True Left

OLD CONTENT contd.

Going hand in hand with removal of colonialist monuments is building of anti-colonialist monuments:

www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-48724128

A monument honouring the "tremendous contribution" of the Windrush generation is to be erected in London.
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Events are taking place across the country on Saturday to mark the first National Windrush Day.
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BaronessFloella Benjamin, chair of the Windrush Commemoration Committee, said: "Having a Windrush monument located at Waterloo Station where thousands of Windrush pioneers - including children like myself - first arrived inLondon, will be a symbolic link to our past as we celebrate our future."

Janice Irwin, from community group Ageless Teenagers, described the plans as "fantastic", but also "long overdue", and said itwas "a little strange" that it would be built at Waterloo Station, and not Brixton where many people from the Windrush generation settled.

Some of the Windrush generation were wrongly told after they had lived in the UK for decades they were in the country illegally.

Many lost their right to work or get NHS treatment, while others were detained or deported.

Thethen Home Secretary Amber Rudd apologised last year for the deportationthreats, calling the scandal "wrong" and "appalling".

An estimated 500,000 people now living in the UK have been called the Windrush generation.

TheHMT Empire Windrush first arrived at Tilbury Docks, Essex, on 22 June 1948, bringing workers from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and other islands, as a response to post-war labour shortages in the UK.

www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-08/sydney-statues-of-colonial-leaders-in-spotlight-again/11285380

There are 25 publicly funded statues of the colony's early leaders around the CBD.

Amongthem are Captain Cook, Governor Arthur Phillip, Lachlan Macquarie, Queen Victoria, explorer Matthew Flinders and even his cat Trim.
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"It'sbreathtakingly hard trying to feel proud walking around seeing statues of people that my old people have told me have declared martial law on us."

So far so good. But then:

Mr Moran said a statue of a prominent Indigenous leader would be a small but significant step towards reconciliation.

It's the colonialist statues that have to be taken down,not merely other statues added. No non-colonialist statues should be built before the last colonialist statue has been removed, in the same way that we lower the colonial flag prior to raising our own flag. Otherwise subjects the non-colonialist symbol to the indignity of sharing space with the colonialist symbol.

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Medals count as statues:

rapidcityjournal.com/news/local/bill-seeks-to-remove-stain-of-wounded-knee-massacre-medals/article_ef12b305-8252-5f80-8541-7f3cfd015c2d.html

Newfederal legislation seeks to “Remove the Stain” from the Medal of Honorby rescinding 20 medals that were awarded to soldiers who participated in the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre.
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The massacre happened on Dec. 29, 1890, near Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in southwestern South Dakota. A force of 490 U.S. soldiers — armed with rapid-fire, wheel-mounted artillery guns — was attempting todisarm a camp of about 370 Lakota Sioux people when a shot rang out andchaotic firing ensued.

A total of 31 soldiers died during the encounter or afterward from their wounds, compared to hundreds of NativeAmericans. Although precise estimates of Native American deaths vary, the Remove the Stain Act says there were 350 to 375 Native American fatalities, nearly two-thirds of whom were unarmed women and children.
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Afterthe massacre, some of the Native American dead were left on the frozen ground for several days before a military-led burial party dumped the bodies in a mass grave. Today, that grave is marked by a small, weathered monument that was erected in 1903.

The Army awarded 20 Medals of Honor — the nation’s highest military award — to soldiers who participated in the massacre.
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Thelegislation, if passed by Congress and signed by the president, would require the names of the 20 medal winners to be removed from the government’s official Medal of Honor Roll.
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The findings in thenew legislation also mention the historical writings and statements of Maj. Gen. Nelson Miles, who was not present at the massacre but commanded all of the Army’s departments west of the Mississippi River atthe time.

Drawing from a letter Miles wrote in 1891, the legislation quotes him stating, “I have never heard of a more brutal, cold-blooded massacre than that at Wounded Knee.”

Western civilization itself is a stain on the New World that needs removing.

(Notonly should the medals be rescinded, but all known descendants of the soldiers who participated in the massacre should be prohibited by the state from reproducing.)

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Visitor comment: I agree with most of what he's saying, only the notion that people who never owned slaves should pay "reparations" to people who never were slaves, in apology for slavery existing - something that no one today was even alive to see - is retarded. I thinka much better course of action, one that won't actually deepen ethnic division, is to remove these monuments and to shift the cultural forces of the US towards Univeralism rather than tribalism.

90sRF response: He wasn't necessarily demanding reparations, but rather pointing out that the same people unwilling to pay reparations gladly pay for stuff to celebrate historical slave owners. If people who had nothing to do with slavery themselves solely cared about keeping their own money, they shouldn't be willing to pay for either. Unwillingness to pay only for the former can therefore be deduced to be caused by something other than merely people who had nothing to do with slavery wanting to keep their own money.

