On June 24th, Trump said, “I think many of the people that are knocking down these statues don’t even have any idea what the statue is… Now they’re looking at Jesus Christ.”
Actually, both the iconoclasts and their backers know very well what they’re destroying, and who they’re humiliating, deracinating and subjugating. Though often messy, their process has been laser focused and methodical.
Though Trump avoided naming his trigger, it was clear he was responding to Shaun King, who had tweeted on June 22nd:
Yes, I think the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus should also come down.
They are a form of white supremacy.
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Always have been.
In the Bible, when the family of Jesus wanted to hide, and blend in, guess where they went?
EGYPT!
Not Denmark.
Tear them down.
And:
All murals and stained glass windows of white Jesus, and his European mother, and their white friends should also come down.
They are a gross form white supremacy.
Created as tools of oppression.
Racist propaganda.
They should all come down.
Who’s Shaun King? At his website, there’s this self-description, “As a magnetic element of the Black Lives Matter movement, King helps us see our present place in the larger current of American history. He’s adopted social media to rally and unite people of disparate backgrounds and has now become one of the most followed activists in the world.”
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Kings naturally speak in the third person. Here’s more, “Shaun King is one of the most experienced, accomplished, skilled speakers in the nation. He has been the keynote speaker in every venue with every type of audience imaginable over 1,000 times since he was just 17 years old. He has been a full-time speaker his entire adult life.
“His ability to weave humor, compassion, meticulous research, and grave seriousness into one presentation is unmatched. In his new events, he integrates photos, charts, graphs, and videos to help make his most essential points stick. A master of his content, Shaun shocks event organizers by not using any notes or guides.”
It’s curious that King’s incitement for mass destruction of private properties has incurred no censure from the mainstream media, and we’re not talking about dollar store flower pots here, but the most sacred icons of Western civilization, many of which have historical and/or artistic values.
At the National Gallery, there are three Madonna and Child’s by Raphael, The Crucifixion by Grunewald and The Last Supper by Dali, etc. At the Met, there is The Crucifixion by Fra Angelico; The Adoration of the Magi by Giotto; The Crucifixion and The Last Judgement by Jan van Eyck; Christ Healing the Blind, Christ Carrying the Cross and The Adoration of the Shepherds by El Greco; and The Denial of Saint Peter by Caravaggio, etc.
Each of these masterpieces flaunts a white Christ. Some have his European mother or even white friends. As a gross form of white supremacy, tools of oppression and racist propaganda, according to King, they should all be torn down!
Iconoclasm must be nearly as old as icons. Just a second later, perhaps.
Yahweh certainly digs it. “Thou shalt not bow down to their gods, nor serve them, nor do after their works: but thou shalt utterly overthrow them, and quite break down their images.” Exodus 23:24. “But ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves.” Exodus 34:13. “Then ye shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, and destroy all their pictures, and destroy all their molten images, and quite pluck down all their high places” Numbers 33:52. “But thus shall ye deal with them; ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with fire.” Deuteronomy 7:5.
“The graven images of their gods shall ye burn with fire.” Deuteronomy 7:25. “And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place.” Deuteronomy 12:3. “Ye shall make no league with the inhabitants of this land; ye shall throw down their altars.” Judges 2:2. “Declare ye among the nations, and publish, and set up a standard; publish, and conceal not: say, Babylon is taken, Bel is confounded, Merodach is broken in pieces; her idols are confounded, her images are broken in pieces.” Jeremiah 50:2.
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Sanctioned and inspired by such passages, Christians have destroyed countless idols. At times, they’ve smashed their own during internal squabbles, as under Constantine V during the 8th century, or, even worse, during the Beeldenstorm and similar outbreaks during the 16th. One of the crowning achievements of Western Art, van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece, had to be dismantled and hidden to save it from the rampaging mob.
Down the centuries, it’s been stolen seven times, in whole or partially. Germany filched it twice. Only one of its 17 panels has never been recovered, however, so it’s resplendently restored to Saint Bavo, just waiting for Black Lives Matter to come charging in.
In Camus’ The Fall, the missing panel turns up in an Amsterdam apartment, “By the way, will you please open that cupboard? Yes, look at that painting. Don’t you recognize it? It is The Just Judges. That doesn’t make you jump? Can it be that your culture has gaps? Yet if you read the papers, you would recall the theft in 1934, from the St. Bavon Cathedral of Ghent, of one of the panels of the famous van Eyck altarpiece, The Adoration of the Lamb. That panel was called The Just Judges. It represented judges on horseback coming to adore the sacred animal. It was replaced by an excellent copy, for the original was never found. Well, here it is.”
Such a quaint question, to ask someone about possible gaps in his culture! That’s all we have nowadays. After decades of miseducation and mass media dumbing down, even a “learned” man has so many gaps, their edges blur right into each other, so that his culture is nothing but a hacking and spitting crater of boiling bullshit, with here and there a bobbing misunderstanding, which he will militantly misquote, to prove he has culture.
