Template:Statues

Robert E Lee spoke against the idea of erecting monuments to commemorate the war. He thought the money would be better spent to help so many southern poor who were still starving in the aftermath of the war. He wanted the wounds to heal. To force the tearing down these works of art through civil or more violent means in most case is nothing more than political posturing and virtue signalling. This habit of force is pandemic in these protesters and many who oppose them so that they do not have the courage to end slavery in their own time. They are the ones who engage in hate, willing to open wounds, and divide the people for mere emotional benefits in vain posturing of self righteousness rather than free their neighbor by taking back responsibility for their own lives.
Most will not be willing to see the whole truth and provide for it, but know this, you should "Never trust the spirit that comes to take and destroy by force."

Statues and History

People want to destroy statues that are woks of art because they think that will make things better. That, of course, is nonsense. That is also true of those who are destroying statues in Europe.

They correlate the destruction of statues of Hitler or Stalin and Lenin and justify that tearing down of symbols as if they have reached a more woke view of the world.

Is this vandalism warranted or wise?

Columbus was not commemorated because evil men came with him or after him but because he had the courage to explore the possibilities. He was man. Like us all, containing both good and bad, he struggled. Some saw him as a threat and a destroyer but to others he was a savior.

Slavery has been such a universal picture throughout history my first question would be where does this destruction end?

All most all famous people of the past Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, all Spartan, who brutally enslaved most of their nation and of course Caesar. You could say they were all white but most Muslims including Prophet Muhammad himself engaged and promoted slavery. Most of the tribes of Africa including the Zulu king Shaka.

The statues of Columbus or Robert E Lee and many others were created as works of art to commemorate the good in men because "The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones." The question of what is good and what is evil is the beginning of all conflicts.

Their mere presence may give rise to debate and in an environment of free speech reason may flourish since, these statues represent different things and ideas to different people.

Even the statues of Hitler or Stalin and Lenin can remain as reminder of where bad ideas can take a society. Tyrants prosper where ignorance prevails. Freedom grows where the individual allows and allows others to speak, and see, and hear freely the opinions of others. If one statue may represent different things to many people we can ask "What happened to diversity and inclusion?"

Was every American that fought on the side of the south during the Civil War evil racists?

Can you actually divide humanity into good and evil by geography?

The victor of a war often gets to write its history. Every conflict includes both good and evil. While it may be convenient to dived nations or sides of every conflict good and evil it is generally both over simplistic and naive if not unjust counter productive, and destructive.

A mob is born

It is true that we should not be so accepting of the propaganda of victors. But the true historical account of the events and the motivations of the people during the war between the States may be far from what people are being taught or just want to believe today.

Neither nations nor races are guilty of evil accept in an academic sense. In truth only individual can choose to do or not do evil.

We should always try to deal in facts and the underlying causes and motivations of people as individuals when looking at history or for justice. It is the individual who writes history with the sweat and blood of their lives. There is no brush so broad that it can paint a large group or a nation or a race without doing injustice.

We should study history to learn from the mistakes of individuals so that we as individuals do not repeat those mistakes in our own lives.

Real history is the Human experience and that is complicated because humans are complicated. They are seldom just good or bad. When you divide whole groups of people into north and south or Germans and Americans, or Jews and Palestinians or White and Black, you start getting into trouble. That is where the mob is born and evil thrives.

Crowds turn into mobs when individuals lack courage. If the individuals lack forgiveness, which must be practiced, they will lack love. Without love mobs become beast devouring who they will. If you are a part of or just with a mob emotion has become the ruler of the day and the voice of reason is drowned out by the cries for justice which give life to the specters of injustice.

The innocence of Scout could not have saved Atticus Finch if he did not have the courage to stand against the mob.

Countries of the South

There were racists in the south and the north but most of the people fighting in the south against the people who came from the north were clearly patriots fighting for their country and "State's rights".

Some are still saying "The American Civil War started due to the secession of Southern states who then went on to form a new federal government, the Confederate States of America." There are several reasons why this is a distortion of the history of governments.

The Southern states had the right to secede from the Union. They were simply going back to a Confederation, not a federal government, like the Americans States had before the federal Constitution.

States, before and after the federal Constitution was created, were “as foreign to each other as Mexico is to Canada.” Clark’s Summary of American Law, Constitutional Law.

After the Revolutionary war each State had its own government. They formed a confederation through the Articles of Confederation. What that means can only be understood by a deeper understanding of the conflict between these to forms of governments and the status of the States and their citizens. Flags and statues or phrases and slogans do not impart that understanding.

