It’s become so convoluted, so broad and wide, so misrepresented that most Americans do not understand what Cancel Culture is, what its purposes are, and what is its basis.
Some are quick to respond by saying “The U.S. founders were almost all slave owners. We demand that their evils are erased from history books and they are no longer honored! After all, they committed the most egregious acts any man can force on another: slavery. The fact that a white man would own a black man and that the black man had absolutely no rights at all is the opposite of what Americans have studied in U.S. history for more than 200 years. It’s all lies!”
Watching and listening to people who tag themselves as “authorities” on racial rights and wrongs resonates deeply with many folks — those who vaguely remember the horrors in Europe and Asia in World War II where nations ruled by despots portrayed REAL racism on people who were different colors, different cultures, sometimes different languages, and religions. But THOSE tyrants didn’t just tear down statues selectively chosen by a few as being eligible for cancellation, they slaughtered people with whom they disagreed: men, women, and children. More than six million Jews were shot, burned to death, gassed, or starved. All of those happened in places scattered throughout Europe.
Do American minorities have some unilateral right to destroy the history of the racial injustices, not only injustices around us today, but injustices from every part of America’s history? Does that even make sense?
Before we go any further, one African American man became so enraged at today’s “Cancel Culture” he boiled over. Listen to his words describing his thoughts and feelings:
For What and Whom IS History?
The subject in college that I hated most was American history — not because it wasn’t important and not because I didn’t enjoy learning the details about our nation, but because every professor I had in four different American history courses concentrated almost solely on specific dates! Their exams were not about the history of which we learned, it was as if they wanted to trip us up for not remembering exact dates. Maybe the exact dates are not so important. But the context of time and life in the U.S. at those specific times IS critical to our understanding.
When my children went through the same dilemma, their much older Dad explained that I felt the exact same way when I was in college. What was different from the way my professors explained was this: I told our children that every important American history event never happened in a vacuum. Life around each event was far more important to understand than just each historical event by itself.
We all live in context. Our laws are made in the context of the day. What was meaningless in 1965 may be critical to address in a law today. What today prompts a law probably would have been insignificant and certainly not important in 1965.
History is to give us all not only a few details of a few events from our past. It is to give us the understanding of how and what initiated those historical acts, learning the details of those acts themselves, and putting them each in historical context as was applicable when each occurred and then to compare each with today’s America.
The Holocaust
Not only the Jewish people, but people from every ethnicity, nationality, and culture have at least heard of the Holocaust. The Holocaust did NOT occur in a vacuum either. It was not initiated by one or two events but from a generation of elitism in Germany that included gross racism against Jews by German nationals. I don’t want to be cold or harsh in saying this, but today’s cries by the Leftist media and many political activists of systemic racism are totally wrong. Germany in the late 1930s and early 1940s WAS systemically racist. What’s the difference?
The government of Nazi Germany fanned the fires of racism with laws, policies, regulations, and even social structure to continually fan the fires of racism among the people. But then Hitler’s government became aggressive actions to target not just a few Jews embedded among the German people but to force Jews out of their homes, jobs, and even neighborhoods to segregate Jews to keep them separate from Germans.
The “Final Solution” — or the plan to rid Germany of Jews — began with the Wannsee Conference.
In 1942, a group of high-ranking Nazi officials meet and calmly discuss the logistics of the “Final Solution,” the elimination of Jews from Germany. Along with notorious figures such as Adolf Eichmann (Gerd Böckmann), a number of lesser-known officers like Reinhard Heydrich (Dietrich Mattausch) debate plans of whether to reform the Jews, ship them elsewhere or simply end their lives. The actual minutes of the meeting were taken from each attendee to be destroyed. But, years later, it was discovered that one attendee kept the notes. From those notes came the movie that told the entire story of the planned extermination of six million Jews to rid Germany of them entirely. That movie, Conspiracy, is available today and can be viewed at several online streaming services. (I highly recommend it to all who want the REAL version of Germany’s World War II)
Erase History?
One can destroy some of the representations of historical events. That’s what horrifies most Americans watching evening news today. Statues, monuments, even buildings, many of which have been in existence for 200 years are being defaced and destroyed by “Cancel Culture’s” minions. Why? It’s foolish for one to believe history can be erased. It’s crazy to want to do that!
