I can’t decide whether these people are the new Taliban or the new Red Guard
Maybe it doesn’t even matter which it is, because the impulse is the same whether it’s supposedly religious or supposedly secular/leftist: to destroy history and its representations and replace them with the new orthodoxy. The deeper motive is to indoctrinate in a way that will make it more difficult for people to think.
The people I’m referring to in the title of this post are a panel called the “Reflection and Action Group” (love these titles) formed by the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) to study some murals deemed offensive that were painted in a San Francisco high school during the Depression and were among several works of art in that high school that were funded by the WPA (hat tip: RedState).
The new panel recommended that the murals in question, about the life of George Washington, be removed entirely by painting over the plaster with white paint:
We come to these recommendations due to the continued historical and current trauma of Native Americans and African Americans with these depictions in the mural that glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, manifest destiny, white supremacy, oppression, etc. This mural doesn’t represent SFUSD values of social justice, diversity, united, student-centered. It’s not student-centered if it’s focused on the legacy of artists, rather than the experience of the students.
Back in the 60s and 70s, this is what happened:
Public complaints first came to light about these mural panels in the late 1960’s, and at the time, opponents called for the destruction of the murals due to their offensive depictions of African-Americans and Native Americans.
In response, the school decided to install new murals with more positive imagery by artist Dewey Crumpler. His murals, entitled “Multi-Ethnic Heritage: Black, Asian, Native/Latin American”, depict Latin Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and African Americans overcoming oppression. They were completed in 1974.
Nope, not enough for the Taliban. The offending murals Must Be Destroyed, and this is somewhat ironic considering the intent of the mural maker:
Robert Chemy, a professor emeritus at San Francisco State University who wrote a biography about Victor Arnautoff (the mural artist who painted the Life of Washington), believes the artist was presenting “a “counter narrative” to the prevailing high school textbooks of the time because his representation of the westward expansion included the slaughter of Native Americans, and he presented Washington as a slave owner, both facts the official narrative back then tended to either ignore or gloss over.” ]
“He put those ghastly gray pioneers literally walking over the dead body of an Indian to demonstrate that the settlement of the west was an act of conquest that involved the slaughter of Native Americans,” Cherny said at a 2018 Board of Education meeting. “That was a very bold effort on his part to counter the kinds of textbooks that students were seeing.”
So the artist was a leftist, a sort of Zinn ahead of his time, correcting the more patriotic “narrative” in the 30s that left out all the exploitation. Now I guess people are considered too dumb and/or too easily traumatized to take in even that message from the left; it simply must be erased, smashed, painted over, destroyed, and then replaced by another narrative.
It all makes me think of something Allan Bloom said over three decades ago:
You know, we’ve all read history. Everybody, you know, world history, and weren’t all past ages maaaad? There were slaves, there were kings—I don’t think there’s a single student who reads the history of England and doesn’t say that that was crazy. You know “that’s wonderful, you gotta know history, and be open to things and so on,” but they’re not open to those things because they know that that was crazy. I mean, the latest transformation of history is as a history of the enslavement of women, which means to say that it was all crazy—up till now.
Our historical knowledge is really a history which praises, ends up praising, ourselves—how much wiser [voice drips with sarcasm] we are, how we have seen through the errors of the past…Hegel already knew this danger of history, of the historical human being, when he said that every German gymnasium professor teaches that Alexander the Great conquered the world because he had a pathological love of power. And the proof that the teacher does not have a pathological love of power is that he has not conquered the world. [laughter] We have set up standards of normalcy while speaking of cultural relativism, but there is no question that we think we understand what cultures are, and what kind of mistakes they make.
And here’s a video showing the WPA artwork, both older and newer, in that San Francisco high school that is still named George Washington High School (for now):
I vote for New Red Guard. It begs for a video of their behavior during the Kavanaugh and Barr hearings.
Needles and feces all over San Francisco’s sidewalks and they also have sh*t-for-brains running their schools. I’m shocked!
Actually, these wonderfully progressive young people seem to be the ideal type of Woodrow Wilson’s vision of the true progressive man: they leave behind utterly — even to burying beneath a white work of their own creation — everything that is old, retrograde, finished, ended, unprogressive, useless for their own transcendent times.
So they too will of necessity expect to be passed on to an inglorious decay when progress moves beyond even their own highly enlightened, near perfected existence.
