by Gene Kizer, Jr.
George Orwell gave us, perhaps, the most profound truth in all of human history when he wrote in his masterpiece, 1984:
Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, founder of the 1619 Project, gave us a long, racist, anti-white screed that is published in its entirety at the end of this essay and includes:
The white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world. . . . Christopher Columbus and those like him were no different than Hitler.1
We are in the midst of a serious situation in America that I never would have thought could happen here.
We are in an uncharted territory of hate with massive forces arrayed against those of us who have always loved America and been proud of our country, whose main desire was to go after “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” by getting the education or training we needed, working hard, living in peace and contentment with friends, family, neighbors, voting, supporting our military, our police, our communities, and raising families to carry on that tradition.
I doubt if many on the left realize what they have done by unleashing the dark forces of hate and racism into American life, though, like President Trump said at Mount Rushmore, many know exactly what they are doing.
It has gone way beyond legitimate grievance. It is now political hate and intimidation.
This is one reason why the left hates the Second Amendment. Imagine if we had no Second Amendment and could not defend ourselves against the mobs we have all seen now for weeks terrorizing citizens with murder, beatings, arson, looting and vandalism.
Here in Charleston, run by Democrat Mayor John Tecklenburg, on the night of May 30, 2020, hundreds of calls to 911 went unanswered as downtown Charleston was terrorized by violent mobs shattering windows, business owners begging the howling mob not to destroy their businesses, terrified people hiding in the meat coolers of restaurants and for hours being put at risk of death and injury with no help from the police.
I don’t care what a person thinks their historical grievance is, or what they think it entitles them to, they have no right to break the law. They have to abide by the law whether they like it or not. There is a political process for change.
It is a disgrace that here in Charleston the monument to our greatest South Carolina native son, John C. Calhoun, was removed by Mayor Tecklenburg and 12 cowards on Charleston city council, several of whom previously said they supported our monuments.
The worst, most dishonorable thing about what happened in Charleston was that we debated our monuments and especially the Calhoun monument over a year ago.
We had a public debate that started with Robert R. Macdonald, a transplanted New Yorker, writing a hit piece on Confederate monuments.
It was followed by much discussion, many appearances before city council by a lot of good people, a history commission with recommendations for a plaque for the monument, though it is hard to imagine anything better than “Truth, Justice and the Constitution,” which was what the monument said.
How do you get better than that?
The Calhoun monument stood for Truth, Justice, and the Constitution, but that is not enough today.
In fact, that is why Calhoun had to go, because, of course, the United States Constitution and our country itself are racist to the core, founded on racism and the taking of other people’s land (though those same people had taken it from others).
Our country has got to be radically transformed, as was Barack Obama’s goal, and is now the goal of Joe Biden, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat Party.
They have all affirmed that Washington, DC will be a state, giving them two more senators, and illegal immigrants will be made citizens and voters as quickly as possible.
Calhoun was one of the five greatest American senators of all time, as proclaimed by the United States Senate in 1957. Calhoun’s other accomplishments besides vice president of the United States are too many to list here. He is a Founding Father. His monument had stood for 125 years.
The extensive debate we had over a year ago ended with historian Robert Rosen’s excellent piece that looked at every monument here in Charleston and reached the conclusion that they were constructed by an impoverished, kind of sad, people, to pay tribute to their war dead.
Charleston endured one of the longest sieges in the history of warfare, some 587 days. The monument at the Battery is To the Confederate Defenders of Charleston and Fort Sumter, and it portrays a young man with sword and shield protecting a woman who represents his family and also the city of Charleston itself.
The issue of the Calhoun monument was tabled over a year ago and had not come up since. Everybody was happy in Charleston.
But Democrat Mayor Tecklenburg was in political trouble for allowing Charleston to be terrorized and looted for hours on May 30th so he used the death of George Floyd as an opportunity to resurrect his political career.