If any culture in modern history has a right to remove reminders of their history, it is the Jewish people. Their eradication by Nazis was as horrible and insidious as any other in World history. And Jews cringe even at the thought of anyone trying to erase that history. Why?
Remember: no historical event exists without context. The details of the context along with the historical events themselves are the greatest tools for building a future without repeating those horrors from the past.
Dachau was a Nazi concentration camp opened in March 1933, which was initially intended to hold political prisoners. It is located on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory northeast of the medieval town of Dachau, about 16 km northwest of Munich in the state of Bavaria, in southern Germany. When the Allied forces invaded Dachau and saw the inhumanity of the slaughters of an estimated one million Jews there, every citizen — man, woman, and child — of that small town were forced to go to the concentration camp to view the remains of tens of thousands of Jews that died in the gas chambers. The bodies those people from Dachau Village were forced to see were just those that had not yet been incinerated in the ovens at that camp.
Why would our European allies force that on those German villagers? They knew that unless German civilians were witness to the travesties of the German army, no one would believe those stories.
That is history. Jews nor Germans would EVER think about destroying Dachau. In fact, it remains to this day in the exact same form in which it existed the day those Germans were forced to go view the carnage. Why would they leave it in place all these years? It was so horrible, one would think (like many today in the U.S.), “We want it gone! It illustrates some of the lowest depravity of man. Why would we even think about keeping it?”
Simple Answer: To keep historical events that when described in their context would keep generation after generation of Germans from ever thinking, “Nothing like that could ever happen here.” The context in which the horrors against the Jews were created is exactly what needs to be branded on the minds of every German from every future generation after World War II in perpetuity.
I’ve been to Dachau!
Its horrors are forever in my memory. I walked through the large room where Germans tricked prisoners by telling them they were going to get a shower. When they all entered that room, (about 200 at a time) the doors were closed and locked and the gas was turned on. It took about five minutes for them all to die.
After about ten minutes, the doors were opened, and German soldiers began to haul their bodies and stack them in the adjacent large room where three massive ovens stood ready to welcome tens of thousands of lifeless innocent Jews for their cremation.
Those ovens are forever stamped in my memory. And with those memories and the context of their creation, no one can ever convince me “That was horrendous! We need to destroy that Concentration Camp!” German people never thought their leaders would allow such devastation.
By the way, all German concentration camps from WW II were preserved for history.
What’s Different Here?
NOTHING!
It is not only unconscionable that a large group of Americans choose to destroy representations of the American Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and even the memories of the men and women who led and served in those and other important American events. What is their reasoning for doing so? “To erase the memories of those who instigated the atrocities of those events.”
Doing so is the definition of Lunacy!
There is no doubt slavery was and is a travesty. There is and never has been any justifiable purpose for any human owning another human. But thinking one can do anything to erase historical memories of events — both good AND bad — is actually stupid. Doing so WOULD steal a number of great learning opportunities from every future generation of Americans. And for what purpose?
Summary
My youngest daughter had a Japanese classmate during her freshman year in college. That Japanese girl was horrified the first day in American history where the professor showed an old black and white film of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. That Japanese student actually got up and stormed from the class.
My daughter saw her later that day and asked why she was so upset. That Japanese student shared that ALL World War II history in Japan stated that World War II in the Pacific began when the United States bombed Tokyo! Nothing is Japanese history books even mentioned Pearl Harbor.
Cancel Culture is pure lunacy.
Instead, let’s be realistic, understanding that everyone must have the opportunity to see and hear all American history: even the bad. Someone more knowledgable than me once said, “If we don’t learn from our history we are doomed to repeat it.” Sure, there are parts of history I wish were different. But they weren’t different! And those bad things for which most Americans are ashamed they are part of our history, let’s learn from those and make certain none of that ever happens again.
Doesn’t that make better sense than just ignoring the reality of our past? My grandchildren and THEIR grandchildren need to know and understand slavery and its horrors — not to honor the evil, but to learn to never let it creep back into America again.
Here’s the Link for the Article: “319 Square Miles”
https://truthnewsnet.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/319-Square-Miles.pdf
Here’s the link to the video/audio played today on TNN Live Regarding the Truth about Today’s America:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