Pardon me, hmong sir, but permit me to squeeze in, edgewise, a slight and undoubtedly malnourished assertion about oil painting. Since it is pigment in slow-drying linseed oil, hue, tone and line can be fine-tuned to an infinite degree, unlike, say, ink on paper. This unprecedented exactitude teaches not just the artist, but his entire culture, to look more carefully, reverentially and even scientifically, a conditioning that spills into every other aspect of said culture. This edification was further jacked by the dissemination of the graphite pencil (17th century) and rubber eraser (18th century).
Yo dude, go check out, in person, if possible, any pencil drawing by this whitey, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Sharp, eh? Cracker did crank out a super racist, white-supremacist Jesus Returning the Keys to St. Peter, however. I mean, come on! There’s not even one token African-American in the entire picture, not even a shadily shadeless one like Shaun King, so pale he was listed as white on his birth certificate, so tear it down!
America’s current eruption of iconoclasm is not spearheaded by blacks, however, but antifa, a mostly white coalition of Communists and Anarchists, with their red and black flags. This coupling of Communists and Anarchists is farcical, by the way, for they have diametrically opposed ideologies.
Bakunin, “The differences between revolutionary dictatorship and statism are superficial. Fundamentally they both represent the same principle of minority rule over the majority in the name of the alleged ‘stupidity’ of the latter and the alleged ‘intelligence’ of the former. Therefore they are both equally reactionary […]”
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So Communists are reactionary. Interesting. Their striving for a utopia is a bloody forced march towards a supposed Golden Age. Seen in this light, Pol Pot and Mao sending city folks to primitive farms or even uncleared land makes more sense.
But then, Anarchists must be the ultimate reactionaries. Sorry, Bakunin. Discussing Koestler, Orwell points out, “As an ultimate objective he believes in the Earthly Paradise, the Sun State which the gladiators set out to establish, and which has haunted the imagination of Socialists, Anarchists and religious heretics for hundreds of years.”
Seeing America’s Communists and Anarchists pulling down statues, I wondered when churches would be targeted, for the same two groups did exactly that during the Spanish Civil War.
Arriving in Barcelona in December of 1936, Orwell witnessed, “Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen […] Some of the foreign anti-Fascist papers even descended to the pitiful lie of pretending that churches were only attacked when they were used as Fascist fortresses. Actually churches were pillaged everywhere and as a matter of course, because it was perfectly well understood that the Spanish Church was part of the capitalist racket. In six months in Spain I only saw two undamaged churches, and until about July 1937 no churches were allowed to reopen and hold services, except for one or two Protestant churches in Madrid.”
A militiaman for the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), Orwell served on the front line for 115 days, until he was shot in the neck by a sniper. “As soon as I knew that the bullet had gone clean through my neck I took it for granted that I was done for. I had never heard of a man or an animal getting a bullet through the middle of the neck and surviving it. The blood was dribbling out of the comer of my mouth. ‘The artery’s gone,’ I thought. I wondered how long you last when your carotid artery is cut; not many minutes, presumably. Everything was very blurry. There must have been about two minutes during which I assumed that I was killed. And that too was interesting—I mean it is interesting to know what your thoughts would be at such a time. My first thought, conventionally enough, was for my wife. My second was a violent resentment at having to leave this world which, when all is said and done, suits me so well.”
Though Orwell miraculously recovered, he was too weak to fight, so was free to go home, but not before he witnessed the violent crackdown of POUM, as ordered by the Soviet Union. Much has been made of the involvement of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in that conflict, but Communist Russia was also a key player.
This was how POUM’s leader, Andreu Nin, was treated, as described by Jesus Hernandes Tomas, “Nin was not giving in. He was resisting until he fainted. His inquisitors were getting impatient. They decided to abandon the dry method. Then the blood flowed, the skin peeled off, muscles torn, physical suffering pushed to the limits of human endurance. Nin resisted the cruel pain of the most refined tortures. In a few days his face was a shapeless mass of flesh.”
The man who directed all these arrests, tortures and executions was Alexander Orlov, but to avoid being butchered by his own regime, he had to flee to the US, where he managed to live peacefully as Alexander L. Berg, a model immigrant in Cleveland. Even the FBI didn’t know about his true identity until Orlov cashed in on his memoir, The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes.
Orlov’s boss was the sadistic Genrikh Yagoda. After overseeing the torture and execution of Old Bolsheviks Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, Yagoda was tortured by Nikolai Yezhov and shot, then it was Yezhov’s turn to be tortured and shot, but that’s Communism for you. Power delirious and paranoid, they also slaughtered many of their own, just to be on the safe side.
There was never, and can never be, a dictatorship of the proletariat, for any dictatorship, by definition, is the overwhelming application of state power. With its monstrous bureaucracy and violent enforcers, it micromanages your life from some unreachable place.
Since no one likes to be told how to do everything, people will resist, which means many will be shot. Such is the plight of a conquered population.
Freedom will have to be regained, inch by inch, one life at a time, but only with maximum courage, tremendous organization and, most likely, outside help.
Without the French, the American Revolution would not have succeeded. A Wall Street Jew funded Trotsky. Ho Chi Minh was trained in Moscow.
After the current crop of vandals, looters and cosplayers are dispersed, real rebels will stand up, and if they’re very lucky, they’ll have someone with the brains and balls of a George Washington to lead them.
True men matter.
As published at Smirking Chimp, OpEd News and Unz Review, 7/19/20.
Reprinted with the author’s permission.