He agitated to have the monument removed, and the seething, rabid Charleston Post and Courier, basically a Democrat Party hate-sheet that is insufferably politically correct, supported him all the way and whipped up this hysteria of hate and anger that intimidated city council into voting to remove the 125 year old monument.
This is Charleston’s most disgraceful hour thanks to John Tecklenburg.
In Charleston, we don’t remove monuments. We build more monuments.
I told that to City Councilman Ross Appel when I saw him at the rally to preserve the Calhoun monument before the council vote. I was walking out with the speaker, Dr. Michael Kogan, and I called the councilman’s name.
He turned and I said, “Mr. Appel, in Charleston we don’t remove monuments. We build more monuments.”
He seemed very sympathetic and said something like, “I know. I agree.” He definitely said “I agree.”
But he was not being truthful. He voted to remove Calhoun shortly thereafter, and there were others who made promises like that who did not keep them.
They should all be voted out of office because they are untrustworthy. Every one of them and especially Tecklenburg.
The pathetic disgrace that is happening to American history today by the left has been going on against Southern history since the 1960s. Esteemed historian Eugene D. Genovese,2 one of America’s greatest historians before his death in 2012, wrote this in 1994:
Rarely, these days, even on Southern campuses, is it possible to acknowledge the achievements of the white people of the South. The history of the Old South is now often taught at leading universities, when it is taught at all, as a prolonged guilt-trip, not to say a prologue to the history of Nazi Germany. . . . To speak positively about any part of this Southern tradition is to invite charges of being a racist and an apologist for slavery and segregation. We are witnessing a cultural and political atrocity.3
Dr. Genovese goes on to say that this cultural and political atrocity is being forced on us by “the media and an academic elite.”4
President Trump said in his July 3, 2020 Mount Rushmore address:
Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but that were villains. The radical view of American history is a web of lies – all perspective is removed, every virtue is obscured, every motive is twisted, every fact is distorted, and every flaw is magnified until the history is purged and the record is disfigured beyond all recognition.5 (Bold emphasis added.)
This is exactly what the left has done to Southern history. Now, as predicted, they are doing it to all of American history.
The New York Times’ 1619 Project is a perfect example. It is breathtaking in its inaccuracy and perspective (it has tried to say the American Revolution was fought so we could keep slavery). The current desire of its founder, Nikole Hannah-Jones, is reparations.
Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a racist screed a few years ago. Her anti-white feelings have probably not changed.
The New York Times likes to hire white-hating racists. Remember Sarah Jeong who wrote on her Twitter account December 23, 2014:
Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins6
Before that, on November 28, 2014, Jeong wrote:
Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants7
While studying slavery is an important part of our history, I hate to tell Hannah-Jones but it is not the central focus of American history.
Slavery existed, not as an end in itself, but as a way to get the cotton picked. It was 100% economic.
That does not excuse it in the least, but in the harsh world of the nineteenth century and before, it helps explain it.
With the advent of technology and machines to pick cotton, slavery would have ended peacefully within a generation of the War Between the States without 750,000 people dying and over a million being maimed, and a century of second class citizenship for African Americans.
It is a near-certainty that Nikole Hannah-Jones will not focus on the blacks in Africa who are the beginning of American slavery by selling other blacks, captured from tribal warfare, into slavery.
Those black tribal chieftains had those poor captives waiting on the beach for Yankee slave traders, and British before them, in places like Bunce Island off modern Sierra Leone, and in the famous barracoons, the slave forts referred to by African American anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston in her book, Barracoon.8
Hannah-Jones ought to study Jim Downs’ book, Sick from Freedom, African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction9 about the hundreds of thousands of blacks who suffered and died during and after the war because the Union Army really didn’t give a damn about them. Yankees were primarily concerned with winning the war.
