There’s a hot debate nationally over whether localities should erase historical monuments that offend some Americans.

The very fact that angry mobs and cowardly vandals are willing to smash historic statues as vigilantes ought to worry us. So should the fact that the left is casting its net very wide indeed in what it’s attacking. Radicals are treating statues of Columbus, St. Joan of Arc, missionary St. Junipero Serra, and even Abraham Lincoln as if they were slave-traders or concentration camp Kommandants.

Today it’s Confederate monuments. Tomorrow it will be the Jefferson Memorial. What principle, exactly, will stop leftist mobs from going onto private property to smash up statues of the Virgin Mary (offensive to feminists)? To pull down crosses (offensive to Muslims)?

Who will stand firm when the left demands we remove, one after the other, every marker that honors the Puritans, Pilgrims, settlers of the West, and founders of every American state. Each of these symbols embodies the violent displacement of Native Americans. By the way, when are we giving all that land back? Or are we only interested in cheap symbolic gestures?

Blood in the Water

The issue isn’t whether these are on public or private land. None of the opponents of Confederate memorials would be satisfied if the monuments and the land were sold to private history buffs. They want the icons destroyed. And they won’t stop with the Confederacy. They won’t stop with public land.

When tempers cool, and the white supremacist losers go back to their mothers’ basements, and the Antifa thugs get tired of going to jail, then let’s have a conversation.

The very fact that angry mobs and cowardly vandals are willing to attack such statues as vigilantes ought to worry us profoundly. The Antifa thugs (and their allies) throw jars of urine at cops. You think they’ll be stopped by the “private property” claims of churches and other private owners of monuments? Remember, these are the same people who want Christian florists and bakers bankrupt and imprisoned for “antigay” Crimethink. They will smash, grab, deface and destroy with impunity. Until and unless we stop them. Cold.

That means that in this moment of almost complete hysteria, we need to draw a bright red line in the sand. We should rename nothing. Dismantle nothing. Don’t throw little pieces of our past to feed the sharks in the hope that they’ll eat us last. I don’t even favor taking down Seattle’s Lenin statue at this point, or melting down the Smithsonian’s Margaret Sanger bust. Not now.

Of course we’re not giving the country back to the Native Americans.

When tempers cool, and the white supremacist losers go back to their mothers’ basements, and the Antifa thugs get tired of going to jail, then let’s have a conversation. A rational one, about commemorating history intelligently, warts and all.

Don’t Tear Statues Down. Put Up Different Ones, Too.

The best outcome, of course, would be this: Preserve every historical memorial, whomever it commemorates. Where the values of the person commemorated offend our current values, put up another statue. Across from Confederates, commemorate abolitionists. Or innocent lynching victims. Or black war heroes, artists, and authors. Let us live with the tensions, and appreciate the ironies. Let’s be challenged by the past to wonder what it is we do today that might horrify our descendants.

As we’re going now, the end-state will be appalling. We’ll end up with a bunch of empty public squares, where statues used to be. We can’t rename every street for Martin Luther King, Jr., so pretty soon we’ll be naming them for Lena Dunham and Caitlyn Jenner. Maybe Kermit Gosnell can get a highway, to make the pro-choicers happy.

Almost no one from before 1960 or so will be eligible for honoring. (Even Abraham Lincoln held views about black people that today would put him on the Alt-Right.) And I think that’s what the Left really wants. They find the past disgraceful. Our ancestors didn’t have time machines that would let them read Salon and adjust their beliefs accordingly. So into the Memory Hole with them.

Like the French Revolutionaries, and the Italian Fascists, and Pol Pot, they want this to be Year Zero. Like Orwell’s Big Brother they want to erase the past to gain raw power over the present and the future.

We Didn’t Fall So We Don’t Need Redemption

Of course we’re not giving the country back to the Native Americans. Nor are we stopping Margaret Sanger’s eugenics organization from killing hundreds of thousands of preborn blacks and Hispanics. We won’t do anything that might actually inconvenience us. All we post-moderns want is to feel comfy and peaceful for the short span of years we stumble across the planet, before we vanish into nothingness. We don’t care about our ancestors. We’d prefer not to have descendants. And we don’t need any headaches. So go ahead and tear down whatever anyone objects to.

We don’t want any evidence reminding us that we benefited from a continent-wide landgrab we’re unwilling to reverse. Erase any evidence that man is fallen, sin is real, and that we need redemption. We want to “cure” conditions like Down Syndrome by wiping it out in the womb. Expect us to “cure” old age pretty soon through mass euthanasia. We want our bloodless utopia, and we’ll spill blood to get it.

The Past, Him Bad! Hulk SMASH!

I can’t help remembering one of the darkest moments of the French Revolution: when a mob attacked the ancient Abbey of Cluny, and leveled it to the ground. That abbey had been the center of moral and cultural renewal during the Dark Ages. It goaded priests to embrace poverty, to keep their vows, to preach the Gospel.

Cluny served the poor, recopied books, and insisted on New Testament ethics in a still partly pagan age. It was also a vast and exquisitely beautiful complex of medieval buildings. But radicals screaming “social justice” slogans, backed by a revolutionary government, tore it down brick by brick. (The same regime went on to conduct an anti-Christian genocide in the Vendée.)

Their pretext? The Inquisition, which surely was evil. But it hadn’t operated in France for hundreds of years. In fact, King Louis XVI before the Revolution had lifted all legal restrictions on Protestants and Jews. The revolutionaries beheaded him anyway. The left sees reasonable compromise as a patch of blood in the water. It just whets the appetite.

Now if you want to “see” Cluny, you must resort to a virtual reality simulation.

It reminds us what we lost, to the rage of the moment, and the cowardice of conservatives.