A Yankee soldier reportedly asked his Confederate prisoner: 'Why do you fight us so hard, Reb?" The response was simple, "Because you are here, Yank.”

The Confederate Soldier was a patriot of his state. He saw his state as his country for he was a citizen of the State. To many of them they saw the federal government taking a path most American feared when the US Constitution was first promoted by a minority of Americans.

It was the factories, money, and navy that won the war for the north. There were courageous men on both sides of the conflict. To say that it was a "war to end slavery" is devoid of understanding as smashing statues as if you are some kind of advocate of freedom by doing so. Before you judge men of history and whole nations you should find out who they were and what they were doing.

Even Lincoln knew the south could go, but they could not pick federal apples on their way out. They also had to pay debts to merchants with just weights and measures. These two sentence are at the root of the motivation for many to go to war. And then there is the profit and power wars may bring.

To think the war was fought to free slaves may make people feel better about the destruction of the lives of so many people living in the South and the death of 600,000 Americans but it was still a blight on the history of humanity.

Most of those who suffered and died never owned slaves or profited from their bondage. In fact slavery as a cheap source of labor impoverished more so called white people than it made rich. Many in the south wanted to see slavery end for a variety of reasons.

Only 4% of Americans even owned slaves. Some of those slave owners were Blacks and Indians. You could have bought all the slaves and set them free for far less than the war cost without all the death and destruction.

Who financed the first army that marched into the south?

How many Federal Officers were with them and how many died?

The answer is one US Officer was with them and he is the only one who died. They were not there to free the slaves and he was not killed because he was going to free slaves. They were there for the money.

The officer who was an observer was killed because he wanted to take down the flag of the confederacy flying on the roof of a hotel. The hotel manager that shot him was immediately killed with a sword of the man next to him.

It might be called idolatry to hold an object dearer than another mans life. Such extreme reverence is certainly misplaced. But there is something almost delatorius, even demonic, to imagine that the destruction of those objects or symbols can be hailed as virtue.

We also revere the constitution that moved American states from a confederation to a Federal form of government. But do we understand what that means and meant to Americans at that time.

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Confederate vs Federal

In the days before the Civil War people were a citizen of the State they lived in not citizens of the United States. State citizens were not the "We the People " of the US Constitution. They were not even a party to it. Numerous cases verify that fact.

The men who signed the Constitution of the united States beginning “We the People” had been given no authority to sign anything, much less invent a new government. At the time they scratched their John-Hancocks to that parchment, “We the People” consisted of the names on that document. Patrick Henry, who opposed the Constitution, aptly asked “Who authorized them to speak the language of ‘We the People’, instead of ‘We the States’?”.Prior to the Fourteenth Amendment, “No private person has a right to complain, by suit in court, on the ground of a breach of Constitution. The constitution it is true, is a compact, but he is not a party to it. The states are party to it”.

If the individual freeman was not a party to the Constitution, then the constitution was not “a government of the people” or “by the people”, at least as “private persons” but only those people who signed the compact and those state governments in their limited and legal capacity. If the Constitution is a compact or contract then there is no contract or contracting away of rights of the people in general at its signing or ratification. Those who signed did not have the rights of the people in their possession at the time. The States could invest no rights in the Federal government that were not theirs to begin with and if they did so they would have to do it according to the contract that granted their existence. In any case the people were not a party to the Constitution.
“Hence the attempt of the constitution to establish a federal government, without these natural souls, was preposterous, unnatural, and void...”

Today, many consider the constitution as sacred - but not those who had won a great freedom through a century of sacrifice and hardship. They feared and opposed this Constitution of the United States. And that generation who had secured their free dominion against an unwarranted usurpation and tyranny opposed those “great words” and its compact. They did not war against it because it was not a compact with them nor did it have much influence over them or their lives at that time.

• “Just as the revolutionary Adams opposed the Constitution in Massachusetts, so did Patrick Henry in Virginia, and the contest in that most important State of all was prolonged and bitter. He who in Stamp Act days had proclaimed that there should be no Virginians or New Yorkers, but only Americans, now declaimed as violently against the preamble of the Constitution because it began, ‘We the People of the United States’ instead of ‘We, the State’. Like many, he feared a ‘consolidated’ government, and the loss of states rights. Not only Henry but much abler men, such as Mason, Benjamin Harrison, Munroe, R.H. Lee, were also opposed and debated... others in what was the most acute discussion carried on anywhere...”

• “Owing to the way in which the conventions were held, the great opposition manifested everywhere, and the management required to secure the barest majorities for ratification, it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that the greater part of the people were opposed to the Constitution.”