The poor ex-slaves “frequently begged for scraps of uneaten food, worn-out boots, and unused tents.”10
These facts were deliberately covered up by the army, Northern journalists and the Federal Government because they did not fit the narrative the North wanted to put forward of happy ex-slaves. Federal Government agents “did not tell the stories of the tens of thousands of emancipated slaves who suffered and died during the Civil War from the explosive outbreak of epidemic disease. The names and experiences of these freedpeople were too politically problematic to be recorded.”11
A typical example was “Chattanooga, Tennessee in January of 1865, [when] a military official reported that former enslaved people were ‘dying by scores-that sometimes thirty per day die & are carried out by wagon loads, without coffins, and thrown promiscuously, like brutes, into a trench.'”12
In Helene, Arkansas the “bodies of emancipated slaves were placed in the same carts with carcasses of mules and horses to be buried in the same pit.”13 Collecting dead bodies of former slaves shows that “Northerners, allegedly fighting for the freedom and dignity of those subjected to human bondage, were transporting black people like animals.”14
I hope Hannah-Jones includes this part of the story because it is history too.
The fake news New York Times, hard left in its politics, completely committed to the Democrat Party, is now the chief arbiter of American history. The 1619 Project has spread all over the country as a curricula for American schools and children. It brags that it is in all 50 states.
Below, is the 1995 racist screed in Notre Dame’s The Observer by Nikole Hannah-Jones (Nikole Hannah back then).
She has more power and reach than any American historian in all of American history, because she knows that history today is not history. It is 100% political, and 100% the politics of the hard left and Democrat Party.
Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
Of course, if you disagree with Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times, you are a racist pig.
Modern savagery
Dear Editor,
I was shocked and disgusted when I read Fred Kelly’s article in the November 9 issue of the Observer. What responsible editor would print an article that applauds and dignifies the white race’s rape, plunder, and genocide of a whole race of people?
I find it hard to believe that any member of the white race can have the audacity and hypocrisy to call any other culture savage. The white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world. Europeans have colonized and destroyed the Indigenous populations on every continent of this plant. They have committed genocide against cultures that have never offended them in their greed and insatiable desire to control and dominate every non-white culture.
Christopher Columbus and those like him were no different than Hitler. The crimes they committed were unnecessarily cruel and can only be described as acts of the devil. Africans had been to the Americas long before Columbus or any Europeans. The difference is that Africans had the decency and respect for human life to learn from the Native Americans and trade technology with them. The pyramids of the Aztecs and the great stone heads of the Olmecs are lasting monuments to the friendship of these two peoples. But as David Walker wrote in his Appeal in 1829, the white men acted “more like devils than accountable men. . . whites have always been an unjust, jealous, unmerciful, avaricious, and blood-thirsty set of beings, always seeking after power and authority.” It was not enough for whites to come to the Americas and learn, they looked upon the native people as inferior and a people to be annihilated. Their lasting monument was the destruction and enslavement of two races of people.
Using Christianity as their excuse, the white race denied the native people their humanity. Not only did they rape and murder the indigenous people of America, but they killed off many more by introducing diseases which came from filth and uncleanliness to the native people. The white race used deceit and trickery, warfare and rape, to steal the land from the people that had lived here for thousands and thousands of years. Over and over again whites made peace treaties with the Native Americans telling them that if they moved just this one last time and gave up their land to the greedy settlers just this one last time they would never had to move again. It was common knowledge that the white man’s word could not be trusted.
Even today, the descendants of these savage people pump drugs and guns into the Black community, pack Black people into the squalor of segregated urban ghettos, and continue to be bloodsuckers in our communities. Yes, it was Columbus that set the platforms for these racist America institutions. A devil calling someone a savage is like the pot calling the kettle black.
But after everything that those barbaric devils did, I do not hate them or their descendants. I understand that because of some lacking, they need to constantly prove their superiority. Kelly felt threatened by NASA-ND’s exposure of the true Columbus, so he felt it necessary to degrade their whole culture to maintain his security. Fred Kelly, I pity you for feeing that just because you are white and Christian, you can celebrate the destruction of another human being. In closing, a famous American, who was beat down by members of the Christian society, once said “Why can’t we all just get along?” Why? because white America’s dream is colored America’s nightmare. To Kelly I say: It does not feel good to have your culture put under a microscope, does it?
