Wednesday, June 24, 2020

Good-bye, Teddy!

From The New York Post:
The Rough Rider will soon dismount. The statue of President Teddy Roosevelt at the entrance to the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan will be removed amid widespread protests over racial inequality and police brutality in the United States, the New York Times reported Sunday. 
The statue, depicting the former president on horseback while flanked by a Native American man and a black man, has stood at the museum’s entrance since 1940. The museum — which is privately run but sits on public land — requested the statue be moved and the city agreed, according to the report. 
“Over the last few weeks, our museum community has been profoundly moved by the ever-widening movement for racial justice that has emerged after the killing of George Floyd,” the museum’s president, Ellen Futter, told the Times. 
“We have watched as the attention of the world and the country has increasingly turned to statues as powerful and hurtful symbols of systemic racism,” she added. “Simply put, the time has come to move it.” (Read more.)

From The Federalist:
For millennia, King Mob has targeted societies’ icons with varied goals and to varied ends, and few things are more foreboding than his desecration of civic art. Just as the targets have ranged from rulers to clergy, from tyrants to helpless, and from the guilty to the innocent, the outcomes have ranged from victory to defeat depending on the society’s strength and will. The promise of bloodshed coming alongside or following shortly after, however, is an historic certainty. The symbols of a people never satisfy: People themselves must always come next.

In 1790, mobs looted and pillaged Paris’s treasured Notre Dame. To the revolutionaries, the cathedral symbolized everything that was wrong with France’s history and society — a history of kings, tradition and religion, and a society beset by royal injustice and systemic inequality.

Over the next three years, the 12th-century church’s riches and artifacts were stripped, stolen, and destroyed, their remnants hidden by the faithful and sold off by the faithless. Statues of the Virgin Mary were removed and statues to the Goddess of Liberty took their place on desecrated altars.

At nearby Sainte-Chapelle, the revolution pulled the apostles from the pedestals where they had stood watch over Christ’s Crown of Thorns. The 12 statues were vandalized and buried — half so badly they are still undergoing attempts at restoration. As the destruction of religious art unfurled, priests who did not swear allegiance to the new order and those who aided them were sentenced to death. Back at the cathedral, the revolutionary government mistook the 28 statues of the kings of ancient Judah for French kings (rich old men and all), dragging them into the public square for decapitation. Their buried heads were not rediscovered for nearly 200 years.

In the Place de Louis XV, the large statue of the square’s namesake was torn down and the plaza renamed Place de la Revolution. A guillotine was raised, and the “liberated” space would see the execution of more than 1,200 prisoners, from King Louis XVI and his wife to the executions’ ringleader himself, Maximilien Robespierre. (Read more.)
Share

5 comments:

julygirl said...

Alright, alright, alright....but Teddy Roosevelt?? What's next, the Jefferson Memorial, Mount Vernon?

elena maria vidal said...

By erasing our history, the Marxists make it easier to rewrite.

Sansa said...

Unfortunately, they won't rest until every statue they don't like is pulled down. And if public officials disagree with them, choose to preserve those statues they are called racists, defenders of imperialism.
I don't know if it's true or false, I read that a member of the black lives matter, wants the statue of Jesus removed because the statue shows Jesus Christ as a white man and that promotes white supremacy.

julygirl said...

Try as they might, history cannot be erased. Even before there was the written word, history (his story) was told. The wrongs of the past and the mistakes of the past help to create a better future. Forgetting the past only leads to a doomed repetition of it. The people who are causing this destruction are too stupid to realize that they can get away with it only because they live in a society that allows it. They and their leaders would all be dead or in a 'Gulag' somewhere if they lived in another place at another time. What is even worse than the destruction is the ignorance and arrogance that foments it.

elena maria vidal said...

Unknown, you are right. Julygirl, I could not agree more.