• “It was not submitted to the people directly, and in those days of generally limited suffrage, even those who vote for delegates to the State conventions were mostly of a propertied class, although the amount of property called for may have been slight.”

In 1787, when the Constitution was ready to be submitted to the Governors of the states for ratification, Patrick Henry lectured against it in the Virginia State House for three weeks, criticizing the Constitution, warning that it had been written “as if good men will take office”! He asked “What will they do when evil men took office?”! “When evil men take office, the whole gang will be in collusion”, he declared, “and they will keep the people in utter ignorance” and “seize the public liberties by ambuscade”. He further warned that the new federal government had too much money and too much power and it would consolidate power unto itself, converting us “into one solid empire”. And the President with the treaty power would “lead in the treason”.

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People do not take the time to really learn history. You do not and have not been taught it in your schools and universities which have become propaganda machines. Smashing statues is a pointless exercise and nothing more than virtue signaling, especially if you do not want to find out the deeper causes and motivators of the actions of humanity, both good and evil.

You must look deeper into the lives and hearts of your fellow man and care about his pain in a way that might make him and his life better. To do that you may have to look deeper into your own heart and mind.

If you want to smash statues of pro slave owners then you need to destroy Grants Tomb. Robert E Lee freed the slaves he inherited before the Civil War started. Grant on the other hand did not do that with his slave until after the war.

History is a story

"When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear." Thomas Sowell

All of History is a story but not all stories are history. When the people no longer want to hear the truth they will make up their own history where liars are heroes.

The statist theory of history is that it is a series of events culminating around kings, presidents and rulers, their wars and schemes and politics. Howard Zinn wanted to see history as a class struggle of impoverished farmers, feminists, laborers, and resisters of slavery and war warding off the oppression of the opportunistic, depraved, and sinister powerful elite. But the real struggle of mankind is the endless quest to find the truth and the willingness to accept it at all cost.

Anyone who knows the history and the strategies of the communist take overs in other nations which has led to the deaths of millions of people should be able to predict the phases to come in America and the world at this time of crises, real or imagined.

While Lenin knew in his mind that “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” Patrick Henry said “We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth… For my part, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst; and to provide for it.”

So the question for you as an individual is do you want to know the whole truth and provide for it?

To take that journey we need to understand, like Daniel Webster that “There is nothing so powerful as truth, and often nothing so strange.”

Because something is unfamiliar or strange do you have the courage to explore the facts even if they prove to contradict what you want to believe?

The truth is, History is the story of every man who seek to live through it and they must be judged according to the content of their character, actions, and motivations as individuals. They are the author of history.

People are complex creatures living in a sea of relationships that can manifest both good and bad, righteousness and unrighteousness, sloth and avarice, virtue and vice. Any attempt to collectivize people as those Germans, those Indians, those Irish or those Africans immediately bias the author.

That sea of relationships in which we all move include not only family and friends, enemies and allies, strangers and pilgrims but the social structures of law and government, community and religion.

Ever Changing

Thing are changing as they have already changed.

History is the story of individual men and their relationship with other men and the elements of the world. The elements of the world includes the laws and institutions that men establish for themselves.

History is complicated because relationships are complicated. The people who are bound by love and sacrificed for one another form unbreakable bonds in society but those who bind the loyalty of society by "gift, gratuities, and benefits" and other means are easily divided.

“All government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery!” Jonathon Swift

Black people risked their lives to save white people and white people did the same to save black people by the millions. The same is true of native Americans. The same stories are rampant in the colonies and countries throughout history. As soon as you label a group with the actions of a single individual you become a racist and bigot. It is always dangerous to start identifying people by groups it is a disaster when you do it by geography, or race, or even religion.

Thousands of Germans risked their lives to save Jews. 10 of thousands lost their lives resisting Hitler and his political and social schemes. Some served his government. In fact, the ideology of the Nazi party were not only in Germany but all over the world. Certainly the philosophy of the socialist were everywhere.

There are more than a dozen streets in Germany named Rommel, at least one or more army barracks and some statues and busts. Germany systematically destroyed statues of Nazis but many of the laws created by Hitler are still in place.

You go to prison if you try to home-school your children just for one.

Does destroying the statues of the past change the course of human events?

Does it repair the human heart to wreak revenge upon an object that never had life in it to begin with while you neglect the living?

People are virtue signaling and posturing in self righteousness but in truth they desire to free no one. They are not accustomed to sacrificing for the living and have no desire to do so. In fact, they not only are willing to become perfect savages having become accustomed to living at the expense of others but desire that a livelihood be provided them at by the property of others.