Nikole Hannah
Sophomore
Breen-Phillips15
1 “In Racist Screed, NYT’s 1619 Project Founder Calls ‘White Race’ ‘Barbaric Devils,’ ‘Bloodsuckers,’ Columbia ‘No Different Than Hitler'”, June 25, 2020 by Jordan Davidson, https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/25/in-racist-screed-nyts-1619-project-founder-calls-white-race-barbaric-devils-bloodsuckers-no-different-than-hitler, accessed 7-8-20.
2 Genovese was a brilliant historian as the following paragraph illustrates. It is the opening paragraph of an essay in The Journal of Southern History, Volume LXXX, No. 2, May, 2014 entitled “Eugene Genovese’s Old South: A Review Essay” by J. William Harris: “The death of Eugene D. Genovese in September 2012 brought to a close a remarkable career. In the decades following his first published essay on Southern history, Genovese produced an outstanding body of scholarship, based on a rare combination of deep research in primary sources; a mastery of the historical literature, not only in Southern history but also in many complementary fields; a sophisticated command of methodological issues; and often sparkling prose. And Genovese’s reputation reached far beyond specialists in Southern history, and even beyond the academy. In 2005 a reviewer in one magazine for a general readership called Genovese the ‘Country’s greatest living historian’ and his Roll, Jordan, Roll ‘the most lasting work of American historical scholarship since the Second World War.'”
3 Eugene D. Genovese, The Southern Tradition, The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), Preface, xi-xii.
4 Ibid.
5 “Remarks by President Trump at South Dakota’s 2020 Mount Rushmore Fireworks Celebration, Keystone, South Dakota, July 3, 2020, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-south-dakotas-2020-mount-rushmore-fireworks-celebration-keystone-south-dakota/, accessed 7-5-20.
6 “In Racist Screed, NYT’s 1619 Project Founder Calls ‘White Race’ ‘Barbaric Devils,’ ‘Bloodsuckers,’ Columbia ‘No Different Than Hitler'”, June 25, 2020 by Jordan Davidson, https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/25/in-racist-screed-nyts-1619-project-founder-calls-white-race-barbaric-devils-bloodsuckers-no-different-than-hitler, accessed 7-8-20.
7 Ibid.
8 Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon, The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo’ (NY: Amistad, 2018).
9 Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom, African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 4.
10 Downs, Sick from Freedom, 4. The next three paragraphs of this essay come from the final draft of a great new book by historian Michael Bradley of Tennessee to be published soon by Charleston Athenaeum Press. It is entitled: The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States. Please visit www.CharlestonAthenaeumPress.com in July, 2020 for more information.
11 Downs, Sick from Freedom, 6, in Michael Bradley, The Last Words, draft. Entire paragraph is from The Last Words draft.
12 Maria R. Mann to Elisa, February 10, 1863, Maria Mann to Miss Peabody, April 19, 1863, Maria Mann Papers, LOC, quoted in Louis S. Gerteis, From Contraband to Freedman: Federal Policy Toward Southern Blacks 1861-1865 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973), 121, in Downs, Sick from Freedom, 27, in Michael Bradley, The Last Words, draft. Entire paragraph is from The Last Words draft.
13 Ibid.
14 Downs, Sick from Freedom, 27, in Michael Bradley, The Last Words, draft. Entire paragraph is from The Last Words draft.
15 “In Racist Screed, NYT’s 1619 Project Founder Calls ‘White Race’ ‘Barbaric Devils,’ ‘Bloodsuckers,’ Columbia ‘No Different Than Hitler'”, June 25, 2020 by Jordan Davidson, https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/25/in-racist-screed-nyts-1619-project-founder-calls-white-race-barbaric-devils-bloodsuckers-no-different-than-hitler, accessed 7-8-20.
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View Comments
We have the same problem here in the UK, but who can we turn to when you have no freedom of speech and no voice?
Carol,
Thanks so much for writing! Nice to hear from you from across the pond!
