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Chris
08-24-2017, 01:51 PM
Victor Davis Hanson opines on just where this war on the past could go in The Progressive War Against the Dead (https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2017/08/24/the_progressive_war_against_the_dead_134819.html)


Much of the country has demanded the elimination of references to, and images of, people of the past -- from Christopher Columbus to Robert E. Lee -- who do not meet our evolving standards of probity.

...cleansing the past is a dangerous business. The wide liberal search for more enemies of the past may soon take progressives down hypocritical pathways they would prefer not to walk.

In the present climate of auditing the past, it is inevitable that Margaret Sanger's Planned Parenthood will have to be disassociated from its founder. Sanger was an unapologetic racist and eugenicist who pushed abortion to reduce the non-white population.

Should we ask that Ruth Bader Ginsburg resign from the Supreme Court? Even with the benefit of 21st-century moral sensitivity, Ginsburg still managed to echo Sanger in a racist reference to abortion ("growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of").

Why did we ever mint a Susan B. Anthony dollar? The progressive suffragist once said, "I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman."

Liberal icon and Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren pushed for the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II while he was California's attorney general.

President Woodrow Wilson ensured that the Armed Forces were not integrated. He also segregated civil service agencies. Why, then, does Princeton University still cling to its Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs? To honor a progressive who did a great deal of harm to African-American causes?

Wilson's progressive racism, dressed up in pseudo-scientific theories, was perhaps more pernicious than that of the old tribal racists of the South, given that it was not regionally centered and was professed to be fact-based and ecumenical, with the power of the presidency behind it.

In the current logic, Klan membership certainly should be a disqualifier of public commemoration. Why are there public buildings and roads still dedicated to the late Democratic Senator Robert Byrd, former "exalted cyclops" of his local Klan affiliate, who reportedly never shook his disgusting lifelong habit of using the N-word?

Why is 20th century Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, once a Klansman, still honored as a progressive hero?

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