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https://summit.news/2019/07/25/video-algerians-tear-down-statue-of-general-de-gaulle-in-france/

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People are catching on to our way of thinking:

www.campusreform.org/?ID=13537

Aimedat UVA President James Ryan, the petition entitled "Remove Monument to Genocide that Welcomes People to UVA," as reported by Newsweek, calls for UVA to scrap a statue of George Rogers Clark, a leader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and brother of William Clark. The petition has received 450 total signatures, just 50 signatures shy of its final goal,at publication time.

Inscribed text underneath the statue reads “George Rogers Clark: Conqueror of the Northwest.”

“Remove the statue of George Rogers Clark engaged in genocide to a museum where it can be presented as a shameful memory,” the petition demands. “The statue of George Rogers Clark at UVA depictsa white man on a horse dressed for war….He has other men behind him with a gun and a barrel of gun powder, and he appears to be reaching back for a gun with his right hand. There are four Native Americans in front of him, including one infant.”
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Richard Handler, an anthropology professor at UVA, told the Cavalier Daily that the statue could be moved to an exhibit to teach people about genocidal behavior against Native Americans.

“People need to realize that statues were not handed down from God but are human creations of specific times,places and peoples,” Handler said. “As our thinking changes, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with removing, destroying, or even rededicatinga statue.”

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Another history lesson:

www.startribune.com/the-real-history-of-mount-rushmore/388715411/

Thecarved visages are iconic Americana, appearing in a gazillion media photos and books and travel features, in advertisements and promotions, on U.S. postage stamps in two eras, and on South Dakota’s license plate (“Great Faces. Great Places.”).

But the back story of Mount Rushmore is hardly a rich history of a shared democratic ideal. Some seethe monument in the Black Hills as one of the spoils of violent conquest over indigenous tribes by a U.S. Army clearing the way for white settlers driven westward by a lust for land and gold.

Actually, violent conquest of minorities by the majority is the democratic ideal.

As it was in colonial America, the young country’s expansion was fueled by “Manifest Destiny” — a self-supreme notion that any land coveted by Euro-Americans was, by providence, rightfully theirs for the taking.
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Thesculptures were chiseled by an imported Ku Klux Klansman on a granite mountain owned by indigenous tribes on what they considered sacred land — land that the U.S. Supreme Court said in 1980 was illegally taken from them.
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Theso-called “Indian wars” featured the U.S. Army aggressively enforcing America’s expansionist resolve by exterminating indigenous tribes who sought to stay where they’d always been. Indians would lose nearly everybloody battle that would follow.
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the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 granting Lakota autonomy over a broad, 60-million-acre region encompassing all of South Dakota west of the Missouri River — including the Black Hills — and parts of North Dakota and Nebraska.
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But like every tribal treaty before and since, the U.S. reneged on its Fort Laramie promises almost immediately by failing to prevent small-scale incursions into “The Great Sioux Reservation.”

Justsix years after Laramie, Gen. George Custer led a U.S. Army expedition out of Fort Lincoln (present-day Bismarck, N.D.) into the Black Hills toexplore suitable sites for forts and routes to them. The action was a purposely provocative treaty violation.

Anothermission, to assess the presence of gold, would hasten the treaty’s demise. Custer rosily trumpeted that gold was found, unleashing a torrent of prospectors that the U.S. chose not to contain.

After a failed bid to buy the Black Hills, the U.S. determined to drive out the Lakota and simply take the area’s riches.Fierce resistance by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull was worn down by the Army’s big guns and well-supplied legions, mostly dispatched from Minnesota’s Fort Snelling.
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Atwar’s end, the “victorious” U.S. carved up the Great Sioux Reservation by first taking back the Black Hills and broad swaths of buffers. The Lakota were forced onto mostly useless land, including the Pine Ridge Reservation on South Dakota’s southern border.
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On a bitter December day in 1890, a U.S. cavalry contingent intercepted a band of ghost-dancing Lakota and attempted to confiscate what few guns they had. A shot rang out, and panicked soldiers opened fire from all sides, killing150 men, women and children before hunting down scores of unarmed Lakota and shooting them point-blank as they struggled in the snow.

The infamous Wounded Knee Massacre (incredibly, the U.S. called it a “battle” and awarded medals to its “heroes”) was the last of America’s long, violent campaigns to subdue indigenous tribes all across the continent.
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Threedecades after Wounded Knee, in 1923, a South Dakota tourism agent advanced an idea for several large sculptures in the Black Hills. He enlisted the support of the renowned Gutzon Borglum, whose most recent work had been carving Stone Mountain, Ga., a grand gathering site for a white supremacist group Borglum belonged to, the Ku Klux Klan.
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AtMount Rushmore, you may learn that the sculptures are arranged for maximum sun exposure, itself a cruel irony: The faces of the four presidents (white conquerors) peer southeast toward a reservation housing vanquished Lakota, who mostly live out forgotten, impoverished lives in the shadow of their sacred Paha Sapa that, legally, still belong to them.

This is called democracy.

The Mount Rushmore sculptures must be destroyed. (They are extremely ugly anyway, and utterly ruin the entire mountainscape in the most tasteless way possible. In this sense this perfectly captures how Western civilization interacts with everything it encounters. We should certainly keep photos to show students in a post-Western future.)

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