and intolerant as inquisitions of history, holding all of the country and the culture’s past to the angry progressive orthodoxy of today.
This is America today, intent on denouncing and destroying the America of yesterday.
It is an effort of leftist internationalism which requires Americans to turn against their history, heritage and ancestors. It is an attack on America from within, in the classroom and on the evening news, in the shouted rants of protestors, in the profanity-laced graffiti of the streets. It is an attack not just on the individuals honored in history and sculpture, but on the very notion of honor, on the belief that there is anything American from an earlier day worth remembering and taking inspiration from.
It is a well-advanced effort to make Americans hate America.
And it takes its cues from the darkest days in mankind’s past.
Because toppling statues is Hitler and the Islamic State, not Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. This is what societies do as they are collapsing, not as they are opening new eras of freedom and peace. This is a sinister assault, hiding behind the worthy cause of equality, hoping to create chaos and impose oppression.
All as an act of horrific intolerance.
Intolerance and bigotry.
A bigotry against the people who founded and built this country, and intolerance for any age or culture not compliant with today’s progressive agenda. The Islamic State blew up statues of a different day and time, and America’s progressives are intent on doing the same thing.
And so we take down the statue of the president who first invited a black man to dinner at the White House, and we have a national debate to take down the statue of the president who freed the slaves.
Because statues are metaphors for civilization, and they destroy one because they hate the other.
Because they hate America that much.
The professors and the newscasters and the politicians, and some of the people in the streets, the ones with the burning flags and the hateful curses and the shouting at the cops. The ones who tell us that the voice of the people is heard in the mobs.
Which is a lie.
In America, the voice of the people isn’t heard in the streets, it is heard at the ballot box. We are a republic, not a mobocracy. And blocked streets and shouted slogans are notoriously inaccurate measures of public opinion. We form public policy, we shape our law, we hold the people sovereign, in peaceful elections, not raucous demonstrations. Certainly, speech can be expressed in protest, but governance cannot.
And politicians seemingly running scared from public protests are merely using the demonstrations as cover for policies and agendas that would otherwise not be tolerated. The mobs want to defund the police, but the voters do not, and the progressive politicians hide behind the one to avoid the scrutiny of the other.
And so it is that America finds itself at war with itself – at war with its past and its present, fighting against its founders and its protectors.
A war that could only be fomented and embraced by America’s enemies, its enemies within.
Because only an enemy philosophy could take America’s first and most fundamental declaration – “that all men are created equal” – and turn it into a weapon of division, instead of its natural role as a uniter of causes and people.
It is good that teaches us that we are brothers and sisters, equal and free. It is evil that turns us against one another, separate and enraged.