Some symbols of hate are acceptable to anti-hate protestors
Statues of Confederate General Robert E. Lee were torn down during mob-led protests in Durham, North Carolina and in Charlottesville, Virginia this week as the media turned the events into protests against their hated President Donald Trump. But there was silence about statues with even more vicious history that dot the American landscape, statues that symbolize even more brutality and mass murder that no one will talk about because the protestors can’t turn them into fuses for their anti-Trump politics
By Ray Hanania
No one says Robert E. Lee was a hero. But he was a part of American history. He led the unsuccessful rebel states during the Civil War, and was defeated and then punished.
Lee was an American and so were the millions of Confederate soldiers who followed him.
It took years but the anger between the North and the South calmed down and rational American leaders called for the nation to heal it’s wounds and come together.
Of course, today, those are not the real issues behind why protestors vandalized public statues of Lee that have stood in recognition of historical facts reflecting a divisive time in this country. Two statues of Lee were torn down by angry mobs of protestors in Durham, North Carolina and in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The statues were torn down as a part of the growing hate-campaign against American President Donald Trump. In other words, the reasons the statues were torn down had nothing to do with the facts of their history or the symbolism they allegedly represented, but rather as political statements in a media-driven war against President Trump.
Because it is the news media that is deciding what hate gets publicized and plastered across American TV screens, while others are buried in obscurity mainly because they have not been dragged into the hate-Trump movement that is fueling anger and violence across America.
Oh yes, there are statues of worse villains that are still standing in America that the anti-Trump haters don’t want to bother with, maybe because those statues reflect the politics of the leftist movement, Marxists, anarchists and even remnants of Communism who have found new life in the survival of 1960s violent radicals like Bill Ayers, the pal of the media darling president Barack Obama.
As one of the leaders of the Weather Underground, Ayers and his cohorts engaged in a violent campaign bombing public buildings across America and even taking American lives.
When anti-Obama protestors criticized his ties to Ayers, Obama’s defenders accused the critics of being anti-Black racists and the media discredited the criticism rallying around Obama’s defense.
But President Trump has made the news media “Public Enemy # 1,” and has vowed to challenge their lies, exaggerations and biased one-sided coverage. The mainstream American news media is more political than the political organizations that stood by Hillary Clinton and forgave her husband, Bill Clinton, for a wave of sexual harassment and predatory sexual abuse.
So it’s not surprising that the biased mainstream news media isn’t talking about some of the other statues, hundreds of them that stand in the same principle contradiction of justice asserted against the statues of Robert E. Lee that are fueling the anti-Trump haters.
Let’s look at just a few.
Vladimir Lenin was the founder of the Russian Communist (Bolshevik) Party that became the foundation of the mass murder campaign of his colleague and successor, Joseph Stalin. Stalin was second only to Adolph Hitler in his bloody persecution of civilians in Russia and territories the Soviet Union obliterated during his reign, but Lenin was just as evil.
It was Lenin who ordered the cold blooded murder of the family of the imprisoned Russian Tasr Nicholas II. On Lenin’s orders, the Bolsheviks murdered in cold blood the Tsar, his wife, their son and their four daughters.
But Lenin didn’t stop there as he grabbed control of the Russian landscape, and he led a series of executions of business leaders, land owners, the wealthy and even peasants who refused to turn over their farm lands and animals to the state.
Stalin merely expanded Lenin’s bloodied government policies leading the the pogrom of Jews and the establishment of the Soviet Gulag.
There are statues of Lenin in Seattle, Washington and one only recently taken down voluntarily by a New York building owner as a part of the sale of the property.
There are three more statues and monuments to Lenin in America including two in Las Vegas and one in Los Angeles.
But we don’t have to leave the confines of America to track down mass murderers and racists who held power and who have been immortalized by America in statues and memorials throughout this country.
One of the worst killers was the 7th President of the United States, who before becoming America’s chief executive officer in 1829 led a vicious campaign of slaughter of America’s Native American population.
Jackson was like many of the American leaders at the time whose crimes were far worse than those of Robert E. Lee. Jackson bragged about philosophy when he led regiments in the West oppressing Native Americans directing his soldiers to not only kill Native American warriors but to massacre their wives, women and children to exterminate the “savage threat.”
Jackson’s vicious hatred of Native Americans was notorious and the Indians called in “sharp knife.”
Jackson’s hatred wasn’t just reserved for the “savage Indian threat,” but for African Americans, too. Jackson was one of the America’s wealthiest slave owners at the time. At the turn of the 19th Century through 1810, Jackson posted Wanted Posters offering bounty to any White Man who would capture and return runaway slaves, dead or alive. He offered $50 in one ad to anyone who would capture and return a runaway slave in a famous poster published on Oct. 3, 1804. Jackson even offered $10 for every 100 lashes up to 300 lashes that the captor would give to Jackson’s runaway slave, known as the “Mullato Man Slave.”
Jackson’s face and bloody legacy adorns one of our most treasured possessions, the American $20 bill.
Another mass murderer was General George Armstrong Custer who also led the U.S. assault on Native Americans and connived with greedy merchants to break the US Government treaty giving the Black Hills reservation rights to the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho.
Custer started the Indian wars by attacking and massacring an Indian village and then spreading claims that the Black Hills of South Dakota were filled with gold. The gold diggers brought fleas, prostitution and venereal disease to the Wild West along with their greed. The false stories have it that Custer was a hero massacred at the Battle of the Little Bighorn but in fact, it was justice that fell upon Custer’s cruel abuse of Native Americans, many of his victims weaponless and unarmed.
There are two statues of this mass murderer, the George Armstrong Custer Equestrian Monument was erected in 1910 in Monroe, Michigan, his childhood home. There is also a memorial to him, a bronze statue in his birthplace in New Rumley, Ohio.
But somehow, the massacre of Native Americans is treated differently by the racist and biased mainstream American news media, and by protestors leading the anti-Trump hate campaigns.
Stand up to the Nazi scum and fascists. Protest the real racist haters. But don’t turn principled protests against modernday Nazi supporters into a media spin for your own selfish politics. That demeans the victims of the Nazis and the immorality of mass murder.
Hanania also writes about Middle East issues for the Arab News, and The Arab Daily News criticizing government policies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Hanania was named "Best Ethnic American Columnist" by the New America Media in November 2007, and is the 2009 recipient of the SPJ National Sigma Delta Chi Award for column writing.
Email Ray Hanania at rghanania@gmail.com.
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I’d sure like to see this ‘glorification of repression on a mass scale’ melted down. I’m thinking it could be replaced with a statue of Gandhi or Reverend King or Liu Xiaobo. You know, someone who stood for peace and freedom.