As seen in the news, there is a movement to tear down monuments to the Confederacy and to change the names of university buildings that were named after slave owners. The proponents of this movement argue that it is inappropriate for a society to honor those who brutalized, enslaved, or killed innocent men, women, and children.
They have a point.
But why do they restrict their principled argument to the Confederacy and Southern slave owners? Why don’t they extend it to others who brutalized, enslaved, or killed innocent men, women, and children?
For example, for intellectual consistency, they should demand the removal of the monuments to Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, the renaming of the cities of Cheyenne and Sioux City, and the jackhammering of Plymouth Rock.
Let me explain by starting with Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.
These two chieftains were leaders of Native American (nee, Indian) tribes that brutalized, enslaved, and killed innocent men, women, and children from other tribes—tribes that had done so long before the white man came on the scene. Many other Indian tribes did the same, but the Plains Indians were particularly vicious, especially the Sioux and Cheyenne.
This viciousness is described in the outstanding book, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, an American Legend.
A defeated Crow, Pawnee, Cheyenne, Shoshone, or Sioux not immediately killed in battle would be subjected to unimaginable torments for as long as he could stand the pain. Women of all ages were tortured to death, but not before being raped—unless they were young enough to be raped and then taken as captive slaves or hostages to be traded for trinkets, whiskey, or guns. Crying babies were a burden on the trail, so there were summarily killed, by spear, by war club, or by banging their soft skulls against rocks or trees so as not to waste arrows.
The book also describes what the Indians did to whites:
Captured whites were scalped, skinned, and roasted alive over their own campfires, shrieking in agony as Indians yelped and danced about them like the bloody-eyed Achilles celebrating over the fallen Hector. Men’s penises were hacked off and shoved down their throats and women were flogged with deer-hide quirts while being gang-raped. Afterward their breasts, vaginas, and even pregnant wombs were sliced away and laid out on the buffalo grass.
This makes the Confederacy look humanistic by comparison.
Of course, as the book details, whites also inflicted atrocities and barbarism on Indians, with U.S. Army forts being the bases of such actions, such as Fort Leavenworth, Fort Riley, Fort Kearney, and Fort Laramie.
In keeping with the thinking behind the changing of names associated with the Confederacy, cities and towns named after these forts should change their names, because of the evils that had emanated from them.
Which brings us to Plymouth Rock and also Plymouth Mass.
Why them?
Because both of these are associated with the Pilgrims and Puritans, who engaged in brutal warfare with the Indians, contrary to American mythology about Thanksgiving being spent in peace with the native population. Historians disagree about whether the colonists or Indians started the conflict, but, as detailed in the great work of history, Mayflower, the trouble began when the starving Puritans stole corn that Indians had stored for the winter months.
Employing a tactic that would be used centuries later by ISIS, the god-fearing Puritans cut off the heads of Indian leaders and put them on stockade posts to rot.
Because of this sordid history, and in the interest of intellectual consistency, Plymouth Rock should be jackhammered into gravel and the city of Plymouth should be renamed.
My comments are not entirely tongue in cheek.
On the one hand, it is indeed unseemly for Americans (and humans in general) to honor killers, enslavers, and tyrants, by naming towns after them, or keeping the names that they gave to towns, or erecting statues of them in the public square and Capitol Mall. But to be intellectually consistent, statues, monuments and the contents of museums going back to antiquity would have to be obliterated, given the universality of evils inflicted by humans of all races, tribes, and nationalities on other humans.
On the other hand, it would be better to leave the historical record alone so that future generations can learn about the universality of the human condition. But this presupposes that political correctness won’t continue with its hijacking of American institutes of learning, particularly in the portrayal of whites as victimizers and everyone else as victims, a portrayal that is at odds with the fact that such revered non-whites as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse cut off the private parts of their enemies, bashed the heads of babies, and raped, disemboweled, and roasted Indian women.
History is an equal opportunity destroyer of myths. That’s why so many people hate history and why ideologues like to revise it.
