Tom Paine 1949
Diamond Member
- Mar 15, 2020
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YOU were the one who brought up George Orwell and misapplied his polemic against Stalinism! Typical of you and many others here. While Orwell wrote little about American race relations and to my knowledge nothing about Civil War memorials, your demagogic partisanship here on USMB represents precisely everything he hated in real life. I just showed where the deep roots of Orwell’s intellectual honesty led him in real life. You don’t appreciate that a “democratic socialist” like Orwell became the great symbol and expositor of truth telling on historical matters.What in the name of Sam Hill does that have to do with what's going on with the vandalization of Murican history?Democratic Socialist, “premature anti-fascist” who almost died fighting Franco and Nazis in the Spanish Civil War, hated the Conservative Tories, supported the Labour Party.It's being done on purpose....Erasing the past gives you no frame of reference for the present.
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Were Orwell alive today I am confident he would have contempt for your views on this question, while also denouncing the excesses and stupidities of those on the other side who show no understanding or even political savvy in addressing these questions. Orwell was a dedicated enemy of “nationalism” and bigoted partisan thinking in all forms.
His argument about “erasing the past,” would most certainly not apply to the long process of re-evaluating the past that has resulted in the gradual removal of Confederate Flags from public Courthouses and State Capitols, schools and military bases all across the South ... a result of the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s. Like the removal of statues to Confederate heroes, this has mostly been a slow deliberative and democratic process carried out by local communities and elected representatives. The old Jim Crow memorials to the leaders of a war fought to defend human slavery and its whole way of life are better placed in museums or cemeteries or on battlefields than in our public squares.
That is where the adults are.
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