We have lots of problems here, too, with attacks on free speech, ALWAYS by the left. They have to shut the debate down because their positions are so idiotic and horrible for the country they can't win on fair debate and truth.
We are in the midst of a kind of revolution because the left has gone all out with the hate-America, hate white people because they were born racist, stuff, and it is all a total fraud. People are fighting back and I do believe there will be a backlash. We have a presidential election in November, just four months from now, and that is going to tell us a lot.
In America, it all goes back to Barack Obama who began the present racial divide.
Just his election as a two-term black president in America PROVES we are not a racist nation in the least.
If America was racist, we would never ever elect a black man president twice!
Of course there are minuscule problems with race here and there, just like everywhere. It's part of the human condition.
But they amount to nothing and are accepted by nobody, and they are on the left and right. The only thing that matters is equality of opportunity, and we have that hands down. We still have so much opportunity in America for everybody, and NOBODY thinks about holding anybody down because of skin color. The best people here - black and white - are interested in competing fairly and winning on merit, not by affirmative action handouts.
Obama was elected twice, though he is among the most mediocre presidents in American history, and his FBI and CIA spied on his political opposition in an attempted coup d'etat. It is being investigated now by the US Justice Department in the Durham investigation and rumors are that indictments are imminent. I hope so.
When the left lost the ability to call America and white people racist, they started freaking out and looking for racism behind every tree. Their latest invention, of "systemic racism", whatever that is, is absurd. The black economist, Dr. Thomas Sowell, just called it a tactic Hitler and Goebbels would have used, and he is right.
Of course, the left has always been enamored of hatred and violent intimidation because they can't win a fair debate. The left has always admired Bolsheviks and communists and their tactics. All they care about is power and if they have to murder the whole population to get it, they will.
Write me and let me know more about how it is in the UK. I would love to know more. Send a private email if you'd rather not post publicly. I have heard a lot of bad things about free speech and freedom in the UK in recent years. The hate and political correctness of the left is all over the world.
Thanks for writing!
Gene
The whole left-wing movement reminds me of a swarm of locust. They're here for a season and hopefully will be gone soon. What angers me even more are white Yankees coming down here to vote for the destruction and removal of our Statues. They flee the destruction and chaos of their own failed culture's just to infect our culture with it. Maybe we can stop inter-state migration from northern states to the south, I'm serious.
Get ready for a lot more of them because they are fleeing big Northern cities in droves. Why would anybody live in New York these days? The NYPD is constantly hampered by that idiot de Blasio, and has had their budget slashed. The NYPD's hands are tied. They can't even defend themselves much less the public. The mob is in control of New York. Even when arrests are made, the criminal is back on the street immediately.
I feel for New Yorkers but they voted for de Blasio and this lawless garbage.
Hopefully somebody who stands for America and the rule of law will rise up and win in New York and save them, but it is going to be a while. De Blasio is there for another year-and-a-half.
Gene
Excellent article. Enjoyed it very much thank you for your research
Thanks for your kind words, Carol!
There is a lot more to come.
All the best to you!
Gene
Its really amazing that the Satanic Barbarism, Cannibalism of these poor pitiful races are not mentioned by her. One of the first things that Columbus did was put a stop to them eating each other! They found captive women impregnated and bound waiting to deliver so they could eat the new-born infants. I wish we could transport her back in time to the days just before Columbus's arrival to the new world.
I know the Aztecs had ceremonies that required removing the beating heart out of the sacrificed. Some cultures have sacrificed their own children so, as they thought, the spring would arrive on time with its renewal. There was certainly a lot of barbarism in the past.
There have been injustices throughout all of history. Today, though, these leftists pick episodes here and there, with no perspective or context, just to promote political hate. They are at war with the past and their enemy is largely a fairy tale, an invention.
The past is the past. You can't use today's standards to judge the past. To understand the past, one has to look at the past the way the people in the past looked at it. It was not their past. It was their present.
Thanks for writing,
Gene