‘Who controls the past controls the future’
On this Independence Day weekend, on the Fourth of July holiday of 2020, with angry slogans being shouted and history being rewritten, you might wonder:
Will Americans stand to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in years to come?
Just a year ago, most people would have thought you crazy. But now, with even Mount Rushmore and monuments to George Washington under siege, it doesn’t seem all that crazy, does it?
And you have to wonder if Americans will stand and sing, or be shamed into silence by the cancel culture, broken and fearful, as if they’d been plucked out of some bad dystopian fiction.
In your backyard refuge, you light that fire to start the coals, for the ribs and chicken, burgers and hot dogs. On the table of your deck there might be red, white and blue paper napkins, to wipe the rib sauce from hungry lips. And as those coals light, as the heat rises, and the air above them begins shimmering in the sun, you might spare a moment to think of the roiling news and the angry slogans being shouted.
I have a favorite. Of all the slogans out there, it is vital, especially now, on Independence Day. Well, it’s not really a slogan, though it should be.
Yet no one will shout it aloud. No one will shove it in your face, or in the faces of your families. You won’t hear it repeated 24/7 on CNN. You won’t see it in a headline of The New York Times editorial page, where our nation’s history is rewritten before transmission into the public schools, to condition the young.
But the man who did write it understood human nature and how hate can herd the mob. He understood how those who would cancel history would use language and symbolism to delegitimize that history, before rewriting it to serve their pursuit of power.
Here it is:
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
The author’s name was George Orwell. You may have read “1984” long ago, and perhaps wonder if you should read it again. You should, to refresh yourself on the cancel culture and thought crime and the erasing and sculpting of history. You might even apply the novel to the anger you see around you and constantly in the news.
That anger isn’t about George Floyd. The toppling of statues and the destruction of history have little to do with George Floyd, a Black man killed by a white Minneapolis police officer just weeks ago. We’re far beyond George Floyd now.
On Independence Day 2020, you might consider that all of this, as Orwell warned, is about erasing the past to control the future
America did not begin in 1619, as the left and its scribes of The New York Times insist. America began on July 4, 1776, with the signing of the Declaration of Independence:
“We hold these truths to be selfevident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
But were all men equal? No. Black people were held as slaves in the South. Even George Washington had slaves.
But the Declaration of Independence was a light in the darkness of the world, and it allowed for the possibility of great change. And we fought a bloody Civil War to end slavery.
Of the many statues being toppled lately, including those of abolitionists, consider the one of President Ulysses S. Grant. He fought for racial justice. He was the general who won the Civil War. Yet his statue was also destroyed by one of those angry mobs of the left, who are now the shock troops of the Democratic Party in the 2020 elections.
Professional Democratic politicians understand this, even though the mob might not grasp that what they’re really doing is toppling idols, as the Taliban did recently, as early Christians did centuries ago. Theirs is a religious movement with government as the altar. Those who oppose them are damned as heretics.
Even a statue of President Abraham Lincoln, the Republican who signed the Emancipation Proclamation, is under attack. But it was Lincoln, one of our greatest presidents, who wrestled with that line in the declaration about all men created equal. In 1857, in Springfield, he said it was promise to future generations:
“They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.”
A standard maxim constantly labored for. A guiding star for free people to follow. That sounds realistic, and just, and right. The white Union soldiers fighting the slave states in that Civil War, dying and wounded, their guts eaten by hogs, understood. The Black fighter pilots, of the Tuskegee Airmen, doing battle in the skies of World War II understood.
What sounds wrong and unjust is the destruction of history by a mindless mob, and the rewriting of that history by those who are not mindless in the least, and who direct and benefit from the actions of the mob.
There is no freedom at the end of it, no liberty. And that is by design.
Happy Independence Day, America.
Listen to “The Chicago Way” podcast with John Kass and Jeff Carlin — at www.wgnradio.com/category/wgnplus/thechicagoway.