After 365 long days, “Black History Month” is here again, so now is the ideal time to discuss the destruction of Confederate statues and their replacements and what they mean. The last three years of cultural-historical iconoclasm didn’t begin with the Floyd Hoax. Nor did it begin with Dylann Roof’s murders at a black church in 2015. I believe it began 30 years ago, when the U.S. Senate, panicked by a black radical from Chicago, repealed the “congressional patent”—essentially, formal acknowledgement—of the United Daughters of the Confederacy’s trademarked logo. Incredibly petty of course—but  America’s Totalitarian Left understands that the symbols in which the Historic American Nation takes pride must be destroyed in order to complete the Great Replacement. In contrast, the GOP/GAP does not understand symbols, which explains why America is losing this Orwellian war to expunge our past.

Thus the latest news is from Roanoke, VA: The city was forced to replace its statue of Robert E. Lee with one of a completely unknown (because they couldn’t think of anyone else) black woman, Henrietta Lacks, who happened to be born in Roanoke.  And for something she didn’t know she did but happened only because of white science. (More below.) That’s how crazy the madcap rush to Replace from public memory the Confederacy—and eventually white America—has become.

The Great Replacement wasn’t just for the living, but for the dead as well. Change the past we celebrate (instead, teach our children to denigrate it) and those in the present have no future. https://t.co/zYbVpKwoQP

— VDARE (@vdare) December 27, 2022

Of course the winds of the anti-Confederate war blew from the very moment Martin Luther King Jr. was canonized with a national holiday in 1983.

Elevating a communist fellow-traveler and accomplice to rape to the status of Washington and Lincoln, as Sam Francis subsequently wrote, legitimized King and delegitimized those real heroes.

A “new nation,” Francis continued, was being created:

In the new nation and the new creed of which the King holiday serves as symbol, all institutions, values, heroes, and symbols that violate the dogma of equality are dethroned and must be eradicated. Those associated with the South and the Confederacy are merely the most obvious violations of the egalitarian dogma and therefore must be the first to go, but they will by no means be the last.

Subsequently, black Illinois Senator Carol Moseley Braun fired one of the first nationally significant shots in the emerging ideological war against the Confederacy. In 1993, seven years after the King holiday was first celebrated, Braun attacked the UDC’s design patent for its insignia, which included the first Confederate National Flag—known as the “Stars and Bars”…

…significantly, not the much more inflammatory (and consequently much-loved) Battle Flag, which, let the record show, was still acceptable as a Clinton-Gore symbol in 1992:

”On this issue there can be no consensus. It is an outrage. It is an insult,” Moseley Braun proclaimed:

It is absolutely unacceptable to me and to millions of Americans, black or white, that we would put the imprimatur of the United States Senate on a symbol of this kind of idea.

[Daughter of Slavery Hushes Senate, by Adam Clymer, NYT, July 23, 1993]

Needless to say, Americans hadn’t thought much about the UDC insignia until Braun mounted her charger. Nevertheless, figuratively speaking, Braun brought even Alabama Democrat Sen. Howell Heflin, a descendant of Confederates, to his knees—long before stupid whites really began kneeling before their new masters thanks to George Floyd’s fentanyl overdose.

Heflin’s ancestors were “deeply rooted in the Confederacy,” he said. He was the grandson of a Confederate surgeon, and the great-grandson of a signer of Alabama’s secession ordinance. But alas, said Heflin, the UDC’s patent must go:

We live in a nation that daily is trying to heal the scars that have occurred in the past. We’re trying to heal problems that still show negative and ugly aspects in our world that we live in today. And perhaps racism is one of the greatest scars and serious illnesses we suffer from still today. [C-Span Video]

While Braun made trouble for the UDC, Democrat governors were working to remove the Battle Flag from their state flag [Moseley-Braun Fighting Extension Of Insignia Patent For Confederate Group, by David Pace, Associated Press, May 3, 1993].

In the intervening three decades, the Respectable Right has learned nothing.

After Roof murdered nine blacks in that black church in Charleston, South Carolina, there came the demand that the state strike the Confederate battle flag. GOP Governor Nikki Haley, a Punjabi Indian with no roots in the country in general or the South in particular, readily complied. Nimrata Randhawa didn’t give a rip about the flag. When brave, Christian Southern boys were marching into Union rifle and canister fire, her ancestors were still in the Punjab worshiping cows and hoping for a Hindu purification bath in the Ganges River.

