In Our War Against Memory<\/a>, Hanson writes (hyperlinks added),<\/span><\/p>\n How about progressive icon Joan Baez? Should the Sixties folksinger seek forgiveness from us for reviving her career in the early 1970s with the big money-making hit \u201cThe Night They Drove Old Dixie Down\u201d\u2014 her version<\/a> of The Band\u2019s sympathetic ode<\/a> to the tragedy of a defeated Confederacy, written over a century after the Civil War. (\u201cBack with my wife in Tennessee \/ When one day she called to me \/ Said, \u201cVirgil, quick, come see \/ There goes the Robert E. Lee!\u201d) If a monument is to be wiped away, then surely a popular song must go, too.<\/span><\/p>\n [. . .]<\/span><\/p>\n The logical trajectory of tearing down the statue of a Confederate soldier will soon lead to the renaming of Yale, the erasing of Washington and Jefferson from our currency, and the de-Trotskyization of every mention of Planned Parenthood\u2019s iconic Margaret Singer, the eugenicist whose racist views on abortion anticipated those of current liberal Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. (Ginsburg said, \u201cFrankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don\u2019t want to have too many of.\u201d)<\/span><\/p>\n [. . .]<\/span><\/p>\n The strangest paradox in the current epidemic of abolitio memoriae<\/em> is that our moral censors believe in ethical absolutism and claim enough superior virtue to apply it clumsily across the ages \u2014 without a clue that they fall short of their own moral pretensions, and that one day their own icons are as likely be stoned as the icons of others are now apt to be torn down by black-mask-wearing avengers.<\/span><\/p>\n A final paradox about killing the dead: Two millennia after Roman autocrats\u2019 destruction of statues, and armed with the creepy 20th-century model of Fascists and Communists destroying the past, we, of a supposedly enlightened democracy, cannot even rewrite history by democratic means \u2014 local, state, and federal commission recommendations, referenda, or majority votes of elected representatives. More often, as moral cowards, we either rely on the mob or some sort of executive order enforced only in the dead of night.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In Our War Against Memory, Hanson writes (hyperlinks added), How about progressive icon Joan Baez? Should the Sixties folksinger seek forgiveness from us for reviving her career in the early 1970s with the big money-making hit \u201cThe Night They Drove Old Dixie Down\u201d\u2014 her version of The Band\u2019s sympathetic ode to the tragedy of a … Continue reading “Victor Davis Hanson on Joan Baez and Abolitio Memoriae<\/i>“<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[206,18,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memory","category-music","category-race"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5313\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n