As American Politicians Surrender to BLM, France Says “No!” to Statue Killers
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When two NYC employees were recently confronted for using an American Flag to mop a dirty bathroom — hours before Flag Day — one responded, “It’s just a symbol.” (One wonders how he’d respond to someone thus treating an inherited symbol of his mother’s love.)

But the employees’ attitude is no surprise. They were just following the example of pseudo-elites, politicians, and others, who either cower before terrorist group Black Lives Matter as our culture is further destroyed — or actually facilitate that destruction. In an ironic twist, though, the cowardly among us are getting “a lesson in courage” from France, writes American Thinker today.

As the site’s editor-in-chief Thomas Lifson states, “I am sick at heart that our entire political leadership is cowering before mobs of vandals seeking to destroy our collective memory of the past. But now we see mob rule imitating the tactics of the Red Guards of China’s Cultural Revolution, who destroyed that nation’s precious artistic and literary heritage in the name of revolutionary purity, and the Taliban in Afghanistan, who blew up ancient Buddhist statues — to almost universal condemnation outside the Islamic world.”

So where “is the condemnation of the vandalism of our historic artistic heritage by mobs tearing down statues…?” Lifson asks. He then says that, while we hear crickets, President Trump and other politicians are getting a lesson in fortitude from the president of France (tweet below).

Red State’s Brandon Moore provides a transcript:

“We will be inflexible when it comes to tackling racism, anti-Semitism and discrimination, and new strong decisions will be made to reinforce the egality [sic] of chances,” Macron said in the video. “But this noble fight is perverted when it turns into communitarianism, into a false rewriting of history.”

“This is unacceptable when it is picked up by separatists. I tell you very clearly tonight my dear fellow citizens, the Republic will not erase any trace or name from its history,” he continued. “It will not forget any of its deeds or take down any statue. What we need to do is to look all together with lucidity on all of our history and all our memory. Our relation to Africa in particular so we can build a present and a possible future from one to the other side of the Mediterranean.”

In reality, though, the very fact that the West’s national heroes are assailed reflects how history has already been rewritten. That is, instead of emphasizing (and, admittedly, sometimes exaggerating) their triumphs, we now fixate (and surely exaggerate) their sins.

Yet as a quotation attributed to Abraham Lincoln warns, “Those who look for the bad in people will surely find it.” All people exist far, far from perfection. If moral infallibility were a prerequisite for hero or cultural icon status, who could possibly make the cut? As I pointed out in another article today, just last year an airport was renamed after a figure who in 1975 said, “A black man should be killed if he’s messing with a white woman.” That figure is late boxer Muhammad Ali.

As for Macron, I can’t really credit him with too much courage. His stand for standing statues is made easier by the fact that France is still approximately 80 percent native French (precision is difficult since the nation doesn’t record detailed demographic statistics). Moreover, the French have historically been gung-ho nationalistic.

In contrast, there currently is no American people.

There are peoples living in America.

Partially due to 1965-born immigration policy, we’ve become increasingly Balkanized. European-descent Americans — who’d years ago largely assimilated into a common culture — now constitute only 60 percent of the United States, with the other 40 percent comprising multitudinous groups. Add to this the emphasis on multiculturalism and demeaning of American and Western history/traditions in academia, the media, and entertainment, and is it surprising that people are cleaning toilets with American flags and firing those daring to proclaim “All lives matter”?

The threat posed by this demographic fracturing is why President Theodore Roosevelt said of immigrants in 1907:

In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American…. There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag…. We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language … and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.”

Of course, in 1907 this was called patriotism and common sense. Now it’s called “racism.”

Returning to Macron, while he did take a laudable stand, that he has to address cultural destruction at all speaks volumes. For if you’re fighting a battle on your shores — in this case a cultural war — it’s because you became weak enough for an enemy to set up camp on your shores.

(Consider, too, that Macron has helped invite this war by endorsing the idea of creating “Eurafrica,” a scheme requiring the flooding of Europe with 150 to 200 million Africans during the next few decades.)

As for the NYC flag-mop (image of the outrage below) miscreant’s “symbol” copout, while we shouldn’t descend into symbolism over substance, proper symbols reflect substance.

Of course, reflected by our cultural symbols is our culture, and culture is a major thing defining a nation. When people travel overseas, perhaps the most common way they express what inspires their voyages is by saying, “I want to experience other cultures” — not other “countries” or other “governments.” For it’s understood that culture is a most significant distinguishing characteristic of a “nation,” that it’s an essential part of what makes a nation.

It then follows that unmaking a culture serves to unmake a nation. This, of course, is the intention of the most Machiavellian cultural revolutionaries: They want to remake our nation in their image.

They’re well on their way to doing so, too. Aside from the aforementioned naming of an airport after Ali, a statue of crack-using ex-Washington, D.C., mayor Marion Barry has been erected in our nation’s capital and one of Russian Revolution author Vladimir Lenin is on display in Seattle.

So we’ll always have a culture, degraded though it may be. It will always have its heroes, too (or at least anti-heroes), but they won’t be any more perfect than those now being demeaned, and will usually be less so. They’ll just be serving a different agenda.

Photo: vm / E+ / Getty Images Plus

Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.