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PAUL GREENBERG: The war on heroes

The first step is to erase all the heroes of the past from the historical record. Or as poor Winston Smith was told in 1984, he who controls the past controls the present, and he who controls the present controls the future.

Today's ideological vandals believe they can inscribe whatever they want on a blank slate. Or so they theorize, for they are big on theory, not experience. They forget that somewhere some of us, if only the proles, are not so easily shorn of human memory, which will linger somewhere. There will always be a few of us unredeemable reactionaries who still believe with perfect faith that the past cannot be so easily altered, and will not be moved. Robert E. Lee really did exist, just as Martin Luther King Jr. did.

But today's crop of ideological vandals demands the removal of all those Confederate monuments in courthouse squares all over the South, especially those dedicated to the memory of the once revered Robert E. Lee, because the general happened to have inherited his wife's slaves. Never mind that he provided they be emancipated after the death of his father-in-law--and that as freedmen they be able to support themselves when that day came.

But no, any and all those statues of Lee and other Confederate heroes that now stand in courthouse squares all over the South must go. Just as any and all statues of Lenin had to go during one or the other of Russia's great purges. To historical amnesiacs, the past is an ever malleable commodity they can shape as they will, and facts are just the fictions they work with.

Meanwhile, storied Oxford University is struggling to keep the cultural vandals at bay, too. Over there, they're out to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes from his place of honor on the university's campus. That's right: Cecil Rhodes, namesake of the Rhodes Scholarships, diamond-mining magnate, statesman, empire-builder, and defender of all things British. He's got to go, too.

But all it takes is one voice to cow this mob. In this case it belongs to the university's chancellor, who was also the last British governor of Hong Kong before it was swallowed up by Communist China, that embodiment not of Western but Eastern imperialism.

To quote Chancellor Chris Patten, the assault on Cecil Rhodes' memory is but one example of what's happening on both American and British campuses. As he puts it: "One of the points of a university, which is not to tolerate intolerance . . . is being denied. People have to face up to facts and history which they don't like and talk about them . . ."

Cecil Rhodes is an historical figure to be honored, celebrated and held up as an example to future generations. His exploits are to be remembered, not effaced from the history he made. Having arrived in a remote diamond-mining town in the wilds of British Africa in 1870, he convened a dinner at which he announced to his guests: "Gentlemen, the object of which I intend to devote my life is the defense and extension of the British empire," which he did with remarkable success. He was the Last Englishman in the same sense in which de Gaulle was the Last Frenchman and, yes, Robert E. Lee the Last Gentleman--a prototype whose like may never be seen again. But who still shapes our idea and ideal of the hero.

Cecil Rhodes would become a business magnate who dominated the whole diamond market, prime minister of Cape Colony, and devoted subject of Her Britannic Majesty Victoria, the greatest queen of England not named Elizabeth.

He never tired of proclaiming that the British empire must uphold the rights and liberties of all its inhabitants, as well as the very English principles of fair play, the rule of law, and their pursuit of happiness in their own way. Hear, hear.

Rhodes would have done even more for Her Majesty's subjects in Africa if as a statesman he hadn't had to placate the ever restive Boers, too, the Dutch settlers whose cooperation he needed to rule his domain. Nevertheless, he fought their plan to impose a literacy test on the natives before they were allowed to vote, along with all the rest of apartheid's discriminatory rule. Shades of Jim Crow back here in the States.

When the first black Rhodes Scholar was named, Americans objected, but Rhodes pointed out that there was already "plenty of color" in the British Empire. and no one "was going to be debarred from a Rhodes scholarship on that ground." And no one has been. Indeed, that first black Rhodes Scholar went on to a distinguished career.

So here's to Cecil Rhodes, Robert E. Lee, and to the immutable past itself, which still makes us what we are and, God willing, always will be.

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Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Editorial on 02/10/2016

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