Such a fine irony then that the artist whose work they dismiss was a student of that great Marxist progressive proponent, Diego Rivera, and hence we may surmise, an unbounded progressive himself. It therfore gives me little pleasure to say: let the living progressives win, for the dead progressives have wished it.
Oh ho, oh yes.
What gets is how spurious are the sentiments here, and how contrived the ‘controversy’. It’s a collection of unpleasant people with power drives, and no one in a decision-making position to tell them (in plain terms) to go f!c* themselves. You give into such people, they just move to the next item on their list.
This mural doesn’t represent SFUSD values of social justice, diversity, united, student-centered. It’s not student-centered if it’s focused on the legacy of artists, rather than the experience of the students
IOW, smarmy bureaucratic microbes trashing the tough and accomplished people who were our ancestors.
Like a powerful magnet and iron fillings, the Left’s rejection of reality has attracted to it nearly all of those prone to fanaticism for fanaticism is evidence of an inability to cope with reality as it is…
If they can’t remake the world in their image, they’ll settle for its destruction. Which is what the painting over of the murals symbolizes.
They would have history start with them and they demand to be in charge of what is included in the history books to come.
Sooner or later the fanatical must be permanently dealt with or their fanaticism will take over the world.
It is always a “fight to the death” for the fanatical because reality is an eternal opponent that can never be permanently vanquished.
So ‘the struggle’ is never finished and the struggle’s “moral imperative’ gives their empty lives the meaning they crave.
It’s a collection of unpleasant people with power drives, and no one in a decision-making position to tell them (in plain terms) to go f!c* themselves.
That made me think of one of the last of the folks who had the intelligence and courage to do that sort of thing — John Silber who was president of Boston University from the 1970s through the 90s. What I remember most about him is that he battled Howard Zinn.
I think the artist was a bit beyond the “Left.” He was a communist, which should get him a few points with these kids who know no history,
I vote for New Red Taliban Snowflake Nazi Pol Pot Brigade.
In an article in the San Francisco Chronicle:
That “blacks did more than just pick cotton” remark reminded me that there’s a basic, deep feeling of humiliation that undergirds a lot of this.
That “blacks did more than just pick cotton” remark reminded me that there’s a basic, deep feeling of humiliation that undergirds a lot of this.
You need to learn the difference between ‘feelings of humiliation’ and ‘flagrant aggression’.
Not to worry.
We have always been at war with Oceania
Red Guards v. Taliban?
Easy to see why.
Socialism is a religion masquerading as a political ideology, while Islam is a political ideology masquerading as a religion; the intersection is anti-Semitism.
Its San Francisco… like said abovethere is human feces on the streets on a regular basis; and it has a city employee position for cleaning up the feces. They have ordinances about when a nude person has to use a towel to sit on public benches.
But re the murals… I wonder if any of these people who want history erased have ever stopped to consider what their life might be like if Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton… the list is long… had not come together and created, actually created what we know today as the United States of America.
Example: slavery was going strong in the western hemisphere long before the idea of a USA was the twinkle in anyone’s eye… and if not for the Constitution that initially struck a compromise regarding it, and many years later enough people had had enough and much blood was shed to end it…. Would king George have gone to the length Lincoln did to bring about change..? [I admit this is a rather abbreviated summary of these events.]
I guess I wasn’t woke enough to protest speciesism in WPA art when I saw it a few years ago. The local animal hospital used to be housed in a 1930s building about three blocks from where I lived at the time, and I took my first cat there for her annual checkup and rabies shot because it was close and the staff was friendly. The first thing I saw when I walked in was a floor-to-ceiling WPA-style mural on the back wall of the reception area celebrating the wonders of veterinary medicine. Except it was basically a celebration of dogs: the mural depicted an ancient Egyptian pharaoh with a hunting dog; an Alaskan with a team of sled dogs; a ferocious-looking cop with his K-9 unit; a blind man with a seeing-eye dog; a contemporary American soldier with his canine pal; and a veterinarian examining a dog. No horses, no birds, no reptiles. Just a pathetic little kitten about six inches high down in the lower right corner next to the caduceus symbol with the “V” for veterinary medicine that supposedly represented all other species that vets treat. I sat down to wait for my name to be called, and noticed that of the six other people waiting their turns, five had cats. When the vet tech called me, I said (jokingly; I certainly didn’t want to offend her), “Don’t you think that mural is just a bit speciesist?” She laughed and replied, “You know, a lot of people have made that kind of comment. I guess the artist didn’t foresee that cats would overtake dogs in small animal practice.”
