Felled Statues Are the Canary in the Coal Mine — and That Bird Must Rise Again

The statues felled by cultural revolutionaries in recent years are like the canary in the coal mine:

If the warning their demise provides goes unheeded, other, bigger targets will also fall.

This is no doubt why commentator David Marcus proposes a solution: Restore those statues to their rightful places and, for a change, reclaim territory in the culture war.

Most Americans don’t trouble much over the statue-removal movement, thinking the matter small potatoes. Yet just as how when “systems fall, so do statues,” as Russia Beyond noted in 2012, statues’ fall can mean your system is soon to follow.

Elizabeth Rogliani, a Venezuelan actress living in the United States, knows this firsthand. “Why do I even worry about some silly little statues coming down? … Why do I care?” she asked rhetorically in a 2020 video. (Note: As with the statues, her video has been taken down.)

“It’s because the last time I didn’t care about this, I was a teenager,” she explained. “I have already lived through this thing … in Venezuela.”

“Statues came down, [socialist leader Hugo] Chávez didn’t want the history displayed,” Rogliani continued. “And then he changed the street names, then came the curriculum [in schools], then some movies couldn’t be shown on certain TV channels. And so on, and so forth.”

“You guys say it can’t happen to you; I’ve heard this so many times. But always be on guard; never believe that something can’t happen to you,” she implored. “You need to guard your country and your society, or it will be destroyed.”

That destruction continues apace, too, with the woke worm currently slithering through the Big Apple. That is, removing a statue of progressive-era hero Teddy Roosevelt was apparently not enough for the New York City Council; now its members are targeting Thomas Jefferson and even, strikingly, the father of our nation, George Washington.

Marcus illustrates how ridiculous this phenomenon is. Consider, for example, that Boston removed an Abraham Lincoln statue — one patterned after the one in our nation’s capital — that “was commissioned and paid for by none other than freed slaves,” Marcus writes.

“Or how about the canceled statue of Christopher Columbus in, you guessed it, Columbus, Ohio?” the writer adds. “Does it make the slightest bit of sense to any sane person that the explorer can’t have a statue but the whole town is named after him?”

Actually, it does — if you understand the revolution afoot. The cultural devolutionaries (and that’s what they are) are proceeding in a step-by-step manner. If they had their druthers, the Machiavellian among them would strip our cultural heritage bare; the only thing limiting their aims is what is socially and politically possible at the moment.

But here’s what’s also possible, Marcus avers: Restoring all the felled statues. As he writes:

2020 was like a dinner party gone out of control, with china smashed and upholstery destroyed in the fevered mayhem of COVID-19 and George Floyd riots.

Now … it is time to make amends and fix what was broken, [sic] that is what responsible people do.

It is not always or even very often that grave mistakes made by our society can be swiftly redressed, [sic] usually choices already acted upon become tangled.

Pulling back the excesses of the trans or Me-Too movement, minimizing the impact of critical race theory in our schools, these are complicated, multifaceted projects, but restoring the statues is not.

Just go get them and bring them back, we could do it tomorrow.

Not only is the restoration of these marvelous monuments to our shared history the right thing to do, it will also send a powerful message to those who continue their assault on our culture.

Marcus proceeds to say that leftists believe the changes they effect are irreversible. This is for good reason: In accordance with G.K. Chesterton’s observation that conservatives’ business is to preserve “progressives’” mistakes, conservatives too often settle into the new status quo liberal change agents create. The angry devolutionaries also have most all the passion, dark though it is, while conservatives are too often apathetic. The solution? Fire up the troops with Truth.

Apropos to this, Marcus contends that removing great American heroes’ statues is “cultural suicide.” It’s actually worse, however. It’s something the Left accuses its opponents of: genocide — the cultural variety in this case.

Cultural suicide is the destruction of one’s own culture, but these cultural devolutionaries take no ownership of ours. They aren’t committing suicide but murder, as they aren’t “American” in any true sense. How can they be when despising the very father of our nation, Washington?

The critics will protest, of course, saying that the historical figures in question were flawed. This has prompted half-measure capitulators, such as famed professor Alan Dershowitz, to accept the idea of affixing explanatory plaques to the statues. All right, but will we also note on the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in D.C. that he was a womanizer and allegedly an accessory to rape? Should history-book praise of Mohandas Gandhi be accompanied by information that he left his wife and kids and had a homosexual affair with a German bodybuilder?

While it’s arguable who should be granted hero status, what is unarguable is that perfection isn’t a prerequisite for enjoying it. For perfection is not a thing of this world. Anyone older than five shouldn’t need to be told that “hero” doesn’t mean “sinless.”

Moreover, “Lincoln was the Great Emancipator and Roosevelt was the savior of our public lands,” Marcus points out — yet the devolutionaries target them, too. This isn’t about righteousness, but revolution.

This is why you don’t give an inch: The civilization destroyers will then take a mile. Note that in 2017 I asked rhetorically, “When Will They Blow Up Mount Rushmore?” Four years later, “activists” proposed, in essence, doing just that.

The response to those who’d double down on destruction by removing even more statues should be to double down ourselves, and put felled ones back up. Like the mythical Phoenix, those canaries in the coal mine must rise from their own ashes and fly again.