The ideology of Socialism includes the collective ownership and distribution of the means of production through political means. While some countries moderate their socialist agenda allowing some free market ultimately the labor of the people belongs to the State, not the individual.

The means of production is not just the land, the factories, and business but includes the people themselves as Human Resources. Every citizen of the United States is a numbered slave like in the days of the bondage of Egypt. There are members of a corvee system of statutory labor, where the amount of the labor they must do without compensation is determined by the legislature.

“Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come. And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more: The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen,… and wheat, and beasts… and slaves, and souls of men.” (Revelation 18:10, 13)

Individual vs Collective

Only individuals "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights". To "secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed" or their application for benefits and even their slothful acquiescence.

Socialism sees individualism as an enemy of the State. Individuals are created in the family and some of that animus for the individualism will seek to undermine the autonomy of the family in every socialist state.

Te narrative today in the media and academy and therefor in the minds of the people is the problems and dangers in the Black community are the result of White supremacy and systemic abuses of the police.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a socialist long before Hitler dawned his famous Toothbrush Mustache. Between FDRand LBJ they did more damage to America than Hitler. Their socialist approach to American politics and culture has enslaved more people than the slave traders and killed more Blacks than the KKK.

Comments

If the Black Lives Matter movement wanted to save Black lives they would address the real problems instead of spreading a message of hate and violence that will only feed the cause of racism.

It is up to you to find the facts that matter and provide for them.

Are the Police Racist? by Heather Mac Donald https://www.prageru.com/video/are-the-police-racist/

America Is Less Racist Today Than Ever Before including comments by Condoleezza Rice narrated by Larry Elder https://www.prageru.com/video/america-is-less-racist-today-than-ever-before/

Who Is Booker T Washington? https://www.prageru.com/video/who-is-booker-t-washington/

Larry Elder and facts about racism and profiling in America https://www.prageru.com/video/is-america-racist/

Facts matter https://www.facebook.com/127225910653607/posts/3236873216355512/

Cops Are the Good Guys https://www.prageru.com/video/cops-are-the-good-guys/

The Left Wants to Keep Racism Alive In America, there's a card more valuable than any card from Visa or American Express. What is it? How can you get one? Candace Owens answers these questions and explains why the Left continually invokes racism. https://www.prageru.com/video/the-left-wants-to-keep-racism-alive/

“The process (of mass-media malpractice and deception) has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies---all this is indispensably necessary.”

The real threat to Black lives is not the police and certainly not white supremacists, which have been getting harder and harder to find.

Statistics are clear that the greatest threat to Black lives today is Black crime. If you do not know that you are listening to the wrong news sources or have been brainwashed in the schools you have attended. It is your responsibility to alter your own falsely perceived notions about who is killing Blacks and why. But it is most important for you to understand what you must do about it if you want things to change.

The election of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 led to a shift of black voting loyalties from Republican to Democrat, as Roosevelt's New Deal socialist programs seem to promise economic relief to people suffering from the Great Depression. In truth serious economist agree that those programs only delayed the recovery and prolonged the depression and therefore the suffering.

The Black community had 3% single parent families 40 years after slavery. Enmity between races and nations has existed all over the world. It has ebbed and flowed with different generations. While there was clearly was a stronghold of support for racism against blacks in the south there were always Attica Finch struggling to bring balance.

Only 7% of black children were born in single parent families before 1964 despite Jim Crow laws and acts of persecution and abuse.

But suddenly by 2014 the Black children in single parent homes had risen to 73% and was still climbing. What happened?

This is a direct result of the welfare state that began with FDR and by LBJ who targeted the Black community to secure their vote. The cure was worse than the disease and it devastated the Black community by undermining the Black family.

The drive toward socialism of the Great Society of LBJ seeded into the field of America has divided the Black community into fatherless family . The condition of black poverty and crime in America is not the product of slavery or even bigotry but socialism.

“If we want better people to make a better world, then we will have to begin where people are made in the family.” J.M. Braude.
You can neither repair the family nor society unless you repent of the covetous practices of Socialism.

People are conquered by their own greed, covetousness and sloth long before any tyrant seizes power. Nature abhors a vacuum and vices are nothing more than what occurs in the absence of virtue.

While we all originally had free choice we did not all have the wisdom to make that free choice for our mutual benefit. Governments are created by man, but men are often recreated by governments. The mob makes the recreation easier.

You cannot legislate morality unless you are willing to become tyrant.

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