{"id":11718,"date":"2019-03-14T13:01:32","date_gmt":"2019-03-14T20:01:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=11718"},"modified":"2019-03-14T13:01:41","modified_gmt":"2019-03-14T20:01:41","slug":"waging-war-against-the-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/waging-war-against-the-dead\/","title":{"rendered":"Waging War Against the Dead"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The 21st century is in danger of becoming an era of statue smashing and historical erasure. Not since the iconoclasts of the Byzantine Empire or the epidemic of statue destruction during the French Revolution has the world seen anything like the current war on the past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In 2001, the primeval Taliban blew up two ancient Buddha statues in Afghanistan on grounds that their very existence was sacrilegious to Islam.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In 2015, ISIS militants entered a museum in Mosul, Iraq, and destroyed ancient, pre-Islamic statues and idols. Their mute crime? These artifacts predated the prophet Muhammad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The West prides itself in the idea that liberal societies would never descend into such nihilism. Think again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the last two years there has been a rash of statue toppling throughout the American South, aimed at wiping out memorialization of Confederate heroes. The pretense is that the Civil War can only be regarded as tragic in terms of the present oppression of the descendants of Southern slaves\u2014154 years after the extinction of the Confederate states.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/amgreatness.com\/2019\/03\/13\/waging-war-against-the-dead\/\">Read the full article here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness The 21st century is in danger of becoming an era of statue smashing and historical erasure. Not since the iconoclasts of the Byzantine Empire or the epidemic of statue destruction during the French Revolution has the world seen anything like the current war on the past. In 2001, the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1132,99,1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-330","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":12424,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/on-name-changing-and-statue-toppling\/","url_meta":{"origin":11718,"position":0},"title":"On Name Changing and Statue Toppling","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 12, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review General David Petraeus wrote an impassioned article in the\u00a0Atlantic\u00a0this week about the need to change the names of military bases that for over a century have been named after Confederate generals and to recalibrate iconic remembrances such as statues commemorating Robert E. Lee at\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10586,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/10586-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":11718,"position":1},"title":"09\/15\/2017 From An Angry Reader:\u2026","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 15, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"09\/15\/2017 From An Angry Reader: Angry Reader Sam Davidson Victor, I enjoy reading your articles in the National Review. I never understood why this country has statues that honor people that took up arms against the United States. I do not think there are any statues honoring Lord Cornwallis, General\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Angry Reader&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Angry Reader","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/angry-reader\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10514,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-double-standard-in-the-progressive-war-against-the-dead\/","url_meta":{"origin":11718,"position":2},"title":"The Double Standard in the Progressive War against the Dead","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 24, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review \u00a0 Will Progressives erase the history of their racist heroes, or only their racist enemies? \u00a0 Much of the country has demanded the elimination of references to, and images of, people of the past \u2014 from Christopher Columbus to Robert E. Lee \u2014 who\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Civil War&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Civil War","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/civil-war\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10540,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/linguistic-mccarthyism\/","url_meta":{"origin":11718,"position":3},"title":"Linguistic McCarthyism","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 31, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"By Victor Davis Hanson National Review Most Americans recoil from the statue-smashers and name-changers. \u2018The Bard,\u201d William Shakespeare, had a healthy distrust of the sort of mob hysteria typified by our current epidemics of statue-busting and name-changing. In Shakespeare\u2019s tragedy Julius Caesar \u2014 a story adopted from Plutarch\u2019s Parallel Lives\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Sports&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Sports","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/sports\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11366,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-ideology-of-statue-smashing\/","url_meta":{"origin":11718,"position":4},"title":"The Ideology of Statue Smashing","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 27, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness Statue smashing is back in the news. One night last week, University of North Carolina students pulled down \u201cSilent Sam,\u201d a bronze monument to students and faculty of the university who fought as Confederate soldiers in the Civil War. The bronze figure is portrayed\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Civil War&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Civil War","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/civil-war\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10505,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/our-war-against-memory\/","url_meta":{"origin":11718,"position":5},"title":"Our War against Memory","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 22, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review \u00a0 The new abolitio memoriae \u00a0 Back to the Future Romans emperors were often a bad lot \u2014 but usually confirmed as such only in retrospect. Monsters such as Nero, of the first-century A.D. Julio-Claudian dynasty, or the later psychopaths Commodus and Caracalla, were\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Civil War&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Civil War","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/civil-war\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11718"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11718"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11718\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11719,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11718\/revisions\/11719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}