After the Floyd Hoax, rampaging blacks and self-hating whites vandalized every Confederate statue on Richmond, Virginia’s Monument Avenue, including Lee’s equestrian statue, one of the most valuable public works of art in the country.

Terrified Republican legislators in the oldest democratically elected legislature in the Western Hemisphere skedaddled into the bushes.

Of course, once America’s Southern patriots were demonized, then came the non-Southerners:  from Junipero Serra and Christopher Columbus to Lewis and Clark and George Custer.

I expect eventually to see Mount Rushmore and Stone Mountain blown to smithereens. I await the day when one of my (Northern) ancestors, whose statue stands in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall, is removed solely because he is white. I await the day when the monument in Ohio to another, who fought with Gen. Daniel Morgan and Light Horse Harry Lee in South Carolina, is removed because he was killed in battle against the Indians.

The tenacious iconoclasm is not stopping with wrecking statues. Our new cultural commissars have graduated to desecrating graves. Even Confederate dead may not rest in peace.

So Leftists understand symbols and know how to use them. And why some must be destroyed and replaced. Communists conscripted Abraham Lincoln to serve the Red cause at party rallies for a reason.

But Conservativism Inc. absolutely does not understand the political and cultural value of symbols. For example, in absurdly trying to claim Martin Luther King as one of their own because he was a Republican (wrong), would have abhorred Affirmative Action (wrong), and would have called abortion genocide against blacks (wrong), they have stupidly helped empower and embolden the left to redefine the American founding and history.

By accepting those new symbols, Conservatism Inc. validated the war on the Confederate flag and statues and memorials. The new symbols were adopted not by popular approbation, but by racial and political extortion. If you don’t approve the King holiday, you are a racist opponent of civil rights for blacks. If you vote for the UDC patent, you are a racist defender of slavery!

As well, the new symbols require rewriting American history much more profoundly than Lincoln’s reinvention of the Founding in the Gettysburg Address.

Thus, the central claim behind the new symbols is that American history did not begin in 1492 when Columbus sailed the ocean blue. It did not begin 1607 when John Smith led Virginia Company Englishmen to Jamestown, or in 1620 when John Winthrop, William Bradford and the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. It did not even begin when Lincoln waged an unconstitutional war that erased a quarter of Southern manhood ages 20-24.

When the New York Times disgorged its ludicrous 1619 Project, we learned that the real history begins—when the first black slave landed at Jamestown! Since then, the most significant events are Emmett Till’s murder, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board decision, the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, King’s plagiarized I Have A Dream speech and, then, of course, his murder.

Nothing else matters. Blacks invented America.

In the days and weeks to come, we will publish essays demonstrating that nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery. https://t.co/3OXXRhmpbI @nytimes

— Mara Gay (@MaraGay) August 13, 2019

Perhaps a sane country could have kept its old heroes and still accommodated blacks and their desire for their own—perhaps a day recognizing phony Christian minister King, or even that hideous Asian-looking Colossus in the shadows of the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument.

But we don’t live in a sane country. That accommodation would never have been enough, just as civil and voting rights were never enough, in a country where the majority population is taught to hate itself.

And so, as Sam Francis wrote nearly two decades ago, the old symbols could not coexist with the new.

To summarize the history of memory-holing the butternut and gray, let me rewrite Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s dictum about the French Revolution:

For the average conservative, the war against Confederate symbols began with the Floyd Hoax or Roof’s church massacre.

For the knowledgeable conservative, the war began in 1993, when an angry black woman mau-maued the U.S. Senate into revoking the UDC’s patent.

And even then, for the genuine historian, the students of Sam Francis, the war’s staging ground was the King Holiday and the ”Civil Rights Movement” that preceded it.

As for Robert E. Lee’s replacement in Roanoke: Lacks, whose cells were used in cancer research after her death,  had her first child at 14 years old, six years before she married the father. She died of cervical cancer, a disease caused, in nine of 10 cases, by the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus.

Make of that what you will.

Robert deBrus (email him) is a newspaper editor somewhere in America.