I comfort myself with the info. that the first President who had pet cats in the White house was the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln.
Incredible. In the name of tolerance and diversity, they want to erase from history any point of view that doesn’t conform to their’s.
Mike,
Slavery existed in both the Incan and Aztec cultures. It didn’t require the Europeans to introduce it to the Americas.
Robert Arvanitis,
“Socialism is a religion masquerading as a political ideology, while Islam is a political ideology masquerading as a religion”
That is clever… and there just might be some truth in it.
I wonder if any of these people who want history erased have ever stopped to consider what their life might be like if Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton…
Bwahahahaha
I’m going with Red Guards because the Taliban is associated with a formal, mainstream religion.
People that aren’t embarrassed to admit they are traumatized by a painting shouldn’t be taken seriously, and shouldn’t in positions of power.
Robert Arvanitis,
I too find “Socialism is a religion masquerading as a political ideology, while Islam is a political ideology masquerading as a religion; the intersection is anti-Semitism.” noteworthy.
Socialism fulfills the function of acting as a substitute for religion in that, if we are not to sink into nihilism, we all must have something to believe in. All religions rest upon faith in the veracity of its premises. To act as a substitute for religion, socialism’s adherents must invest a similar degree of faith in its premises and precepts.
But Islam is a totalitarian ideology that wraps itself in a facade of religious pretense. And, Islam admits to no ‘political’ component. The Muslim with the strongest claim to leadership rules the Caliphate.
This is when the indignation found on social media sites like Tumblr and reddit become mainstream.
I mean, I thought I was suppose be on the lookout for neo-Nazis, the rise of the alt-right, white supremacists and the “far (far) right”.
“His murals, entitled “Multi-Ethnic Heritage: Black, Asian, Native/Latin American””
As someone who is not white this does nothing for me.
The Muslim with the strongest claim to leadership rules the Caliphate.
The Abbasid caliphate disappeared 700 years ago. The Ottoman sultan claimed the title of “Caliph” some centuries later, something of significance in Ottoman realms only.
My compliments to Art Deco for the phrase “smarmy bureaucratic microbes.”
My compliments to Art Deco for the phrase “smarmy bureaucratic microbes.”
Plagiarized from the late David Ogden Stiers, I’m afraid. Another favorite of mine was his description of a cafeteria supervisor as “You Crown Prince of Ptomania”.
As noted above, Robert nailed the religion/ideology identity.
So, “the new Taliban or the new Red Guard”? – embrace the power of “and.”
Red Taliban vs Blue….
Social Justice Red Guard, SJ Red Guards.
They are socialists, and most are anti-religion, so even if they act like the Taliban, they call themselves socialists. Like the Red Guard.
Few movies about Stalin and his starvation and gulads.
Few movies about the Red Guards.
The Red Guards with human faces are still working in against Chinese Muslims; the greatest concentration of Muslims is in Xinjiang, with a significant Uyghur population. (Wiki) The commies have gulag concentration camps there.
Where are the human rights activists?
A communist isn’t far left enough for them? Wow! The artist must have been a “right revanchist” or something. It’s not so bad that the kids don’t understand what the mural is about — it’s that their teachers don’t know enough to explain it to them.
Richard – you are correct. Even when my kids were in HS 20 years ago (ahem), I was appalled at the level of ignorance of some of their teachers.
I subbed at all grade levels for about a year and was also appalled at the low quality of instruction in the textbooks, especially history and English in middle and high school.
After they paint over the murals in white, someone will come along shortly to complain about the racism…it will be white, after all. Maybe it needs a Jackson Pollock treatment, to be race neutral.
AesopFan on May 5, 2019 at 9:14 pm at 9:14 pm said:
Richard – you are correct. Even when my kids were in HS 20 years ago (ahem), I was appalled at the level of ignorance of some of their teachers.
I subbed at all grade levels for about a year and was also appalled at the low quality of instruction in the textbooks, especially history and English in middle and high school.
Lower quartile of humans, with level 1 souls, trying to teach children with level 3 souls how human life works. Hahaha.
The Shia and Sunni caliphates are no longer existent, yes. But they can always recombine if a strong enough military mullah wins over territory. In some respects, that was what the terrorists AQ and ISIL was doing. Which killed them of course. Guerillas can take territory but they cannot hold it against a conventional army, certainly one that outnumbers you in training, manpower, tech, and firepower.